AHA Today reports on “Founders Early Access,” a new database of primary documents related to the founding period that has been recently released by the National Archives and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. This new and expanding database includes a host of unpublished documents from the following collections: The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution; The Papers of Thomas Jefferson; The Adams Papers; The Papers of George Washington; and the Dolley Madison Collection. The AHA post notes that there is more to come.
Some of the stuff is only available to subscribers. The site offers a forty-eight hour free trial membership. But there is also a lot that is available for free.
It seems that early American history professors (and high school American history teachers) no longer have any excuse for not using primary sources in their teaching or assigning papers on the founding era based on primary research.
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