Right around the Fourth of July, Americans pay renewed attention to the country’s crucial founding document, the Declaration of Independence. Whether Republican or Democrat or independent, some will say – with reverence – that adherence to the values expressed in the declaration is what makes them American.

President Barack Obama, in his second inaugural address, gave voice to this very conviction.

“What binds this nation together,” he stated, “is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names.” What truly makes Americans American, he resolved, “is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago.”

The declaration still stands today as a manifesto. There are its lofty, “self-evident” principles, of course: that “all men are created equal” and that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” such as “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But I’m a historian of the early republic, and I wish to remind you that the declaration doesn’t just go all pie in the sky. And it’s more than an academic paper waxing on and on about the fashionable philosophical doctrines of the 18th century – freedom and equality – or the coolest philosopher ever, John Locke.

The declaration provides a realistic depiction of a wounded society, one shivering with fears and teetering on the brink of disaster.

Repeated injuries and usurpations

On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress asked five of its members to prepare a text that would notify the British king and his Parliament of America’s firm intention to get a divorce.

The drafting committee comprised Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert R. Livingston of New York, and a man who had a stellar reputation as a gifted writer, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia.

Jefferson didn’t waste time. He locked himself up in a rented room near the State House in Philadelphia, and within a couple of days he was ready to submit a draft to his four teammates for revision.

The committee was smitten by the clarity and effectiveness of the document. Other than suggesting a few corrections, Jefferson’s colleagues were elated by the text.

The Continental Congress promptly received the document, discussed it, made a handful of alterations, and in the late morning of July 4, 1776, adopted it.

Late that night, Philadelphia printer John Dunlap was given the historic task of issuing the first copies of the final Declaration of Independence.

In retrospect, all of this may sound like a tale of fearless heroes eager to break the chains of oppression and single-handedly affirm their boundless love of freedom.

However, when Thomas Jefferson took the pen in his hand, he didn’t think of himself as a hero. Rather, looking ahead at the immediate future and the drama that would inexorably unfold, he felt overwhelmed. A war, pitting brethren against brethren, the Colonists against their mother country, had already started.

The situation was tense and painful, because 18th-century Americans didn’t quite see themselves as Americans. They trusted they were active members of a powerful, expanding British Empire.

What had begun as yet another crisis over Parliament’s right to tax its overseas possessions had quickly transformed into a turning point over whether the Colonies should become independent.

As a consequence, readers of the declaration cannot escape the impression that this document carries a sense of reluctance, betrayal, fear and even sadness.

We Colonists thought we were free, the logic of the declaration goes, but now we are waking up to the dismal realization that the king and the Parliament treat us like their personal slaves.

Jefferson’s words appear to longingly express how wonderful it would be for “one people” not to be put in the condition to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” How desirable it would have been if a way to renew “the ties of our common kindred” could be found.

Unfortunately, what Jefferson calls “repeated injuries and usurpations” have created enemies out of a common ancestry, thus stifling the “voice of justice and of consanguinity.”

How not to grieve at these “injuries”? The king is guilty for “abolishing our most valuable Laws”; he has “excited domestic insurrections amongst us”; he has sent “Officers to harass our people”; he has obstructed “the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners”; and he has “made Judges dependent on his Will alone.”

Americans didn’t seek a revolution, the declaration concludes, but Colonists must accept “the necessity” of a separation: “Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”

‘Forget our former love for them’

Americans today may believe that the Declaration of Independence belongs to them – which it does. The declaration is an American document.

But to an even larger extent, it belongs to Thomas Jefferson. It’s a Jeffersonian document.

One of the most consequential American philosophers, the author of the declaration poured into the text his theories of society and of human nature.

For him, human beings should not live as isolated atoms in constant competition against each other. Jefferson was a communitarian, which means that he believed that the very happiness voiced in the declaration could occur only when individuals regard themselves as functional parts of a larger whole made of other human beings.

The declaration was built upon the tenet that, as Jefferson would explain many years later, “Nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succour their distresses.”

As a moral philosopher, Jefferson wasn’t perfect, obviously – and his views on race and slavery prove that. But the declaration puts forth the argument that the British king and the Parliament are also to blame for having transformed a united people, a people who used to love each other, into a mass of foreigners suspicious of each other.

In Jefferson’s account, this king has carried out the supreme betrayal – like tyrannical powers often do. He has stabbed the Americans as well as the British. He has split them into antagonistic parties. And we Americans, as Jefferson wrote in a telling passage of the declaration that didn’t survive revisions, “must endeavor to forget our former love for them.”

The American nation was born of the traumatic experience of an amputation. It’s a residual half of a former whole that one way or another managed to learn to become a whole again.

But after 250 years, America appears once more a people who seem to have lost what binds them together. Those “political bands which have connected them with another” are being tested; “the ties of … common kindred” are frayed.

Such words describe a time, centuries ago, of great uncertainty, fear and sadness. It seems America has arrived yet again at such a time.

