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Public libraries were invited to apply for Revisiting the Founding Era, a nationwide project that will use historical documents to spark public conversations about the Founding Era’s enduring ideas and themes and how they continue to influence our lives today.

Up to 100 U.S. public libraries were selected to host programs related to the American Revolution and the early years of the nation.

Participating libraries received:

• 10 copies of a 100-page reader containing selected documents from the lauded Gilder Lehrman Collection, one of the great archives in U.S. history
• $1,000 to help implement discussion groups and other public programs
• Training, resources and support

Libraries, working in collaboration with scholars, local experts, and others, were asked to implement at least three public programs for adult and teen audiences.

Revisiting the Founding Era is a project of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in collaboration with the ÂÜÀòÍøÊÓƵ (ALA) and the National Constitution Center. The project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Questions? Contact ALA’s Public Programs Office at publicprograms@ala.org.

Watch live! Revisiting the Founding Era Town Hall at the National Constitution Center

The National Constitution Center town hall and historians Carol Berkin and Denver Brunsman, community leader Farah Jimenez, and others discuss priceless documents from the Founding era, highlight the enduring importance of America’s Founding, and discuss how the Founding era documents and debates can help guide conversations that resonate today within communities often left out of the Founding narrative, including minorities, women, and others.

Humanities Themes

As a document-based project, Revisiting the Founding Era highlights a series of questions guided by humanities themes: What can we learn from the ideas and actions of people from the Founding Era? What do the records they left behind tell us? How can the past help us chart our future? Each participating library received ten copies of the Revisiting the Founding Era reader, as well as public access to the PDF reader on the project website. You can access the .

Major humanities themes include:

• Communication and persuasion
• Mobilizing for independence
• Nation-making and state-making
• Race
• Onset of war
• The home front
• Unequal hardships
• Treatment of veterans
• The limitations of the Articles of Confederation
• Making a more perfect union
• Ratifying the Constitution
• Establishing a national economy
• Dissent and national security
• Elections and peaceful transitions of power

Each of the four sections—Declaring Independence, Realizing Independence, Creating a Constitution for a New Nation, and Translating a Blueprint into a Working Government—highlighted questions raised by the themes presented both in the scholarly essays and the highlighted documents.