The Constitution

This Library of Congress Student Discovery Set is here to put history into your hands. It brings together historical artifacts and one-of-a-kind documents from the collections of the Library of Congress. Interactive tools let you zoom in for close examination, draw to highlight interesting details, and make notes about what you discover. There’s no single right answer, only new discoveries to be made.


Over fifty delegates met in Philadelphia in May 1787. They left four months later with a design for a new form of government—the Constitution of the United States. This set follows many of the drafts and debates that brought the Constitution and the Bill of Rights into being, including newspaper articles and notes by the documents’ framers.


This set is intended for open-ended primary source analysis by students. A Teacher’s Guide with background information, teaching ideas, and additional resources is available on the Library’s Web site for teachers, loc.gov/teachers.