The first released was the Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA).  It included Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution (Elliot’s Debates), the first widely circulated published accounts of the ratification debates.  The Wisconsin Historical Society’s and the University of Wisconsin’s Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (DHRC) created a much more comprehensive collection of materials and analysis of that time period.  Distinguished American historian Pauline Maier wrote, “the DHRC lays the foundation for something of a revolution in our understanding of the ratification of the Constitution.” Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788. (xii).

BYU Law’s DHRC corpus, is created from selected 18^th century texts included in the DHRC and entries link back to the University Wisconsin Libraries’ hosted version of the complete works.  It is available both as a standalone corpus and will be integrated into COFEA.

The DHRC corpus represents over 17 times the primary source text available in Elliotts.  It represents additional authors and will expand the total amount of newspaper content available in COFEA.  This will increase the number of voices represented in COFEA, and it increases the overall quality of the text of COFEA.

Below is a list of indexed sources with links to their digital host files and where found, links to information about each author as listed on Wikipedia.

(Last updated 7/9/2026)