Maria Toglia

Director of Capacity Building for the Pennsylvania Branch of the International Dyslexia Association and a certified school psychologist focused on structured literacy teacher preparation and implementation in Pennsylvania. She has served in Pennsylvania public schools for about 20 years and is a member of the Read by 4th Campaign’s Instructional Strategies working group in Philadelphia.

Fourth of July Speeches Cast the Declaration as an Unfinished Obligation

Bryan Doerries’s Aspen closing session used Fourth of July speeches by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the women’s-rights leaders of 1876 to argue that America’s founding language remains an obligation rather than a settled inheritance. Framed through Theater of War’s town-hall model, the session treated the Declaration of Independence as promise, evidence and indictment: a vocabulary repeatedly invoked by people excluded from its protections to demand that the republic enforce the principles it celebrates.

The Aspen InstituteJul 1, 202620 min read