How did you get our Declaration?

Feng Xue
By Feng Xue
April 27, 2017World News
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Wendy Walker, archivist for the county of West Sussex, never thought much about this handwritten piece of parchment. It just sat on a shelf in a room full of 18th-century documents in the city of Chichester in southern England—until a pair of Harvard academics came to look into it.

“You’ve got the header here saying ‘The Unanimous Declaration Of The Thirteen United States Of America.’ So that immediately catches your eye,” Walker explained.

“This document in a way raises more questions than it answers because how did it get to Sussex, how did it end up here? But behind all those questions are the questions of when was it made, where was it made, and why was it made and who was it made for and then how did it get here?” queried Walker.

The pair of Harvard academics will use the full array of modern analysis tools to examine the document. They hope to learn much more about it than meets the eye.

Even their best efforts might not clear up the mystery: Why would a small city on southern England have a contemporary copy of such a rare and important historical document?

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