Source Documents

Go read it yourself. Bills, statutes, regulations, rulings — primary sources, no interpreter.

Search the Federal Record

Full text, straight from GovInfo, the Federal Register, and the eCFR. Federal only — no state, no commentary.

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The Founding Documents

The charters themselves, the arguments that produced them, and the law as it stands today. Every link goes to an official or archival full-text source.

The Charters

The founding instruments, as ratified, from the National Archives.

1776Declaration of Independence Full transcript. The original argument for why a government forfeits its claim to obedience. 1787The Constitution All seven articles, verbatim transcript of the signed document. 1791The Bill of Rights Amendments I–X, plus the two proposed articles that were not ratified. 1795–1992Amendments XI–XXVII Everything added since, with ratification dates. LIVINGConstitution Annotated Clause by clause, annotated with every Supreme Court case interpreting it. Maintained by the Library of Congress. 1777Articles of Confederation The first attempt. Worth reading to understand what the Constitution was reacting against. 1787Northwest Ordinance Governance of the territories, and the first federal prohibition of slavery in them. NARAAmerica’s Founding Documents The National Archives hub — high-resolution images of the originals.

Antecedents & the Argument

What the framers were reading, and the fight over ratification.

1215Magna Carta The original at the British Library, with full translation. Where “no free man shall be seized…” comes from. 1297Magna Carta — U.S. Copy The 1297 exemplar held by the National Archives, with translation and history. 1689English Bill of Rights Direct ancestor of the American one — arms, petition, cruel and unusual punishment. 1720–23Cato’s Letters Trenchard & Gordon’s 144 essays on liberty, tyranny and free speech — the most widely read political writing in colonial America. Half the founding era’s pseudonyms are borrowed from these pages. 1776Virginia Declaration of Rights George Mason’s draft. Madison borrowed from it heavily fifteen years later. 1787–88The Federalist Papers All 85 essays, full text, indexed by number and by constitutional clause. Library of Congress. ANTI-FEDThe Founders’ Constitution University of Chicago. Both sides of every clause — Federalist and Anti-Federalist — sourced document by document. 185,000+Founders Online Every surviving paper of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Franklin. Searchable. National Archives. YALEThe Avalon Project Yale Law School’s archive of law, history and diplomacy documents from antiquity forward.

The Law As It Stands Today

What is actually binding right now. Check the site’s claims against these.

STATUTEUnited States Code All 54 titles of permanent federal law, current through the last enacted public law. REGULATIONCode of Federal Regulations The eCFR — every agency rule with the force of law, updated daily. DAILYFederal Register Proposed rules, final rules, notices and executive orders — the day they publish. LIVEThe Floor Record Every bill this Congress has actually voted on — status, roll-call tallies and full history, straight from the official record. CONGRESSCongress.gov Bill text, sponsors, amendments, roll-call votes, committee action. Official legislative record. SCOTUSSupreme Court Opinions Slip opinions as released, by term, direct from the Court. GPOGovInfo The Government Publishing Office archive — authenticated PDFs of nearly every federal document. NARANational Archives Catalog Scanned federal records, hundreds of millions of pages. Searchable. EXECUTIVEPresidential Actions Executive orders, proclamations and memoranda as issued.

The Economists

The case for free markets, from the people who made it. Free full texts where they exist — the rest belong on your shelf.

1776The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith. Published the same year as the Declaration. The invisible hand, the division of labor, and why planners can’t out-think a price. 1850The Law Frédéric Bastiat. Seventy pages on legal plunder — what happens when the law stops protecting property and starts redistributing it. Read it in an afternoon. 1946Economics in One Lesson Henry Hazlitt. The seen and the unseen — every economic fallacy in politics today is debunked somewhere in this book. 1944The Road to Serfdom F. A. Hayek. Why central planning drifts toward tyranny regardless of who’s planning. Free condensed edition; the full book is in print everywhere. 1949Human Action Ludwig von Mises. The full treatise — economics built up from individual choice. The deep end of the pool, free in its entirety.

IN PRINTCapitalism and Freedom Milton Friedman, 1962. Economic freedom as the precondition for political freedom — school choice, occupational licensing, the volunteer army. Still in copyright; any library or bookstore has it.

1980Free to Choose Milton & Rose Friedman. The complete ten-part PBS series, free to stream. The book of the same name is in print.

IN PRINTBasic Economics Thomas Sowell, 2000. Economics with no graphs and no jargon — scarcity, prices, trade-offs. The single best starting point on this shelf.

