How We Selected the Documents

Building on the success of the National Constitution Center’s Interactive Constitution, we asked scholarly teams from diverse constitutional perspectives to agree on lists of the most influential primary texts that shaped the constitutional debates during the major eras of American history. These texts include many of the most important speeches, essays, books, pamphlets, petitions, letters, court cases, landmark statutes, and state constitutions that have shaped the American constitutional tradition.  For each text, the team of scholars wrote a joint statement explaining the source’s constitutional significance and selected an excerpt that exemplifies the source’s contribution to American constitutional history.  For inclusion in the Founders’ Library, each scholar on the team had to agree on the source, the explanatory statement, and the excerpt.  The document library also includes sources curated by the National Constitution Center team.