Inside the Vaults

Docs Teach strives to teach schoolchildren history through the use of primary source documents that are scanned and hosted on the National Archives website.

The First Federal Congress was the most productive law-making group in American history. The Project aims to publish and make more accessible the materials from the First Federal Congress.

The Discovering the Civil War exhibit showed some of the lesser-known records surrounding the American Civil War. These documents include personal testimony from soldiers and slaves, and drafts of some of the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution.

Chief of Reference at the National Archives Trevor Plante takes viewers inside the Archives vaults to see some of his favorite rarely-displayed documents. They include the original text of the "Virginia Plan," which proposed three co-equal branches of government; a printed copy of the Constitution with George Washington's handwritten annotations; the final printed copy of the Constitution; and the state of Pennsylvania's ratification copy of the Constitution, which is on one enormous sheet of parchment.