Maurizio Valsania, Professor of American History, Università di Torino

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Astronomers manning an asteroid warning system caught a glimpse of a large, bright object zipping through the solar system late on July 1, 2025. The object’s potentially interstellar origins excited scientists across the globe, and the next morning, the European Space Agency confirmed that this object, first named A11pl3Z and then designated 3I/ATLAS, is the third ever found from outside our solar system.

Current measurements estimate that 3I/ATLAS is about 12 miles (20 kilometers) wide, and while its path won’t take it close to Earth, it could hold clues about the nature of a previous interstellar object and about planet formation in solar systems beyond ours.

On July 2 at 3 p.m. EDT, Mary Magnuson, an associate science editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke to Darryl Z. Seligman, an astrophysicist at Michigan State University who has been studying 3I/ATLAS since its discovery.

What makes 3I/ATLAS different from its predecessors?

We have discovered two interstellar objects so far, ’Oumuamua and Comet 2I/Borisov. ’Oumuamua had no dust tail and a significant nongravitational acceleration, which led to a wide variety of hypotheses regarding its origin. 2I/Borisov was very clearly a comet, though it has a somewhat unique composition compared to comets in our solar system.

All of our preparation for the next interstellar object was preparing for something that looked like a ’Oumuamua, or something that looked like Borisov. And this thing doesn’t look like either of them, which is crazy and exciting.

This object is shockingly bright, and it’s very far away from the Earth. It is significantly bigger than both of the interstellar objects we’ve seen – it is orders of magnitude larger than ’Oumuamua.

For some context, ’Oumuamua was discovered when it was very close to the Earth, but this new object is so large and bright that our telescopes can see it, even though it is still much farther away. This means observatories and telescopes will be able to observe it for much longer than we could for the two previous objects.

It’s huge and it’s much farther away, but it is also much faster.

When I went to bed last night, I saw an alert about this object, but nobody knew what was going on yet. I have a few collaborators who figure out the orbits of things in the solar system, and I expected to wake up to them saying something like “yeah, this isn’t actually interstellar.” Because a lot of times you think you may have found something interesting, but as more data comes in, it becomes less interesting.

Then, when I woke up at 1 a.m., my colleagues who are experts on orbits were saying things like “no, this is definitely interstellar. This is for real.”

How can astronomers tell if something is an interstellar object?

The eccentricity of the object’s orbit is how you know that it’s interstellar. The eccentricity refers to how noncircular an orbit is. So an eccentricity of zero is a pure circle, and as the eccentricity increases, it becomes what’s known as an ellipse – a stretched out circle.

And then once you get past an eccentricity of one, you go from an ellipse to a hyperbolic orbit, and that is unbound. So while an elliptical orbit is stretched out, it still orbits and comes back around. An object with a hyperbolic orbit comes through and it leaves, but it never comes back. That type of orbit tells you that it didn’t come from this solar system.

When researchers are collecting data, they’re getting points of light on the sky, and they don’t know how far away they are. It’s not like they see them and can just tell, “oh, that’s eccentric.” What they’re seeing is how far away the object is compared with other stars in the background, what its position is and how fast it’s moving. And then from that data, they try to fit the orbit.

This object is moving fast for how far away it is, and that’s what’s telling us that it could be hyperbolic. If something is moving fast enough, it’ll escape from the solar system. So a hyperbolic, unbound object inherently has to be moving faster.

This is a real-time process. My collaborators have preexisting software, which will, every night, get new observations of all the small bodies and objects in the solar system. It will figure out and update what the orbits are in real time. We’re getting data points, and with more data we can refine which orbit fits the points best.

What can scientists learn from an interstellar object?

Objects like this are pristine, primordial remnants from the planet formation process in other planetary systems. The small bodies in our solar system have taught us quite a lot about how the planets in the solar system formed and evolved. This could be a new window into understanding planet formation throughout the galaxy.

As we’re looking through the incoming data, we’re trying to figure out whether it’s a comet. In the next couple of weeks, there will likely be way more information available to say if it has a cometary tail like Borisov, or if it has an acceleration that’s not due to a gravitational pull, like ’Oumuamua.

If it is a comet, researchers really want to figure out whether it’s icy. If it contains ices, that tells you a ton about it. The chemistry of these small bodies is the most important aspect when it comes to understanding planet formation, because the chemical composition tells you about the conditions the object’s solar system was in when the object formed.

For example, if the object has a lot of ices in it, you would know that wherever it came from, it didn’t spend much time near a star, because those ices would have melted. If it has a lot of ice in it, that could tell you that it formed really far away from a star and then got ejected by something massive, such as a planet the size of Jupiter or Neptune.

Fundamentally, this object could tell astronomers more about a population of objects that we don’t fully understand, or about the conditions in another solar system.

We’ve had a couple of hours to get some preliminary observations. I suspect that practically every telescope is going to be looking at this object for the next couple of nights, so we’ll get much more information about it very soon.

Darryl Z. Seligman, Assistant Professor, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.