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Project Title: Ratifying the U.S. Constitution
I chose this topic because I feel that our country went from being a loose union of individual states to being a nation with a central government when the Constitution was ratified. This was more important than the War for Independence, because it dictated the type of government we would have. The Federalists, led by Hamilton, wanted a strong central government. The Anti-Federalists wanted every state to be its own government. The guiding question for me is: Should the U.S. have ratified the Constitution or stayed a loose confederation?
I found most of my research online, using Google to help me with my web browsing. For primary sources, I was able to locate all the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers at Constitution.org and Yale.edu. This gave me a sense of what the actual debate was about at the time. For modern day perspective, I found an interesting article at Mises Institute by Gary Galles, which argued that history has proven that the Anti-Federalists were right in their fears of what would happen should a central government be founded.
My goal for the project is to understand why the Federalists wanted a central government and why the Anti-Federalists opposed it. I want to be able to show one way or another why one side was right and the other wrong. My output will be to argue that the Federalists were mistaken in thinking that the Constitution would prevent everything they thought it would.
My work progress and group dynamic has been positive so far. Because this topic is so interesting and so relevant today, there has been a lot of good discussion on the subject. We are pretty much evenly divided in our opinions, so this makes for good debate. What I have learned about my abilities and habits is that the challenge of doing research should be looked at as an opportunity to learn, so it has been easy for me to take some time each day reading up on the subject. The new skills that I improved on have been using Google to research.
Bibliography
Primary Sources:
Brutus No. 1. (1787). Constitution. Retrieved from http://www.constitution.org/afp/brutus01.htm
Federalist No. 6 (n.d.). Retrieved from http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed06.asp
Federalist No. 7 (n.d.). Retrieved from http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed07.asp
Secondary Sources:
Galles, G. (2008). The anti-federalists were right. Retrieved from https://mises.org/library/antifederalists-were-right
History. (2018). U.S. Constitution ratified. Retrieved from https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/u-s-constitution-ratified
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