Let’s get one thing straight ~ America wasn’t born in a tidy hospital room with a full birth certificate. It was cobbled together in taverns, backrooms, and sweltering meeting halls by men who argued like siblings, drank like sailors, and somehow still managed to launch a republic. The road to independence was not a scenic drive. It began with the British imposing taxes, and the colonists responding with tea parties ~ and not the cucumber-sandwich kind. There were shots fired in Boston, passionate speeches in Congress, and one giant breakup letter, famously known as the Declaration of Independence. Join historian Joseph Blanco as he tells the entertaining story of the men and events using a multimedia approach. Here’s the thing: becoming an American was never about ancestry or family trees. It was, and still is, about buying into the messy, bold, idealistic values cooked up in that hot hall in Philadelphia. That’s what gives the guys in powdered wigs their lasting VIP status in the story of America’s birth.