Feeling patriotic today. Being the ever so important fifth of July and all. Local University has one of the four original copies of the Bill of Rights on display. It was nice to be able to walk down to see such an important piece of history. However, I was somewhat disapointed that I was the only person there. Here's a link to an image. Apparently, those aren't misspellings. Nobody writes like this anymore. http://posner.library.cmu.edu/Posner/books/CALL1/342.73_U588C/thumbs/title.jpg
That was one of the drafts. (Notice that "the Second" is article four on that one?). I'm not familiar with the history on that one, as it has the current mutated wording, but without the superfluous commas from the Pennsylvania proposal. Both the Pennsylvania and Virginia proposals had "the second" expanded from `rights of the citizens to have arms' to `prohibition against the government having any' -- a ban against standing armies in time of peace. The origins and some of the drafts of the bill of rights can be found in a collection called "the anti-federalist papers" -- the other side of the newspaper debates that generated the Federalist. Isn't it amazing how things you hated in school, like history, become interesting, afterwards? The ability of our school systems to make interesting topics repugnant is yet another consequence of bureaucracy driven class guides.
