WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Declaration of Independence, modernized. “As part of our ongoing project to update and improve the core documents of American history, we present the opening sections of the Declaration of Independence as they ought to have been written, and indeed as it would have been written if the still primitive colonial political process had only been sophisticated enough to restrict participation at important conferences to the appropriately certified, trained and peer-reviewed experts who could have produced a document worth remembering.”