Printer John Dunlap was momentously busy on the evening of July 4, 1776.
Earlier that day, the Second Continental Congress had delivered the approved text of the Declaration of Independence to Dunlap’s printing shop in Philadelphia. Dunlap, a 29-year-old Irish immigrant, toiled late into the night setting type, correcting proofs, and churning out 200 broadsides bearing Thomas Jefferson’s immortal words founding a nation based on the ideals of equality and liberty.
Dunlap’s broadsides were distributed throughout the thirteen colonies, where they were read aloud in town squares and reprinted in newspapers. One copy was pasted for posterity in the journal of the Second Continental Congress. (The famous handwritten copy of the declaration displayed at the National Archives was not signed until Aug. 2, 1776.)
Yale’s copy of the Dunlap broadside — the first printed copy of the Declaration of Independence.
Yale’s copy of Dunlap’s broadside, one of only 26 known to exist, is featured in “Unfurling the Flag: Reflections on American Patriotism,” a new exhibition at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library that contemplates the meaning of loyalty, allegiance, and national belonging 250 years after the nation declared its independence. The exhibition draws on historic writings, maps, photographs, drawings, and other materials from Yale Library’s collections to explore how people’s perceptions of patriotism have changed and evolved in the centuries since Dunlap’s historic all-nighter.
Joshua Cochran, curator of American history and diplomacy for Yale Library, organized the show, which is on view through Sept. 27.
Curator Joshua Cochran envisioned the exhibition as a non-partisan space for reflection on the meaning of patriotism.
“My aim was to create a reflective space,” Cochran said. “I hope the exhibition encourages visitors to think deeply about what it means to be an American citizen. Where do our ideas about patriotism come from? What are the stakes when we discuss those ideas? How might they change over the next 250 years?”
Here are five additional things to know about the exhibition:
An early symbol of American patriotism, one with a strong Yale connection, is represented.
On Sept. 22, 1776, Capt. Nathan Hale, a 21-year-old spy for the Continental Army, was hanged by the British in New York City. Hale, who graduated from Yale College in 1773, accepted his fate with composure and a firm resolve, according to witness accounts of the execution, making him a martyr to the cause of American liberty.
“Legend holds that, upon his execution, Hale famously says, ‘I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,’” Cochran said. “While no contemporary sources confirm that he spoke those words, in the public’s mind, his stoic sacrifice made him a model patriot.”
Hale’s commission as a captain in the Continental Army is on display. Dated Jan. 1, 1776, it is signed by John Hancock, the president of the Second Continental Congress.
A dictionary on display rewards a close look.
A section exploring how print culture helped forge a sense of national unity and patriotism after the United States achieved independence features an 1828 first edition of “An American Dictionary of the English Language,” Noah Webster’s masterpiece that standardized spellings and definitions for 70,000 commonly used words.
Webster, a 1778 graduate of Yale College, was a schoolteacher who considered education a powerful tool for strengthening bonds among citizens of the young republic, Cochran said.
“With his dictionary, Webster sought to create a common language that would overcome regional dialects and enable more precise communication across an ever-expanding nation,” he said.
The dictionary is opened to the word “patriotism,” which Webster defined as “Love of one’s country; the passion which aims to serve one’s country, either in defending it from invasion, or protecting its rights and maintaining its laws and institutions with vigor and purity. Patriotism is the characteristic of a good citizen, the noblest passion that animates a man in the character of a citizen.”
The show explores how people have deployed ‘patriotism’ as a means of exclusion and inclusion.
The exhibition explores how different groups have incorporated patriotism into protest movements that sought to hold America to its ideals.
Popular ideas of patriotism and of national belonging have evolved through a fraught process that initially excluded Blacks, women, immigrants, and Indigenous peoples, Cochran said.
“In the early American experience, ideas of patriotism and national unity were the exclusive domain of land-owning white men,” he said. “For some, patriotism was a means to sustain a culture of manifest destiny that called for westward expansion and the subjugation or even extermination of non-white peoples. But others wielded their patriotism to expose the chasms between the country’s founding principles and the harsh realities many people endured in the early republic.”
On July 4, 1852, the formerly enslaved Frederick Douglass — a fierce advocate for abolition and civil rights for Black Americans — delivered a speech in Rochester, New York, titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” In the speech, a typescript version of which is on view, Douglass noted that Independence Day had no special meaning for enslaved people.
“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” he said. “You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
Also on display is a printed version of 1848 Declaration of Sentiments issued at the end of the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. It echoes the tone, style, and language of the Declaration of Independence as it demands the full rights and privileges of citizenship for women in the United States.
Another document on view underscores how conceptions of national greatness often merged with racist and ethnocentric ideologies. It is an 1827 land grant issued in Georgia to William N. Brimer for a 202.5-acre property that formerly belonged to the Creek peoples, who the federal government would drive from their homelands in the southeast United States in the early 1830s during the Trail of Tears, when tens of thousands of Indigenous people were forced to relocate from their ancestral lands.
Objects on view include documents that concern the removal of Indigenous people from their ancestral lands in Georgia.
Patriotism has helped shape our built landscape, including on Yale’s campus.
A panoramic photograph on view captures a moment during a patriotic celebration held in Hewitt Quadrangle on June 19, 1917, not long after the United States officially entered World War I. Students and members of the campus community, many wearing military uniforms, gather where the Beinecke Library stands today. They stand around the Ledyard Flagstaff, which was erected in 1908 in memory of an alumnus killed during the Spanish-American War. The attendees face the entrance to Memorial Hall where a gentleman is speaking from the balcony over the doorway. Two large American flags are draped from the hall’s roofline.
To the modern eye, Commons looks oddly bare. Its colonnade, which today has the names of World War I battles carved above it, and the Yale Alumni War Memorial monument, which honors the 227 students and alumni who died during the war, are of course absent. Both were erected in 1927.
The exhibition closes with a poem.
In his 1935 poem, “Let America Be America Again,” Langston Hughes critiques the American Dream and calls for its promise of freedom and equality to be extended to everyone. It begins:
Let America be America Again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
A typescript draft of the poem is the final object visitors encounter. Cochran says he hopes Hughes’ verse leaves them pondering what America means to them.
“Perhaps they’ll consider whether America has truly lived up to its ideals or what it might take to do that,” he said. “Protest and change happen because people are active participants in America. They are motivated by specific visions of what the country is and what it ought to be.”
