When the Declaration of Independence Was Written…

When you’re American (like me), it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the world revolves around the US. And somehow, despite reliably proving that an abundance of unintelligent people live here, we continue to believe the same fallacy. So rather than obsess yet again about the document that gave Americans the freedom to be uninformed, let’s take a look at what else was going on in the world when the Declaration of Independence was written. As a reminder, that year was 1776.

 

1

Okay, just one quick American thing—the American Revolution had already started, with the first military engagements having taken place in 1775.

 

2

It was a leap year.

 

3

Popular music was really good—some guy named Mozart was 20 years old.

 

4

There were less than one billion humans on Earth.

 

5

In India, the Mughal Empire was on the fritz, and the Brits (the same ones who were getting the boot from the soon-to-be US) were setting down some pretty deep roots.

 

6

What we know as Australia was still a land of indigenous peoples. The British penal colony that began to change the fabric of the place showed up in 1788.

 

7

The British weren’t the only ones scooping up all sorts of land. The Spanish, Russians, Ottomans, and Qing Dynasty (China) were still going strong.

 

8

Louis XVI was the King of France and still had his head, which wasn’t removed by guillotine until 1793.

 

9

West Africa was still exporting slaves to the New World.

 

10

One of the world’s youngest languages, Afrikaans, was starting to come into its own. (Afrikaans, by the way, is what happened when Dutch met what is now South Africa.)

 

11

About when the Declaration of Independence was written, Scottish economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, one of those super important works you probably never read.

 

12

Smith may have been trying to show up his fellow countryman, Alexander Cumming, who one year prior had received the first patent for a design of the flush toilet.

 

13

Amedeo Avogadro, an Italian chemist, was born. Somehow, this guy figured out that equal volumes of gases at the same temperature and pressure will have the same number of molecules. As a shout out to his scientific contributions, the number of molecules in a mole of a substance is now called the Avogadro constant, which continues to torture chemistry students worldwide.

 

14

The Bible still played a significant role in legislative affairs. Actually, sorry, that was meant for my upcoming piece about 2023.

 

15

The internet wasn’t around, meaning that meandering pieces like this were relegated to scraps of paper in musty diaries.

 

The End