This volume asks us to reread and rethink our founding document. The Declaration of Independence as we now understand it - the stirring passages that define our democratic creed - is not the Declaration that Thomas Jefferson and his congressional colleagues drafted, nor the document that inspired or provoked contemporaneous readers and listeners at home and abroad.<BR>Essays by four of the Declaration's leading students make the historic text come alive, enabling us to hear what it had to say in its own time and what it might have to say to us today. Copiously illustrated with selections from the Albert H. Small Declaration of Independence Collection at the University of Virginia and complemented by biographical sketches of the Declaration signers, this volume offers a rich resource for discovering the origin and influence of America's founding document.