Do you need to find a copy of the U.S. Constitution? The Declaration of Independence? How about the Mayflower Compact or the Magna Carta?

• Many of the key historical documents related to American government can be found at the National Archives web site: www.archives.gov/exhibit_hall/charters_of_freedom/charters_of_freedom.html.
  
  
• Yale University provides online access to many of the documents that preceded the American constitution: www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/constpap.htm.
  
  
• The Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress provides an online copy of the Constitution that is annotated with relevant Supreme Court cases and commentary: www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/constitution/toc.html.

If you really want to get into the history of the American constitutional system, the Web offers a number of options:

• Congress established the National Constitution Center in 1988, and its web site is a good starting point for studying the U.S. Constitution: www.constitutioncenter.org/.
  
  
• A general online introduction to American constitutional history can be found at http://americanstrategy.org/foundations.html.
  
  
• An online history of the U.S. Constitution and its evolution can be found at http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/GOV/chap1.htm.
  
  
• Conflicts involving interpretations of the Constitution are reviewed at www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/home.html.

As an exercise, use a search engine such as Google to see how much you can find on the Internet about some recent constitutional issues. For example, you can focus on the impeachment process and its history. When President Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 and put on trial in early 1999, dozens of web sites appeared to help inform the public. Some of them have disappeared from the Web, but others remain. For example, questions about the impeachment process are answered at the American Bar Association education web site: www.abanet.org/publiced/impeach2.html. Can you find some other good sites that explain the impeachment process?

Another issue to explore is whether the electoral college should be changed. After the 2000 presidential election, a number of informative sites came online. For example, see the discussion about Fixing the Electoral College at http://electionreform.cc/page4.html.