Res Publica
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About

How this library works

Res Publica is a free, nonpartisan, open-source library. It is built so that you can check every claim it makes: where each text came from, how each passage is numbered, and who connected two passages and why.

Where the texts come from

  1. Download. Each source is downloaded once from a public-domain original, and its address, date and checksum are recorded.
  2. Import. A program splits the original into passages. It may collapse spacing and remove markup, but never changes a word, a spelling or a mark of punctuation. Original spellings such as “chuse” and “defence” stay.
  3. Verify. Before anything is published, every import is run again and must reproduce the published text exactly, so no passage can be retyped or “corrected” by hand.
  4. Flag, don't fix. Suspected transcription errors are listed in a public errata log for a person to check against a page image.

Every passage has a permanent address

References are short names that never change once published. Link to one, cite one, or type one into search.

ReferenceMeans
Declaration.2The Declaration of Independence, second paragraph (“We hold these truths…”)
Constitution.PreambleThe Preamble
Constitution.1.8.3Article I, Section 8, Clause 3
Constitution.6.2Article VI, Clause 2 (Articles V–VII have no sections)
Amendment.14.1Amendment XIV, Section 1
Federalist.10.1The Federalist No. 10, first paragraph
Cato.3.2The third letter of Cato, second paragraph
Caution.1A single essay (“Caution”), first paragraph

Connections and review

A connection says how two passages relate: one quotes, cites, responds to orrebuts another, a case interprets a clause, and so on. Each one records why it was made, who or what made it, and whether a person has reviewed it.

  • Suggested Proposed by a machine and not yet reviewed by a person. Shown with a dashed border.
  • Reviewed Checked by a person.
  • Overruled A case that a later decision overruled, recorded with a source for that fact.

Any quotation shown in a connection is checked by code against the text, letter for letter.

Editions

The Declaration of Independence

National Archives transcription of the Stone Engraving of the parchment · July 4, 1776

Spelling and punctuation follow the National Archives transcription, which reflects the original. Paragraphs are as the transcription sets them: each grievance is its own paragraph. Signatures are grouped by state in the transcription's order.

The Constitution of the United States

National Archives transcription of the engrossed parchment · September 17, 1787

Spelling and punctuation follow the National Archives transcription. Spans that the National Archives marks as changed by a later amendment are recorded in each segment's changed_by list.

Amendments to the Constitution of the United States

National Archives transcriptions of the Bill of Rights and Amendments XI-XXVII · 1791–1992

Amendments I-X follow the National Archives transcription of the first ten amendments in their original form. Bracketing and asterisks in Amendments XII and XIV are the National Archives' markers and are kept as transcribed; the matching notes are stored on each amendment's division.

The Federalist

Project Gutenberg eBook #18 · 1787–1788

See docs/editions.md. Paragraphing, footnotes, newspaper lines and attributions follow the base edition. Italics are recorded as emphasis spans.

The ratification debate: texts read from scans

The essays and letters of the ratification debate come from three collections printed in 1888 and 1892, now in the public domain. No accurate digital text of them existed, so Res Publica reads them from the Internet Archive's scans of the printed books:

  1. Layout. One scan's OCR gives the words and their place on the page. Running heads, page numbers and footnotes are set apart, and a paragraph broken by a page is joined again.
  2. A second reading. Each word is compared with the OCR of another scan of the same printed edition, made from a different copy of the book.
  3. A vote, with limits. Where the scans differ, the reading most scans share wins, or the one that is an English word found in a clean text. A real word is never swapped for a different real word, and figures that differ are never settled by vote.
  4. Doubt is shown. Words no rule settles are kept as the main scan reads them and underlined with dots. Select the paragraph to see each scan's reading and a link to the page image.

No word is typed by hand. Errors that every scan shares cannot be caught this way, and the newspaper headings, set in display type, are read worst; please report what you find. Which side a writer took is Res Publica's grouping; authors are as the editions give them, and several of those attributions are disputed.

Brutus, one of the most important Anti-Federalist writers, is not here yet: none of these collections prints his essays, and no other public-domain printing has been found that can be imported and checked.

Paul Leicester Ford, ed., Essays on the Constitution of the United States (Brooklyn, 1892)

The Letters of Cato · Caution · The Letters of Agrippa · Replies to a Landholder · The Letters of Luther Martin · A Plain Dealer · The Letters of Sydney · The Letters of Cassius · The Letters of Caesar · A Friend to the Constitution · The Letters of a Landholder · The Letters of a Countryman · Remarks on the New Plan of Government · Cursory Remarks · A Steady and Open Republican · The Letters of a Citizen of New Haven · Letter to the Landholder

John Bach McMaster and Frederick D. Stone, eds., Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787–1788 (Lancaster, 1888)

The Letters of Centinel

Paul Leicester Ford, ed., Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (Brooklyn, 1888)

Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican

Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, held in the year 1788 (Boston, 1856)

The Letters of Brutus

Privacy

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Open source

The code is MIT-licensed; connections and editorial content are CC BY-SA 4.0; the source texts are in the public domain. Everything, including the checks described here, is onGitHub.

Enter all results↑ ↓ then Enter to open oneTry “Federalist 51”, “Article I, Section 8”, “Amendment 14”