A spirited discussion about energy, hosted by Newsweek's Howard Fineman.

The American colonies adopt the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. The Revolution had been ongoing for over a year when in late June Virginian Richard Henry Lee sponsored a resolution that "all political connection between [the U.S.A.] and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved." Thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson was part of a team (including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin) tasked to draft a full declaration. Franklin and Adams wanted Jefferson to write the document, as he was popular with much of the Continental Congress in ways they were not. Drawing from Virginia's Declaration of Rights, Jefferson wrote of equal, unimpeachable rights inherent in all men, derived from God, rather than granted at the pleasure monarchs or oligarchs. On July 2, twelve of thirteen colonies ratified the document, and after a few days of word-wrangling—much of it having to do with Jefferson's opposition to the slave trade—the Declaration was agreed to. On July 8, it was read publicly for the first time outside Independence Hall. When the Declaration reached Europe, it was met with admiration in some quarters, ridicule in others. An editorial in a British Magazine's August 1776 issue pointed out the hypocrisy of slavery in America but also illustrated how confounding the Declaration was to some in the Old World: "If the Creator hath endowed man with an unalienable right to liberty…there can be no such things as servants, subjects, or government of any kind whatsoever. In a word, every law that hath been in the world since the formation of Adam, gives the lie to this self-evident truth, (as they are pleased to term it)."

On the road as the Illinois senator conducts a summer campaign swing.