From Jamestown 1607 through the Bill of Rights — the colonies that became a country, the documents that named what it would be, and the people who lived between the lines of what was written.
5 Stories · Founding Era
Ten amendments ratified December 15, 1791 — protecting speech, assembly, due process, and arms. Their application to the states would take another 150 years.
Drafted in Philadelphia over four months in 1787, ratified by nine states in 1788. The oldest written national charter still in force — and the three-fifths compromise was in its original text.
On July 4, 1776, fifty-six delegates signed a document declaring that government draws its just powers from the consent of the governed. Many of them held people in bondage.
The Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora — governed by a constitution older than the country that borrowed from it.
August 20, 1619: the White Lion landed at Point Comfort with twenty Angolans aboard — the first documented enslaved Africans in English North America.