Happy Birthday United States of America

Independence Day is a federal holiday in the United States.  It is this day in 1776 that the language and edits of the Declaration of Independence were finalized and adopted by the Continental Congress.  It represents the birth of the United States of America as an independent nation.   

Fun facts on how the 4th of July became a national holiday can be found at Constitutional Facts.com:

For the first 15 or 20 years after the Declaration was written, people didn’t celebrate it much on any date. It was too new and too much else was happening in the young nation. By the 1790s, a time of bitter partisan conflicts, the Declaration had become controversial. One party, the Democratic-Republicans, admired Jefferson and the Declaration. But the other party, the Federalists, thought the Declaration was too French and too anti-British, which went against their current policies.

By 1817, John Adams complained in a letter that America seemed uninterested in its past. But that would soon change.

After the War of 1812, the Federalist party began to come apart and the new parties of the 1820s and 1830s all considered themselves inheritors of Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans. Printed copies of the Declaration began to circulate again, all with the date July 4, 1776, listed at the top. The deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4, 1826, may even have helped to promote the idea of July 4 as an important date to be celebrated.

Celebrations of the Fourth of July became more common as the years went on and in 1870, almost a hundred years after the Declaration was written, Congress first declared July 4 to be a national holiday as part of a bill to officially recognize several holidays, including Christmas.

If you live in the U.S., do your part today to celebrate this holiday.  Wave a flag, hug a vet, and maybe even do what the young people and I are planning.  I printed four copies of the Declaration of Independence, and we will be going over them, line by line, to thoroughly understand why this day is so important to us in the U.S.

If you live in the rest of the world, please have a great Thursday.