128. Digitizing the Constitution with Julie Silverbrook

The word “impeachment” is in the air these days. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a website to find information about what the Constitution’s framers thought about impeachment or any other Constitutional issue.

Well, The Constitutional Sources Project is the place for you.

The project, called ConSource for short, is a Washington, D.C.-based initiative to digitize and transcribe the documents that shaped the Federal Constitution, and increase our historical literacy.

On today’s episode, you’ll hear from Julie Silverbrook, ConSource’s executive director. Julie is an attorney and she is leading the charge to help us all better understand our constitutional past.

If you'd like to support this podcast as well as new research into George Washington and his world, please consider becoming a Mount Vernon Member. 

About Our Guest:

Julie Silverbrook is Executive Director of The Constitutional Sources Project, a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization devoted to increasing understanding, facilitating research, and encouraging discussion of the US Constitution by connecting individuals with the documentary history of its creation, ratification, and amendment. Silverbrook holds a J.D. from the William & Mary Law School, where she received the National Association of Women Lawyers Award and the Thurgood Marshall Award and served as a Senior Articles Editor on the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal.

About Our Host:

Jim Ambuske, Ph.D. leads the Center for Digital History at the Washington Library. A historian of the American Revolution, Scotland, and the British Atlantic World, Ambuske graduated from the University of Virginia in 2016. He is a former Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.