Word: documentation
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...making of books about the Constitution there is no end, especially in this bicentenary year, when thousands of people from the President to the most unassuming kindergarten teacher are trying to define, not always with impartial clarity, the document's conception and meaning. But for an authentic and authoritative version of what the Constitution is about and how it got that way, it is hard to beat two of the original works written on the subject: James Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 and The Federalist, by Alexander Hamilton, Madison and John Jay. Both...
...words set down by the framers mapped out first principles of government in spare but sweeping lines. The amendments added since the Bill of Rights have actually done little to alter the document's intrinsic meaning, though they took such dramatic steps as abolishing slavery, expanding the right to vote and permitting a federal income tax. A few of the additions even seem gratuitous, like graffiti on a public monument -- Prohibition and the amendment to be rid of it -- and the urge rises to go at them with a sponge...
...sacred about them. The Ark of America, it is a civic icon that is worshiped, if not always read. But the Constitution has its other, mundane life down at sea level, where wants and ideals crash into one another. Every year the U.S. reinvents the meaning of the document. In this special issue TIME organizes its usual sections under language from the charter and celebrates the continued vibrancy of those words in every aspect of our lives...
After all the Bicentennial's examinations of what the Constitution is, take one last look to discover who lives there. Someone lives there. The Constitution's inventors could not have produced so durable a document without a vision of the person to whom the laws and stipulations were directed. Before the season dissipates, look at the words one more time. Read them not as rules of the game but as the interior ruminations of a character, a hero, who in some strange conflicted combination of exultation and self-restraint has, for 200 years, found a way to live a life...
...compromise." In other words, the basic Constitution was too balanced, and thus logically flawed: What moderate compromises are available when a nation seeks to retain the institution of slavery? The answer to the Constitution's excessive symmetry was the Bill of Rights, which did not overturn the basic document but represented a risky extension into the realms of individual freedom that many of the framers thought dangerous. So here was the Enlightenment house with an ell attached, and a riddle: yes, the main structure was perfect, and, yes, it needed continuous work...