The Libertarian Canon

The philosophy underneath the politics — self-ownership, consent, and the limits of state authority.

1689Second Treatise of Government John Locke. Natural rights, property, and government by consent — the Declaration of Independence is substantially a paraphrase of this book. 1849Civil Disobedience Henry David Thoreau. What a free person owes an unjust law: nothing. Gandhi and King both worked from this essay. 1859On Liberty John Stuart Mill. The harm principle — over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. 1870No Treason Lysander Spooner. The most radical document on this page: the Constitution binds nobody who didn’t sign it. Disagree if you can.

IN PRINTAtlas Shrugged Ayn Rand, 1957. The novel of the producers going on strike. Love it or hate it, more people came to these ideas through this book than any other.

1973For a New Liberty Murray Rothbard. The libertarian manifesto — the full program applied to courts, roads, police, education. Free in its entirety. 1974Anatomy of the State Rothbard’s short one — what the state is, what it is not, and how it maintains itself. An hour’s read.

IN PRINTAnarchy, State, and Utopia Robert Nozick, 1974. The academic heavyweight — the minimal state defended against both the anarchist and the redistributionist. Written to answer Rawls; it did.

Read the Opposition

This site tells you to read primary sources. That includes the ones this site thinks are wrong. Read them yourself — unabridged, uninterpreted — and decide.

1848The Communist Manifesto Marx & Engels, full text. The most consequential pamphlet ever printed. Note what it promises, then check the ten-point program against what actually got built. 1867Das Kapital, Vol. I Marx’s full economic argument — the labor theory of value and all. The economists two shelves up spent a century answering it; here’s what they were answering.

The Watchlist

The other kind of primary source. Films and series that saw it coming, dramatized the record honestly, or simply told the truth without a narrator. Go watch it yourself — every title links to its full entry.

Before Its Time

Fiction that called it early. Watch the year on the badge, then look around the room.

2006Idiocracy Mike Judge’s comedy about a dumbed-down consumer republic. It was a flop in 2006 and a documentary by now. 2008WALL·E Pixar handed a kids’ movie a mega-corp that swallowed the government, a planet buried in its own consumption, and humans reduced to screen-fed blobs on floating chairs — then shipped it the year before the smartphone finished the job. 2014Ex Machina Alex Garland’s chamber piece on artificial intelligence, consent, and the man who’s certain he owns the thing that’s smarter than he is. 1985Brazil Terry Gilliam’s bureaucratic nightmare. A clerical typo condemns an innocent man and the paperwork never once blinks. 1976Network “I’m as mad as hell.” It predicted outrage-as-ratings, news-as-entertainment and the whole feedback loop — fifty years early. 1997Gattaca A genetic caste system where your DNA is your résumé and your cage. Written before the first human genome was even sequenced. 2002Minority Report Pre-crime, predictive policing, and ads that call you by name. We built most of it within fifteen years. 2006Children of Men A soft apocalypse of checkpoints, migrant cages and managed decline. It looks less like science fiction every year. 1998The Truman Show A man’s entire life as surveilled, monetized content — a decade before everyone volunteered for it.

History, Dramatized

Real events, dramatized with care. Start here, then go check them against the record upstairs.

1976All the President’s Men Watergate as shoe-leather reporting. Two reporters, a parking garage, and the slow unwinding of a cover-up. 2006The Lives of Others The surveillance state from inside the listening room — a Stasi officer and the writer he’s bugging. The best film ever made about being watched. 2017The Death of Stalin Armando Iannucci plays a real succession crisis as farce. Hilarious right up until you remember every bit of it happened. 2004Downfall The last twelve days in the bunker, in German, without flinching. The definitive dramatization of a regime eating itself. 1966A Man for All Seasons Thomas More against a king who only wants a signature. Conscience versus the state, argued all the way to the scaffold. 2000Thirteen Days The Cuban Missile Crisis from inside the room, where the species came within one order of ending. 2015Bridge of Spies “Would it help?” A Cold War lawyer insists an enemy spy still gets the rule of law. Based on the real Abel–Powers exchange.

The Long Format

Series that earn the hours — the stories too big for two.

2002The Wire Five seasons on how institutions — police, unions, schools, press, city hall — grind people down while protecting themselves. The great American novel happens to be on television. 2019Chernobyl “What is the cost of lies?” A state’s reflex to lie meets a reactor that won’t. As much about the machinery of denial as the meltdown. 2001Band of Brothers Easy Company from jump training to the Eagle’s Nest. About as close to the record as dramatized war gets. 1967The Prisoner “I am not a number.” A spy resigns and wakes in a cheerful village he can never leave. Paranoid, allegorical, and decades ahead of itself. 2011Black Mirror An anthology’s worth of near-future what-ifs about the tech in your pocket. The best episodes land closer to home every year. 2004Deadwood A mining camp with no law inventing law from scratch — property, contracts and order emerging out of profanity and mud. Spontaneous order, filmed.

