Three locations hosted the first public readings of the Declaration of Independence on July 8, 1776.
The readings took place at noon in Philadelphia, Trenton, New Jersey, and Easton, Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, John Nixon read the document in the yard of the Pennsylvania State House, the building now known as Independence Hall. The simultaneous readings helped carry Congress’s announcement beyond the delegates who had approved it.
The public readings followed the Declaration’s adoption on July 4 and its initial printing as a broadside. General George Washington ordered the text read to Continental Army troops in New York City on July 9, but that event was not one of the three first designated public readings.
The number is sometimes confused with the thirteen colonies represented in Congress or the fifty-six delegates who signed the engrossed parchment copy. Those figures refer to the document’s political setting and later signing, not to the locations of its first public readings.