Imagine sitting in the Pennsylvania State House during the Constitutional Convention, watching as our founding fathers pulled together 13 diverse colonies into one United States of America – the first country in world history to be founded on the consent of the governed and that recognized the equal and inalienable rights of the people to whom they are accountable.
In this interview, you will hear how The Quill Project, founded by Dr. Cole, allows you to experience the creation of the country's most sacred blueprint, including the formation of a Bill of Rights. From Madison's agenda, to the debates between delegates; from the first few drafts, to the signatures on the final engraved parchment, the Quill software is "track changes on steroids for negotiated text", and you won't want to miss a conversation with the Founder of Quill himself.
Watch the interview on Hardwired's YouTube channel here: bit.ly/Coleinterview
Dr. Cole is a British historian of American history who created the Quill Project at Oxford University in England. He studies the political thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the history of democratic institutions. His particular interests are the influence of classical political thought on America's first politicians, and the search for a new 'science of politics' in post-Independence America. He runs the Quill Project on Negotiated Texts, based at Pembroke College, Oxford University, which studies the creation of constitutions, treaties, and legislation. The Quill software platform (developed with colleagues at the Oxford e-Research Centre) presents a recreation of the original context within which decisions about these texts were made. The flagship work of the project is a presentation of the records of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that wrote the Constitution of the United States. Dr. Cole teaches American History and the history of political thought and supervises graduates working on the history of institutions, political thought and classical reception. He runs the TORCH (Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) network on Negotiated Texts (http://torch.ox.ac.uk/negotiations).