The Documentaries

No actors, no script. Which doesn’t mean no angle — watch them the same way you’d read anything else here.

2003The Fog of War Robert McNamara, architect of Vietnam, delivers eleven lessons and an old man’s reckoning. Errol Morris just lets him talk. 2014Citizenfour Edward Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel room as the story breaks in real time. The surveillance dispatch, filmed live. 2010Inside Job The 2008 crash, followed all the way up the money. It names names and makes them sit there. 2005Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room How a fraud that enormous stayed invisible for so long — and exactly who knew. 2012The Act of Killing Indonesian death-squad leaders cheerfully reenact their own murders for the camera. There is nothing else like it, and you won’t forget it. 2017Icarus Starts as one man’s doping experiment, turns into a state-sponsored conspiracy thriller he never went looking for. 2005Grizzly Man Herzog on a man who moved in with wild bears and misread every signal to the end. On respecting an animal enough to know it is not your friend. 2003The Corporation Puts the legal fiction of corporate personhood on the couch and diagnoses it. Watch it against the free-market shelf upstairs and argue with both. 2008Food, Inc. Pulls the curtain back on industrial agriculture — the handful of corporations behind the corn, the meat and the seed, and the lobbying that keeps the lights off. Big Corn, on the record.

The War Record

War without the recruiting-poster gloss. The ones veterans point to when they say “that’s what it was actually like.”

2025Warfare Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland rebuild one 2006 Ramadi firefight in real time, from the memories of the men who were in it. No score, no arc — just the hour. 1985Come and See A boy walks into the German liquidation of Belarus and comes out the other end unrecognizable. The most honest anti-war film ever made, and the hardest to sit through. 2001Black Hawk Down Mogadishu, 1993. A snatch-and-grab that was supposed to take an hour and didn’t. Close to the Bowden book and closer to the chaos. 1981Das Boot A German U-boat crew, mostly bored and occasionally terrified, in a steel tube that wants to become a coffin. The definitive submarine film. 2006Letters from Iwo Jima Eastwood films the same battle as Flags of Our Fathers from the losing side, in Japanese. The enemy turns out to be men writing home. 1977A Bridge Too Far Operation Market Garden, told as the expensive failure it was. A rare war epic willing to end in defeat because that’s what happened.

Revolution & Civil War

The founding and the fracture, dramatized with care. Watch these, then go read the documents upstairs and check the dialogue against the record.

2008John Adams HBO’s seven parts on the least glamorous founder — the lawyer who defended the redcoats and then argued the country into existence. The founding as hard, unglamorous work. 2000The Crossing Washington’s desperate Christmas gamble at Trenton, 1776, when the whole revolution was one frozen river from collapse. 1989Glory The 54th Massachusetts, the first Black regiment of the Union, from muster to the assault on Fort Wagner. Built from the real Shaw letters. 1993Gettysburg Three days in July 1863, adapted from Shaara’s The Killer Angels. Chamberlain on Little Round Top is worth the whole four hours. 2012Lincoln Not the war — the vote. Spielberg and Kushner on the grubby horse-trading that got the Thirteenth Amendment through the House. Democracy as sausage-making.

The Deep State

Not the tinfoil kind — the documented kind. Whistleblowers, cover-ups, and the machinery that runs whether you voted for it or not. Cross-reference the shelf upstairs.

2009The Most Dangerous Man in America Daniel Ellsberg leaks the Pentagon Papers, from the source. The Vietnam lie and the man who broke it, in his own words. 2014Kill the Messenger Gary Webb reports the CIA’s tolerance of Contra cocaine and gets destroyed for it. The story of what happens to the reporter, not just the story. 2019Official Secrets A GCHQ translator leaks the memo asking Britain to help fix the UN vote for the Iraq war. Based on Katharine Gun, who was right and prosecuted anyway. 2019The Report One Senate staffer spends years documenting CIA torture while the agency fights to bury it. The paperwork war behind the redactions. 2017The Post The Washington Post’s decision to print the Pentagon Papers and dare the government to stop it. The First Amendment as a coin-flip in a boardroom. 1997Wag the Dog A spin doctor and a Hollywood producer fake an entire war to bury a presidential scandal. It came out a month before the Lewinsky story broke and the real bombs started falling. Satire with terrible timing.

