These truths may be self-evident, but where they’ve traveled deserves illumination

The first thing visitors see in The Declaration’s Journey, an exhibition at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, is two seats side by side: the chair at which Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence and the prison bench on which Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

The exhibition aims to show how the Declaration’s words have echoed throughout history and around the world. Exhibits include one of the only original copies of the Haitian Declaration of Independence, a book Frederick Douglass carried with him on his flight to freedom, and an ersatz ballot box used as a form of protest by women in New Jersey after they lost the right to vote in 1807.

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) provided support for the exhibition, which coincides with the United States’ 250th anniversary, calculated specifically from the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. SNF is also supporting The Occupied City: New York and the American Revolution, another exhibition timed to coincide with the anniversary, at the Museum of the City of New York.

In his address at SNF Nostos 2026, lifelong public servant Dr. John Hamre called the opening of the Declaration “the most revolutionary sentence that’s been written in modern times,” and The Declaration’s Journey asserts that “more than 100 nations having integrated its ideals into their own independence movements.”

The exhibition, which includes a number of interactive elements for kids, is on through January 3, 2027.