Learn about America’s birth on our 250th!

John Adams was, at the time, certain that July 2 – the day the Second Continental Congress officially voted to sever ties with Great Britain – would always be celebrated by Americans as our Independence Day.

But almost right away, July 4 became the day everyone remembered and celebrated. That was the day the members of Congress signed the document that Thomas Jefferson wrote after the official vote that made us independent. (Adams, who had made a nuisance of himself ramming independence through Congress, never fully accepted that two-day delay.)

So in respect to both those Founders, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum is splitting the difference: At noon on Friday, July 3, award-winning history teacher Mike Burgess will deliver a free lecture titled “We Hold These Truths to be Self-evident – the Declaration of Independence at 250.” The lecture is open to the public as part of the museum’s regular Noon Debrief program.

You could hardly find a better time to come learn more about how our country was born. Be sure to bring the kids.

And speaking of kids, that’s not all! From 11 a.m.-3 p.m. that day, there will be re-enactors and other devotees of history in the Atrium of the museum, with various displays of artifacts and activities, ready to answer your questions about what you behold. It will be a sort of smaller staging of our annual Revolutionary War Day (which this year was in March). You can touch historical objects, make pomander balls, make a flag, read brochures about our state’s celebration of the 250th, and more.

Many of our regulars know Mike Burgess and appreciate his previous Noon Debriefs on various aspects of our past. He teaches history to lucky students at River Bluff High School in Lexington County, and on July 3 will provide an in-depth, interactive look at the meaning of the different parts of the Declaration. He will talk not only about what it means to this country, but to countries around the world that have yearned the last two-and-a-half centuries to have what we have in the U.S.A.

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, liberal democracy has been the only valid system” on the planet, says Burgess. And we know what brought liberal democracy into the world – the Declaration (and the subsequent Constitution, of course).

That doesn’t mean the magnificent system bequeathed us isn’t suffering tremendous strains today. Many who love our country worry that it may never again experience the high point it achieved in the second half of the 20th century.

But Burgess believes there are workable remedies to “the divisions we have today – the drugs, violence, poverty, hyperpartisanship, polarization, and misinformation” that blinds so many across the political spectrum.

“The answers can be found in the Declaration,” he says.

Explaining all that is a tall task, so this program may run slightly longer than the hour that Noon Debriefs usually take. But the lessons are eminently worth learning.