Big Money & the Whistleblowers

Big tobacco, big pharma, big oil — and the handful of people who read the memo and refused to shut up. Some of them paid for it. Read the corporate shelf upstairs, then watch what it costs a human being.

1999The Insider Jeffrey Wigand tells 60 Minutes that the tobacco companies knew, and the network spikes its own story. Michael Mann on what happens to a man between the truth and the lawyers. 1993Barbarians at the Gate James Garner as F. Ross Johnson, betting RJR Nabisco on a smokeless cigarette nobody wanted, then setting off the biggest leveraged buyout of the era. Tobacco money and Wall Street greed in one farce. 2005Thank You for Smoking A tobacco lobbyist who can argue anything to anyone, played for laughs until you notice the argument works. The best film ever made about the professional manufacture of doubt. 2000Erin Brockovich A legal clerk with no credentials and no quit runs down Pacific Gas & Electric for poisoning a town’s groundwater with hexavalent chromium. Every check written was real. 1983Silkwood Karen Silkwood, a Kerr-McGee plutonium worker, gets contaminated, turns whistleblower, and dies in a car crash on the way to meet a reporter. Cher and Meryl Streep on a death the record never fully explained. 2019Dark Waters A corporate defense lawyer switches sides and spends twenty years proving DuPont knew its Teflon chemical was in nearly everyone’s blood. Based on Rob Bilott’s actual case files. 2007Michael Clayton A law-firm fixer and an agrochemical giant that knew its weedkiller was killing people. Fiction, but every beat of the cover-up is drawn from life. “I am not the guy you kill. I’m the guy you buy.” 2021Dopesick Purdue Pharma manufactures an epidemic one falsified sales pitch at a time, from the boardroom down to the coal-country clinic. Adapted from Beth Macy’s reporting on the OxyContin machine. 2012Promised Land A natural-gas man arrives to buy up drilling rights in a struggling farm town and discovers his own company wrote the playbook against him. Matt Damon and John Krasinski on the fracking pitch. 2024Landman Billy Bob Thornton fixing problems in the West Texas oil patch for Taylor Sheridan, where the money, the danger and the bodies are all real and nobody upstairs wants to hear about any of them.

Ruby Ridge & Waco

Two standoffs, three days apart in the record, that rebuilt a generation’s distrust of federal force. The best of these are minute-by-minute reconstructions, not dramatizations.

2017Ruby Ridge PBS American Experience rebuilds the 1992 siege from court transcripts and the surviving family’s own account. The gold standard — no narrator’s thumb on the scale. 1997Waco: The Rules of Engagement The Oscar-nominated documentary that put the government’s own footage and hearings on the record. It changed how the mainstream understood the fire. 2018Waco The 51-day siege dramatized from books by both an FBI negotiator and a Branch Davidian survivor — two men who were actually there, on opposite sides of the wire. 2023Waco: American Apocalypse Netflix’s three-part cut leans on newly surfaced footage and FBI negotiation tapes. The most complete video record assembled to date.

9/11: The Warnings Ignored

The attack, and the turf wars that let it through. The record shows the pieces were on the table before the towers came down.

2018The Looming Tower The FBI and the CIA spend the years before 9/11 hoarding intelligence from each other while al-Qaeda assembles the plot in plain sight. Adapted from Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer account of the bureaucratic knife-fight that missed the warning. 2006United 93 Paul Greengrass rebuilds the one hijacked flight where the passengers, not the government, mounted the only effective defense that morning. Told in near real time, with air-traffic controllers playing themselves. 2004Fahrenheit 9/11 Michael Moore’s broadside at the administration’s response, the Saudi connections, and how a frightened country got walked into two wars. The polemic that defined the decade’s argument.

What the Response Cost Us

After the towers, the machinery turned to torture, rendition, and indefinite detention. These are the films built from the paper trail.

2012Zero Dark Thirty Kathryn Bigelow’s decade-long hunt for bin Laden, and the interrogation scenes that forced a public reckoning over what “enhanced” actually meant. The Senate later disputed that torture produced the lead. 2019The Report A Senate staffer spends five years buried in six thousand pages proving the CIA’s torture program was both brutal and useless — then fights his own government to publish it. Adam Driver as the man who wouldn’t let it stay classified. 2021The Mauritanian Mohamedou Ould Slahi is held at Guantanamo for fourteen years without charge and never tried. Adapted from the diary he wrote inside the wire, redactions and all.

