Just after the British troops landed near Boston to try subdue the rebellious colonies, U.S. militia met them at Lexington, firing “the shot heard round the world.” A year later, as the U.S. was celebrating its independence, the Liberty Bell was brought out in Philadelphia for the “chime heard round the world.” The bell was commissioned twenty-five years years earlier to commemorate the 50th anniversary of William Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges, Pennsylvania’s original Constitution, and was already a powerful symbol for slavery abolitionists, who gave it the name “Liberty Bell.” After the Declaration of Independence it would come to mean more.

On this day, July 8, in 1776 the Liberty Bell Independence Hall of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, rang to summon the citizens of Philadelphia for first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.

The bell was apparently used quite often in the following years, which may explain the famous crack that it developed while ringing out a commemoration to George Washington’s birthday in 1846. The Philadelphia Public Ledger reported on that day “It gave out clear notes and loud, and appeared to be in excellent condition until noon, when it received a sort of compound fracture in a zig-zag direction through one of its sides.”