(pensive music) - In the decades following the Declaration of Independence of the United States, there are rising revolutionary movements that spread in Europe and in South and Central America.

- The republics that were created out of the old Spanish Empire, all of those nations, there's a direct line to being inspired by the Declaration of Independence.

- There was huge enthusiasm at first for these movements of independence, which was for some in the United States, a confirmation of their own success.

- These are all part of an age that takes place roughly from the 1770s until the 1840s.

That's called the Age of Revolutions.

(pensive music continues) (lively music) ♪ Whoa ♪ (lively music continues) (tranquil music) - [Narrator] The Spanish and Portuguese empires controlled much of Latin and South America from the earliest European conquest in the late 1400s.

- Some historians have looked at the Age of Revolutions as a turning point, but if we look back a little bit, we can see that it was a slow process of royal authority questioned, undermined.

- [Narrator] Europeans are going out and staking claims on lands where Indigenous people had been living for hundreds and thousands of years and establishing new colonial governments.

- By the late 18th century, there was international wars, the French Revolutionary Wars threatened Spain directly, and then we had the Napoleonic War.

So Spain and its empire was under huge threat and war began to take over the decision-making process.

And so when there was a war, you need funds, you need money to be able to pay for troops, for ships, for everything.

And so there is these pressures to tax more.

- The people in South America and Central America, they're feeling disenchanted with their home governments because they're not the priority.

- [Narrator] The colonists were frustrated by a lack of rights, of freedom over social structures, which had a clear caste system that privileged the rights of the European-born population over the rights of the Indigenous, the people of African descent and the people of mixed descent.

- The people of the United States are keenly watching other nations on how would they not only declare their independence, but how would they secure it?

Many people in the United States are even sort of judging how other nations are declaring independence and deeming whether does that nation even have the right to declare independence?

- Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla was a Mexican priest, highly educated.

He led a movement of peasants and took the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe and marched in procession.

- [Narrator] But then he's captured by the Spanish forces and executed.

He becomes this martyr to the cause of Spanish independence.

People are rising up to avenge his death.

- And this shows us also the role that the Catholic Church played in the wars of independence.

If you wanted to study and you wanted to read new things, to do it under the umbrella of the church was the best way to go about it.

- You have revolutionaries like Simon Bolivar who rise up and lead these independence movements.

- Simon Bolivar was known as the great liberator of really South America.

He came from Colombia and he sought out refuge in Haiti, and Haiti granted him that.

And from there he was able to go back with more soldiers in order to gain independence for not only what was then Colombia, but for Ecuador, Venezuela, and for other spaces in South America as well.

(lively music) - Since the mid-18th century, communications began to happen at a much faster pace.

- The first printing press in the Americas was actually in Mexico City, not in British North America.

Some of the printers and the political leaders of these movements had actually come to Philadelphia and come to the United States to seek support, and in some cases, the United States sent printing presses and sent printers to try to support these independence movements that they felt had a similarity.

On the 4th of July every year there were toasts to independence that are recorded in the newspapers, and we can see how Americans thought about other revolutions through these toasts.

We can see toasts to Simon Bolivar and toasts to Ireland and Greece, but we don't see a toast to Toussaint Louverture or Jean-Jacques Dessalinesin in Haiti.

- Well over 100 nations over the past 250 years would adopt that model to become independent via a Declaration of Independence.

- Perhaps the most striking example of another type of citizen using or invoking the Declaration of Independence is Ho Chi Minh.

So Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese nationalist who had fought his entire life for Vietnamese freedom.

He wrote his own Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, and in doing so, he invoked directly the American Declaration of Independence to outline his arguments for why Vietnam deserved independence from Western influence.

- Americans' understanding of their declaration has been a dialogue, not just among themselves and between generations, but with the world.

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