Homegrown

The bombers who came from inside, and the manhunts — some heroic, one that framed the wrong man — that chased them.

2017Oklahoma City PBS American Experience traces the straight line from Ruby Ridge and Waco to Timothy McVeigh and the Murrah Building — the largest act of domestic terror in American history. Barak Goodman lets the record draw the connection. 2017Manhunt: Unabomber The FBI profiler who cracked Ted Kaczynski by reading his prose, over the objections of a task force that wanted a different suspect. The rare procedural that turns forensic linguistics into a thriller. 2021Ted K Kaczynski alone in his Montana cabin, in his own words, before the manhunt caught up. Sharlto Copley plays the man the manifesto came from. 2019Richard Jewell The security guard who found the bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and saved lives — then got railroaded by the FBI and the press as the prime suspect. Clint Eastwood on how the system convicts the innocent by leak.

The Experiments

The programs the government ran on its own people — and the ones it would rather you filed under fiction.

2017Wormwood Errol Morris reopens the 1953 death of scientist Frank Olson, who went out a hotel window days after the CIA dosed him with LSD under MKUltra. Part documentary, part reenactment, all cover-up. 2009The Men Who Stare at Goats Played for laughs, but the First Earth Battalion — the Army’s real program to weaponize psychic powers — was taxpayer-funded and declassified. From Jon Ronson’s reporting on what the Pentagon actually paid for.

The Long Fight — Feminism & the Vote

A century of women arguing, marching and litigating their way to full citizenship — and the backlash that fought them the whole way. Watch it, then check it against the record upstairs.

2004Iron Jawed Angels Alice Paul and Lucy Burns drag American suffrage into its militant phase — picket lines, prison, hunger strikes and the force-feedings that finally shamed Wilson into the 19th Amendment. 2015Suffragette The British fight told from the foot soldiers, not the leaders. “Deeds not words” — and the price the working women who lived it actually paid. 2017The Divine Order Switzerland didn’t grant women the federal vote until 1971. A quiet village reckons with it — a reminder of how recent all of this really is. 2020Mrs. America The ERA and the woman who killed it. Cate Blanchett’s Phyllis Schlafly against Steinem, Abzug, Chisholm and Friedan — the movement and the backlash in one frame. 2020The Glorias Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander play Gloria Steinem across a lifetime of organizing, from the road to the podium. 2018On the Basis of Sex A young Ruth Bader Ginsburg argues the case that began pulling sex discrimination out of American law, one precedent at a time. 2018RBG The documentary companion — how a soft-spoken litigator became the most unlikely icon on the Court. 2014She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry The raw founding years of the modern movement, 1966–1971, told by the women who were in the room. 2022Call Jane The underground network that arranged abortions in the years before Roe, dramatized through one woman who stumbles into the work. 2022The Janes The documentary record of that same Chicago collective — the women who ran an illegal clinic and dared the police to stop them.

The Grand Sweep — History Documentaries

The story of us, told at length and with a narrator. Epics and Ken Burns marathons that trade the two-hour arc for the whole arc.

2010America: The Story of Us The literal title — twelve parts from the first colonies to the modern day, the whole national story in one sweep. 1990The Civil War Ken Burns’ nine-part masterwork that invented the genre. Letters home, still photographs and Shelby Foote’s drawl. Still the gold standard. 2017The Vietnam War Burns and Lynn Novick, ten parts and eighteen hours, told from every side of the war at once. The definitive account. 1973The World at War Twenty-six hours of the Second World War narrated by Laurence Olivier, built from the testimony of the people who fought and survived it. Never bettered. 2014The Roosevelts Burns on Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor — one family threaded through half a century of the American century. 1994Baseball Burns uses the national pastime as a lens on race, money, labor and the country itself. Nine “innings,” not episodes. 2001Jazz The music as American autobiography — Armstrong to Ellington to Coltrane, and the country that made and mistreated them. 2009The National Parks Burns on the radical notion that the most beautiful land should belong to everyone — and the fights it took to keep it. 2011Prohibition How the country talked itself into banning alcohol and what it cost — the original lesson in unintended consequences. 2012The Dust Bowl The worst man-made ecological disaster in American history, told by the last people who lived through it. 1996The West The Burns-produced saga of the frontier — the myth and the far uglier record underneath it. 2005Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond’s big thesis on screen: why history broke the way it did, and why geography got there first.

Primary sources only. If a claim on this site can’t be traced back to a document here, treat it as unverified.