At 250, the Declaration of Independence Still Sparks Hard Questions in Class

Among longtime history teacher Karalee Wong Nakatsuka’s most prized possessions are two nearly identical T-shirts with very different meanings. One comes from Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, celebrating our Founding Fathers’ signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and their fight for freedom from the British Crown. The second is from Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., where an assassin killed President Abraham Lincoln 89 years after the Declaration’s signing. The Civil War, fought to free the nation’s nearly four million enslaved people, had effectively ended five days before the president was shot. Both T-shirts bear the slogan: “Created…