At noon on July 8, 1776, a Philadelphia merchant named John Nixon stepped onto a platform in the State House yard and read the Declaration of Independence aloud to a crowd for the first time.
Reading it in public was an act of open defiance against the Crown, and a British army was not far off. The crowd came anyway.
When Nixon finished, the city’s bells rang into the night and Philadelphians tore down and burned the king’s coat of arms…