Graham Moore, the Revolution 250 curator at the National Archives, said the "exceptional" item was "one of the rarest forms of the Declaration we know about".

A flawed first copy — dashed off in an all-nighter in 1776 — endures as a template for democracy in action.

Nearly 250 years before the Declaration of Independence became one of the world’s most recognizable political documents, it was simply breaking news. According to the Harvard…