Transcripts For CSPAN3 Amending America Exhibit 20161227

Nonjohn glennon jo astronaut john glenn, on americcspan. 225 years ago, 1791, virginia became the 11th of 14 states to ratify the 14 amendments to the u. S. Constitution. The bill of rights then became law. Amending america is a National Archives exhibit marking the anniversary by exploring the history and process of amending the constitution. This tour of the exhibit is about 45 minutes. Hi, my name is Jennifer Johnson and im a curator with the National Archives museum, cocurator for amending america. Im countries mean blackerby, im also cocurator of amending america. Were standing outside the lawrence f. Obrien gallery, and about to take you through amending america. Right next to me here is a case showing the more than 11,000 amendments that have been proposed to the constitution. Christine and i have been working on this exhibit for a couple of years now, although research started almost four years ago. And we couldnt help but notice that the variety and depth of amendments in the stacks, when we were walking through the stacks, and realized there have been more than 11,000 proposed to the constitution. We started asking ourselves why there were so many yet so few actually ratified. The exhibit begins to explore that idea and how the Founding Fathers set up our government and allowed us to amend when needed. One of our challenges for this exhibit is that the bill of rights actually lives in the rotunda, which is a different area of the museum. So we decided as a team to have a banner literally lead visitors from the bill of rights all the way to the obrien gallery. And on that banner are the more than 11,000 amendments proposed in congress. It was a small team of staff and volunteers who worked over the course the last summer to literally transcribe from a variety of government publications into one document the more than 11,000 amendments. The bill of rights is the first ten amendments to the constitution. We decided to open up the gallery with those first ten amendments, which are collectively known as the bill of rights. But we also wanted to collectively explain why we had a bill of rights in the first place. It wasnt guaranteed that we would have one. In fact at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 in philadelphia, when the delegates were talking about the bill of rights, they took a vote on whether or not they should include one in the constitution. And this document right here, which is the voting record from the Constitutional Convention, shows that when they took a vote, which is about two third of the way down the page right here, that the vote was actually zero to ten on including a bill of rights in the constitution. So the delegates to the Constitutional Convention just didnt think it was needed with the constitution. But then, after the convention was over, the constitution was sent to the states for ratification. And the states did not agree with the delegates to the convention that it wasnt needed. So one of the states that disagreed was the state of new york. And this is two pages of the six pages of the state of new yorks ratification of the constitution. What happened in new york, and several other states, was that they decided to ratify the constitution and to use that as the start of a new governmental system. But when they did it, they also suggested a bunch of amendments that they think should be included in the new constitution. Captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2008 captioning performed by vitac