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Chapter 2. The Politics of the American Founding

Explore

General information web sites

The Library of Congress's American Memory collection is a gateway to numerous papers, presentations, critical thinking exercises, and first-hand accounts that address African American, American Indian, and women's history; immigration; religion; and cultural issues from architecture to advertising. You'll also find maps from the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, American colonization, and even the development of the first railroads.

The Library of Congress Exhibitions web site provides in-depth and interactive information on many important events in America's founding. Exhibitions include Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents, which explores the chronology of events and writing processes that led up to the Declaration of Independence, and Religion and the Founding of the American Republic.

View the original pages of over 100 milestone documents including the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, and countless others at the National Archives and Records Administration.

The American Revolution

Liberty! The American Revolution is a companion web site for the acclaimed PBS documentary series by the same name. It has an incredible amount of information, including actual newspaper articles from during the Revolutionary War. (See Exercises.)

Influential documents

Read the full text of the Articles of Confederation, America's first constitution, on the University of Oklahoma's Law Center web site.

A complete library of The Federalist Papers appears on the web site for the Avalon Project at Yale Law School. You can search for specific papers by subject, number, and author, and also be a click away from other primary source material influenced by them.

The Constitution

The web site for the Constitution Center has educational resources, an interactive Constitution, a constitutional timeline, and other information on the historical context of this founding document. (See Exercises.)

Teaching American History is a dynamic site with extensive coverage of the Constitutional Convention, which includes select speech transcripts, interactive maps, and much more. The site also features hundreds of links to audio lectures and discussions (requires Real Player) by scholars around the country and a historical document library organized by eras and presidencies.

Founding Father Bibliographies is a site that includes a brief biography of every person who signed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and even those who attended the Convention but didn't sign the Constitution.