Highlights Archives
Take Your Daily Constitutional
September 17 is Constitution Day. Ten months ago President Bush signed Public Law 108-447, which established September 17th as Constitution Day and requested educational programs at all federally funded institutions. The holiday had already been informally celebrated for seven years thanks to Constitution Day Inc., which organized a simultaneous nationwide recitation of the Preamble.
The ideas in the U.S. Constitution were radical at the time and were not welcomed by everyone. To find out what 18th-century Americans thought about its unusual ideas — that all political power derives from the consent of the governed, for example, or that individuals possess inalienable rights and liberties — the University of Wisconsin-Madison hosts a research initiative to document the ratification of the Constitution. Led by historians John Kaminski and Gaspar Saladino, and funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the project has inspected documents in more than 1,000 libraries and combed through 150 18th-century newspapers. It has gathered more than 12,000 manuscripts and 40,000 newspaper items to create the authoritative record of how the Constitution was received.
The most important of those documents have been published by the Society since 1976 in the multi-volume Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution series. We continue to be proud to issue what one distinguished scholar calls, "the most important editorial project in the nation."
But the Constitution was not written so historians could excavate and comment on it. It was created to hold the American community together and to guarantee that individuals would be free to pursue their dreams. We therefore encourage all readers to stop for a moment and review its Preamble:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." (View the original manuscript and its Bill of Rights.)
We encourage you to make a daily habit of rambling around in the Constitution, its ideas, and its history, especially as they pertain to Wisconsin. Right here on our Web site you'll probably find everything you'd like to know about how Wisconsin tried to create a Constitution even more radical than the U.S. one, how slavery divided the nation (and Wisconsin defied the Supreme Court), and how the Civil War tore the country apart at the seams.
You can learn about howWisconsin African Americans and women won the right to vote, and how the ill-fated attempt to prohibit alcohol affected brewers, drinkers and police officers.
Unlike the laws of physics, the rights and responsibilities embodied in our Constitution are not permanent. They were created by people and can be taken away by people. It behooves us all to understand them and pay attention to attempts to alter or undermine them. What better time to begin than Constitution Day?
:: Posted September 14, 2005
|
