The Quill Project studies the history of negotiated texts. It is a research project based at Pembroke College, Oxford.
Using the records of the processes that have created constitutions, treaties, or legislation, Quill re-creates the contexts within which decisions were made and offers visualizations of the process of negotiation that led to the founding documents as we know them today. Its flagship project examined the work of the 1787 convention that created the U.S. Constitution.
Since 2015, CCS has assisted with most aspects of the Quill Project, including student engagement in digitizing and analyzing materials relevant to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, and a growing number of state constitutional conventions.
As a result of this work, students have engaged in archival and historical work and related scholarship regarding the negotiation of the constitutional documents.
Currently, our Quill student workers are modeling the Congressional sessions that produced the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and are preparing to model more state-level constitutional conventions.
In 1895, delegates from across Utah met in Salt Lake City to debate and draft a constitution for the state. Some of the most heated topics discussed throughout the convention included woman suffrage, prohibition, and the use of lands.
Documents and debates were pieced together by students at Utah Valley University from newspaper articles of the time, the journal of the convention, and microfilm copies of the original documents.
With extensive analysis and hard work, students created a comprehensive digital model of the proceedings of the Utah Constitutional Convention.
To learn more about this groundbreaking research, visit The Quill Project's Utah modeling.
Deliberations on what would become the U.S. Constitution began on May 25, 1787, and proceeded through the hot Philadelphia summer until Sept. 17.
Books we would recommend include James Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Constitution of 1787, Max Farrand's classic, The Framing of the Constitution of the United States, and Richard Beeman's more recent Plain Honest Men.
Now they can be supplemented with the most advanced tool for studying the convention, the web platform from the Oxford Quill Project. It allows users to precisely trace what debates were about and changes to the Constitution made on any given day.
Designed by Professor Nicholas Cole of Oxford University (Senior Research Fellow, History), it was partly executed by our own CCS Wood Assistants Lance Merrell, Matthew Nolte, and Colten Sponseller.
Suite 305, UVU Fulton Library
800 West University Parkway
Orem, UT 84058
Constitution@uvu.edu
(801) 863-5470
