Virtual Chicago
A project of the U of C Press and the Liberty Fund, the online version of The Founders' Constitution is easier to navigate than its print predecessor, five oversized volumes published by the Press in 1986. Edited by two U of C professors-the late Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, AB'47, AM'49, PhD'53, the Benjamin Franklin professor in the College and in Social Thought-it's been called "the Oxford English Dictionary of American constitutional history."

Like the print anthology, the Web site contains documents from the early 17th century to the 1830s: essays, pamphlets, and correspondence of the day's leading political figures. The materials are arranged in terms of themes (see "Union" or "Equality") and by article, section, and clause of the U.S. Constitution, from the Preamble through the first 12 Amendments.

A search engine uses American flags to show the best matches: "liberty" yields 836 hits, "justice," 663; and "freedom," 341.

World Wide Web location:
press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders

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