The reading room · 38 documents
Read the corpus
Every text in the quarrel, in the order it was argued — 38 documents across the five arcs, each glossed where the typed links land (the contested ones shown as contested). Open any one to read it; open a concept thread to read across them.
Inheritance
The English antecedents the founders quoted.
Road to Independence
1765–1776: the quarrel that became a separation.
- 1765Quartering Act 1765
- 1774Quartering Act 1774
- 1774Free Thoughts
- 1774A Full Vindication
- 1774A View of the Controversy
- 1775Novanglus
- 1775Massachusettensis
- 1775The Farmer Refuted
- 1776An Answer to the Declaration
- 1776Common Sense
- 1776Virginia Declaration of Rights
- 1776Declaration of Independence
- 1776Strictures upon the Declaration
Confederation & the Framework
1777–1788: a failed build, a rewrite, and its defenders and critics.
Ratification & the Early Republic
1789–1801: the patch ratified, and the first strains.
Consequences
1793–1833: where the documents got their first authoritative readings.
Texts are cleaned from public-domain sources (Avalon, the National Archives, Cornell LII, the Online Library of Liberty, Project Gutenberg, Teaching American History) — site chrome stripped, period spelling kept. Provenance and any OCR corrections are disclosed on each page.