John Dunlap printed about 200 copies of the United States Declaration of Independence in July 1776.
Dunlap, a Philadelphia printer, produced the famous broadsides after Congress approved the Declaration’s wording. The work was carried out overnight so copies could be distributed quickly to colonial governments, military leaders, and the public. These sheets are commonly called Dunlap broadsides.
The number was large for an urgent eighteenth-century political printing, but only 26 copies are currently known to survive. One additional copy was discovered in the British National Archives in 2009, making the surviving group an important record of how the Declaration was first circulated.
The broadsides are not the same as the engrossed parchment copy signed by delegates. Dunlap’s printed version was an early public text, while the parchment was prepared later for signatures. Differences between early printings and the final parchment help historians reconstruct the document’s publication history.