About four decades ago, a musical play titled "1776" debuted on Broadway. I did not see it there, but I did see a filmed version and had the opportunity to enjoy the play's music and to be reminded of its familiar story of the members of the Second Continental Congress gathering in humid Philadelphia, Pa., in summer's heat to debate, and finally resolve, a question of independence.

That story is familiar to me; I told it every year for nearly five decades, sometimes more than once in semesters when department chairmen scheduled me for more than one section of History 133, SFA's designation of the first half of a course on the history of the United States. I still do, at least in fall and spring semesters, to each new generation of freshman citizens who are just coming of age as voters.

Part of my purpose is to make them aware of how their country came to be as they find it, and thus become knowledgeable voters who will decide its future — not tell them how to vote or for whom to vote, you understand, just to make them aware of why things are as they are so they may decide what to do about it for themselves on the basis of information and understanding.

So we go through the old, old story again and again: colonies; parliamentary governance; stress over new regulations after 1763; Stamp Act crisis; Virginia Resolves and a Boston massacre and tea party; and so on, into Philadelphia, in the state house later known as Independence Hall because of what 55 delegates, among them Franklin, and Adams, and Jefferson, and yes, even Dickinson, did there.

Richard Henry Lee of Virginia issued the challenge on June 2 that "these united colonies are, and of right ought to be" free and independent states, and any all political connection between them and Great Britain, "is, and ought to be," dissolved.

Of course, being a Congress, the members had to argue about that issue for a month, but on July 2 they voted to confirm Lee's resolution. Jefferson and four others wrote the particulars of why in a declaration that also borrowed John Locke's social contract theory, and the delegates accepted their literary work as their own on July 4 — the date thereafter from which we mark the self-realization of not only our independence but also our freedom.

"Freedom," said my hero, John Wayne, "is one of those words that means (a person) can go or come, buy or sell just as they choose. Some words give you a feeling that makes you warm inside. Freedom is one of those words."

The Second Continental Congress did a pretty good summer's work in 1776. Sometimes I still hear America singing about it.