Jul 29, 2026

The Declaration of Independence was fading away, and the federal government had no plan to restore it. A Bohemian immigrant named Theodore Ohman did. Jenny Beth Martin sits down with Mark Hill, owner of the Theodore Ohman collection and founder of BigParty250.com, for the story of the immigrant lithographer who spent decades creating exact restorations of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, then spent 25 years putting them on classroom walls across America. Ohman was taught the Declaration as a schoolboy in Bohemia under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and never forgot it. After arriving in America in 1912, he found the original Declaration faded and torn, so he tracked down an 1823 William Stone print and the 1903 Handy glass-plate negatives and rebuilt the document letter by letter. He printed his Declaration in 1942 and his Constitution, with the Bill of Rights, in 1953, then sold sets to hometown banks town by town so every local school could hang them. Mark Hill explains how the collection survived in crates for decades, why the Library of Congress cannot explain the stone print it received in 1939, how the National Archives reacted to Ohman's glass negatives, and the signature Constitution bearing President Trump's signature after five tries. Now Hill is restarting Ohman's mission for America's 250th anniversary. Learn more at teapartypatriots.org and jennybethshow.com.

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