How we write and check these pages
The U.S. founding documents pages combine a primary text with original explanation. This page describes where each part comes from and how it is checked, so you can judge how far to rely on it.
The texts
Every text is extracted from a named authoritative source, never retyped: the National Archives for the Constitution, amendments, Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation; the Library of Congress for The Federalist; the University of Wisconsin’s Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution for Cato III and IV; the Constitution Society for Brutus; and Cornell’s Legal Information Institute for the opinion in Marbury v. Madison, which can be compared with the official U.S. Reports at GovInfo.
We keep the source’s spelling, capitalization and punctuation. A few obvious transcription defects in a source page, such as a word broken by a line-end hyphen, are corrected and listed in the “Sources and corrections” block of the affected page. We leave out signature blocks, counsel’s arguments and editors’ headnotes, and say so where it applies.
Each text carries a SHA-256 checksum that is tested on every build. A change to any word has to update its source record, so text cannot change unnoticed. A script re-fetches the sources and compares them to the published text.
The explanations
The plain-English summaries, section-by-section notes, context, terms and connections are written by Banaka with the help of AI writing tools, working from the primary sources and standard reference works listed on each page. They are meant to be useful even without the text beside them: they explain what a provision says, what it does today, what later amendments or decisions changed, and how it connects to other documents.
Automated checks run on every build. Any passage quoted from the text on the same page must appear in that text, each explanation must point to a section of the source, every relationship must resolve to a published page, and the two sides of a Federalist and Anti-Federalist pairing must link to each other. Citations may only point to an approved list of publishers.
Banaka takes responsibility for the accuracy of these pages. They have not been reviewed by a lawyer or a professional historian. The explanations describe what the texts say and how courts have read them, they do not predict how a court would decide a specific dispute, and they are not legal advice.
The quizzes
Each page has three to five questions with an explanation for every answer and a link back to the part of the text it tests. Scoring runs in your browser and nothing you answer is sent to a server. Answers are shown in the page itself, so the questions and explanations are readable even if JavaScript is off.
Neutrality and the ratification debate
We try to describe disagreement rather than settle it. When a constitutional question is contested, the page says so and names the leading decisions or arguments. Federalist and Anti-Federalist essays are presented as historical arguments, not as law, and the two series are numbered differently: an Anti-Federalist number is an editorial convention, not an official one, so each page names the actual essay and its author or pen name.
Report an error
If you find a mistake in a text, explanation or quiz answer, please tell us through the support page and include the page address. We correct confirmed errors promptly, and a correction changes that page’s last-updated date.
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