Video: 'August 2, 1776 - The Day America signed Independence'

(Friday, August 2, 1776; during the American Revolutionary War and the American Revolution) — Delegates to the Second Continental Congress meeting today in Philadelphia began attaching their signatures to the Declaration of Independence, which had been approved July 4, 1776.

Video: 'The July 4th Myth Almost Everyone Gets Wrong (1776)'

The declaration proclaimed that the thirteen American colonies then at war with Great Britain were now sovereign states, and thus no longer a part of the British Empire.