Creating the U.S. Interactives
The creative acts of our Founding Fathers are illuminated through enhanced electronic documents that reveal their thinking, their inspiration, and their iterative, collaborative process.
Imagination and vision played critical roles in the creative act of forming a self-governing United States of America. The Creating the United States exhibition offers a remarkable opportunity to learn in a fresh way how the founding documents that emerged from this period were forged out of insight, invention, and creativity, as well as collaboration and compromise. Three interactive stations utilize draft versions of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights to reveal how the ideas, principles, and philosophies they contain emerged and evolved. Visitors can isolate passages and themes in each document and trace threads to antecedent documents, illustrating the evolution of principles inherited from the past. Handwriting is transcribed through a filter control, and the handwritten emendations in the margins of these documents are annotated to reveal the collaborative editorial process between the founders.