July James Boyd Book Club

Who's Your Founding Father? One Man's Epic Quest to Uncover the First Declaration of Independence by David Fleming The James Boyd Book Club reads and discusses the work of North Carolina authors – past and present. They meet at the Weymouth Center at 2 pm on the third Tuesday of every month (except December) . Free Admission / Registration required. About the book: A centuries-old secret document unravels the origin story of America and reveals the intellectual crime of the millennia in this "hugely entertaining" dive into our country’s history to discover the first, true Declaration of Independence (Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon and Churchill.) In 1819, John Adams came across a stunning story in his hometown Essex Register that he described to his political frenemy Thomas Jefferson as “one of the greatest curiosities and one of the deepest mysteries that ever occurred to me…entitled the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. The genuine sense of America at that moment was never so well expressed before, nor since.” The story claimed that a full 14 months before Jefferson crafted his own Declaration of Independence, a misfit band of zealous Scots-Irish patriots, whiskey-loving Princeton scholars and a fanatical frontier preacher in a remote corner of North Carolina had become the first Americans to formally declare themselves “free and independent” from England.