For an usual gift for yourself, The National Archives gives you the chance to Join the Signers. It’s a document (this link for a color printer) that you can pick from three quill penmanship styles, and add your name to the Declaration of Independence to print and frame, or perhaps as a gift to a fellow patriot.
Visit this page for more fascinating details on the Declaration of Independence, including informative facts and history, as well as an article by Stephen E. Lucas on the Stylistic Artistry of it’s literary political prose. This is, in itself, the most worthy read.
Beginning excerpts to titillate you:
The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most masterfully written state paper of Western civilization. As Moses Coit Tyler noted almost a century ago, no assessment of it can be complete without taking into account its extraordinary merits as a work of political prose style. Although many scholars have recognized those merits, there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration. (1) This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically–at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable. By approaching the Declaration in this way, we can shed light both on its literary qualities and on its rhetorical power as a work designed to convince a “candid world” that the American colonies were justified in seeking to establish themselves as an independent nation.(2)
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