Two copies, many stories

Rare German-language printing of Declaration of Independence inspired SDSU School of American and Global Studies’ signature America 250 event

As the nation marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, South Dakota State University’s School of American and Global Studies will host a two-day public event built around a single printed sheet that shows the United States was a multilingual, globally interconnected country from its first days.

Historian Emily Sneff will deliver a public talk on Tuesday, Sept. 29, at 6:30 p.m. in Founders Recital Hall at the Oscar Larson Performing Arts Center. A reception and book signing will follow. The event is free and open to the public; no tickets are required. Copies of Sneff’s book, “When the Declaration of Independence Was News,” can be purchased at the South Dakota Art Museum gift shop.

Within days of July 4, 1776, the Philadelphia printing firm of Melchior Steiner and Charles Cist rushed the Declaration of Independence into German. Roughly 275,000 German speakers lived in the 13 colonies at the time, and while some people understood English, many used German in their day-to-day lives. The broadside, a large single sheet meant to be posted in public squares and read aloud, was how the news reached them. It was set in the Fraktur type familiar to German readers of the period, in two columns. The declaration was also printed in the German newspaper in Philadelphia, and these German translations were the first non-English printings of this pivotal document.

Broadsides were disposable by design. They were posted, read and thrown away, which is why so few survive. Only two German broadsides of the Declaration of Independence from July 1776 are known to exist anywhere in the world: one in the Special Collections of Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library in Pennsylvania, currently on loan to the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, and one in the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. The event takes its name from those two surviving copies and from many similar stories stemming from the declaration’s early days.

“I read about the Berlin broadside this summer and knew right away that we had found our America 250 story,” Garst-Santos said. “South Dakota, like the country, has always been a place where people do their most important thinking in more than one language. When our own state constitution was considered by the voters in 1883, it was circulated in German, Norwegian and Russian. A founding that had to be translated to do its work is a less familiar founding for most of us.”

Sneff’s research follows the Declaration of Independence as it moved through the world in 1776 — in broadsides and newspapers, in public readings, in German and French translations, and in spoken exchanges with Native nations. Her argument is that the declaration was not born as a national icon. It was news, and how it traveled tells us a great deal about who its authors needed to reach.

The German broadside makes that point plainly. It was a domestic document, printed overnight for neighbors down the street. French translations of the Declaration of Independence, by contrast, appeared months later in European periodicals and were aimed at building political support abroad. Same text, entirely different work.

“As a historian and the descendant of Pennsylvania Germans living in the Philadelphia area in 1776,” Sneff said, “I find the German translation of the Declaration of Independence fascinating and wonder if my own ancestors might have learned the news through a German broadside. I am excited to have the opportunity to share my perspective on the broadside printing at this special event.”

The following day, Wednesday, Sept. 30, Sneff will lead a hands-on workshop and visit classes across campus, working with students in museum studies, history, German, global studies and political science on how historians and curators recover these stories and bring them to public audiences. The workshop is being developed with campus and community collaborators, including the South Dakota Art Museum and the Archives and Special Collections at Hilton M. Briggs Library.

The visit also serves as a public introduction to the School of American and Global Studies’ new museum studies minor, which draws on partnerships with museums, archives and historical collections across the region.

About the speaker

Emily Sneff is a historian of the Declaration of Independence and guest curator for “The Declaration’s Journey,” the special exhibition on view at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia through January 2027. She is the author of “When the Declaration of Independence Was News” (Oxford University Press, 2026), an exploration of how the Declaration of Independence circulated, was read aloud, translated and contested in the months after July 1776. Her work has taken her to archives and collections across the United States and Europe in search of the surviving evidence of that circulation.