The Federalist Papers… and the Anti-Federalist Papers
I was tickled pink to come across Federali.st today. The site hosts a semantic HTML, permalinked version of the Federalist Papers, which means you can reference specific paragraphs of the papers in blog posts and websites. This handy resource is the work of Edward O’Connor, and he wrote about his reasons for undertaking the project here. O’Connor has similarly hyperlinked copies of the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution.
And speaking of the Federalist Papers, my Uncle Jay stopped by the other day to write in the comments here:
Important as they were and are, those advocacy pieces were not published in a vacuum. It may have been at the bookstore at the Visitor Center at Valley Forge National Park that I discovered The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention (ISBN: 0451625250), Ralph Ketcham, Ed..
Consider that the Tenth Amendment reserves to the States all rights not specifically granted elsewhere in the Constitution to the Federal government. Arguments opposed to Federalism can be found in The Anti-Federalist Papers (and in the wake of anything done by Alberto Gonzales and his appointer). It was a little epiphany to realize that I had not read before the detailed arguments of the other side(s) of those Federalist arguments. Whether from your library, from Barnes & Noble or from Abebooks.com, you still can.
