Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

boggling. Plymouth Rock suffered three centuries of abuse from hammer-happy souvenir hunters before it was finally enshrined in its current memorial at Plymouth Harbor; cartloads of letters written by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and John Hancock were hauled out of government buildings in Washington, D.C., and dumped into the Potomac River to make room for Union Army munitions during the Civil War; and more recently, NASA administrators sheepishly announced in 2006 that they had lost the original video footage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 landing, images shot with a special camera on the moon that were much crisper and more detailed than anything broadcast live on television. A NASA spokesman later conceded that they might have accidentally taped over it. Not even original copies of the Declaration of Independence have been spared mistreatment. After Second Continental Congress delegates approved the final wording on July 4, 1776, the handwritten manuscript was rushed to John Dunlap’s print shop on Second and Market Streets here in Philadelphia. Dunlap, a twenty-nine-year-old Irish immigrant, labored into the wee hours of July 5 to roll out an estimated two hundred copies, which were then carried by messengers throughout the colonies to be reprinted in local newspapers, distributed to state assemblies, and read aloud in taverns, churches, and town squares. Only about two dozen of these first, official versions of the Declaration—known as “the Dunla...