About the Project

The Amendments Project (TAP) is a searchable archive of the full text of nearly every amendment to the U.S. Constitution proposed in Congress between 1789 and 2022 (more than 11,000 proposals); records of petitions introduced in Congress between 1789 and 1949 that propose, support, or oppose constitutional amendments (more than 9,000 petitions); and thousands of proposed amendments that never made it to Congress. The congressional proposals come from congressional records. The petitions are extracted from the Congressional Petitions Database.1 Other records come from everything from party platforms to online petitions. We have tagged these records with a set of topics developed by the Comparative Constitutions Project for its sister site, Constitute. The project received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and Harvard's Inequality in America Initiative.

Only twenty-seven amendments to the U.S. Constitution have ever been ratified; the Amendments Project is, then, an archive of failures. Yet the failures matter, both to the historical record, and to ongoing constitutional reform.

The U.S. Constitution can be altered by formal amendment, as outlined in Article V of the Constitution, and also by changing meaning and shifting interpretation, especially that provided by decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Proposed amendments are very unlikely to meet with success but there are other reasons than ratification to pursue this path. Members of Congress very often introduce proposed amendments for political purposes: sending a message to their constituents, say, or altering the direction of a political debate, or influencing pending legislation, or advancing a campaign being fought outside the halls of Congress. In some cases, “failed” amendments have been more consequential, in American political discourse and even in the nation's constitutional order, than ratified ones.

The Amend data includes not only amendments formally introduced in Congress but also all those that were instead advanced in newspapers and pamphlets, in party platforms, at political conventions, in presidential papers and, in the twenty-first century, on the Internet, in formats that include social media campaigns and online petitions through venues like change.org. TAP aims to be as comprehensive as possible and has the particular objective of “constitutionalizing” proposals made by people who were disenfranchised—the enslaved, many immigrants, other people of color and, until 1920, women. Those ideas include, for instance, amendments discussed at “Colored Conventions,” available through the digital Colored Conventions Project; proposals made during women's rights conventions; proposals made in foreign-language American newspapers such as The Chinese-American; and collections of Tribal Constitutions. 

PROJECT HISTORY

Started in 2021, the project was developed between 2022 and 2024 with the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Projects for the Public Prototyping Grant.

At the cessation of funding in 2024, the project ceased its work.

In 2026, the website was converted to a static site, and data and content are no longer updated.

FOOTNOTES

1. Blackhawk, M., Carpenter, D., Resch, T. and Schneer, B. (2021), Congressional Representation by Petition: Assessing the Voices of the Voteless in a Comprehensive New Database, 1789–1949. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 46: 817-849. https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12305