Matt Riley
This past Presidents’ Day, the Rotunda played host to a genuine piece of American celebrity: a very rare surviving copy of the Declaration of Independence. UVA’s McGregor Dunlap broadside—one of just 26 known copies still around—was printed in Philadelphia in July 1776 and rushed across the colonies as the 18th century’s version of viral news. The copy itself had an unlikely journey, too: It was discovered wrapped around attic documents in the 1950s, arrived at UVA badly damaged, and was later painstakingly restored. Nearly 250 years after independence was declared, the broadside briefly stepped back into the spotlight as part of UVA250.
