The Amendments Project: Rewriting the U.S. Constitution

FAIN: MT-284709-22

President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3800)
Jill Lepore (Project Director: June 2021 to present)

Prototyping of an interpretive website that integrates 200 years of proposals for new amendments to the Constitution.

The Amendments Project aims to compile, analyze, and present to the public the text of proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution from 1787 to 2020, in the form of a digital archive and a narrative podcast. The project builds on raw, incomplete, and inaccessible data compiled by the National Archives in 2016 and extends that collection through research designed to discover proposals made by historically disenfranchised and poorly enfranchised groups. Through a collaboration with the Comparative Constitutions Project, the Amendments Project will provide access to this collection to an interested general public that will include researchers and teachers, elected officials, political parties, non-profit organizations, constitutional reformers and, especially, students from kindergarteners to senior learners. The project aims to advance civic education and support emerging proposals for constitutional reform, in alignment with the NEH’s Special Initiative, “A More Perfect Union.”