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unbiased your favorite source of unbiased news and legal analysis welcome back to unbiasedased politics. We're doing something special today. I thought it would be

fun to do an Independence Day special. So we'll talk about how Independence Day came to be,

what the holiday signifies, some Fourth of July traditions, fun facts, all the things.

Just because of my travel schedule and just the way the holiday

kind of lined up with the episode. I figured, why not do this? We'll have fun with it, but

it'll still be educational. So let's get into it. Starting with a little bit of history. So

Independence Day, also known as the 4th of July, is the day that the founding fathers officially declared

through the ratification of the Declaration of Independence that the 13 colonies were no longer

subject to the King of Britain. Now, a couple of things to note here, important things. Number one,

it was actually July 2nd that Congress declared the United States independent from England.

And we'll talk about why we don't celebrate on July 2nd and instead celebrate on July 4th,

but that's worth noting. The second thing is that the United States wasn't actually formally

recognized as an independent nation until seven years after the ratification of the Declaration

of Independence.

So we have a lot to talk about in this episode.

We're going to start off in the 1700s when Britain was the world's superpower, right?

Its empire stretched across continents, including here in the United States, but it wasn't

the United States at the time.

It was just 13 British colonies that stretched along the eastern seaboard of North America.

And the 13 original colonies included New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

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