Quill Project and Utah Valley University launch ground-breaking model of the 1895 Utah State Constitutional Convention

NEWS |

The Quill Project launched a ground breaking model of the 1895 Utah State Constitutional Convention, on 11th April 2019 at the Utah Valley University (UVU) alongside its strategic partner, the Center for Constitutional Studies (CCS).

Pembroke Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Quill Project, Dr Nicholas Cole, spoke at the event which highlighted the project’s contribution to the study of constitutionalism.

For the last year and a half, under the oversight of Quill, CCS students have worked with digital records from the Utah State Archives, including the minutes of meetings, the convention journal, committee reports, and newspapers, to reconstruct the Constitutional Convention’s negotiation processes. Their work has shed new light on the relationship between state constitutions and the Federal union, while also demonstrating that the negotiation of state-level constitutional law was often a much more complicated affair than the creation of the Federal government.

The records of the 1895 Utah State Constitutional Convention have now been fully digitized and made available to the public for the first time. Understanding of the negotiation processes involved has been enhanced through detailed reconstruction of the debates and bespoke interactive visualisations, timelines, statistical analysis, search tools, commentaries, and other resources.

The remarkable commitment that CCS students have brought to the project has given them the chance to contribute to ground-breaking research and develop the skills set needed to become world-class historians.

This is Quill’s first state constitution project, following the publication of its flagship project on the 1787 Convention.  It has served to highlight the importance of this often-neglected area of US constitutional history. Two further projects are now under way in other states and a separate project on the Bill of Rights will also be launched later this year.