BGuthrie Photos: PA -- Philadelphia -- National Constitution Center

PA -- Philadelphia -- National Constitution Center:

Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.

Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon

underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.

Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.135.183.187 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.

Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]

[1] NCC_130414_002_STITCH.JPG

[2] NCC_130414_004_STITCH.JPG

[3] NCC_130414_005_STITCH.JPG

[4] NCC_130414_006_STITCH.JPG

[5] NCC_130414_007_STITCH.JPG

[6] NCC_130414_008.JPG	[7] NCC_130414_029.JPG	[8] NCC_130414_042.JPG
[9] NCC_130414_048.JPG	[10] NCC_130414_050.JPG	[11] NCC_130414_057.JPG
[12] NCC_130414_061.JPG	[13] NCC_130414_070.JPG	[14] NCC_130414_078.JPG
[15] NCC_130414_084.JPG	[16] NCC_130414_087.JPG	[17] NCC_130414_090.JPG
[18] NCC_130414_101.JPG	[19] NCC_130414_102.JPG	[20] NCC_130414_104.JPG
[21] NCC_130414_109.JPG	[22] NCC_130414_116.JPG	[23] NCC_130414_122.JPG
[24] NCC_130414_125.JPG	[25] NCC_130414_131.JPG	[26] NCC_130414_139.JPG
[27] NCC_130414_146.JPG	[28] NCC_130414_150.JPG	[29] NCC_130414_155.JPG
[30] NCC_130414_165.JPG	[31] NCC_130414_176.JPG	[32] NCC_130414_179.JPG
[33] NCC_130414_186.JPG	[34] NCC_130414_193.JPG	[35] NCC_130414_199.JPG
[36] NCC_130414_204.JPG	[37] NCC_130414_211.JPG	[38] NCC_130414_217.JPG
[39] NCC_130414_230.JPG	[40] NCC_130414_233.JPG	[41] NCC_130414_239.JPG
[42] NCC_130414_244.JPG	[43] NCC_130414_252.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. NCC_130414_084.JPG: How the Statues Were Made: The 42 life-like statues in this room were cast in bronze by artists at Studio EIS in Brooklyn, NY. They used numerous historical sources to create the most accurate likenesses possible. After gathering all known physical descriptions and portraits of the delegates, actors posed in period clothing so that the artists could make full body casts of each to create the poses you see in the room. Next the artists sculpted a detailed clay bust of each delegate's head. They applied wax to the clay surface, allowed it to harden and applied another layer of clay to create a mold. Then, using a method known as the "lost wax process," the wax was melted away and molten bronze was poured in its place. The artists then assembled bodies and heads onto a support, called an armature, and finished the joints by hand. Finally, they gave the bronze the polish you see today.
2. NCC_130414_193.JPG: Emancipation and Its Legacies: The end of slavery in the United States is the most important turning point in American constitutional, political, and social history. The legacies of emancipation will be with us forever, forcing us to face who we believe we are as a people. Conflicting Visions of the Future of the United States: 1850-1860: The 1850s began with a political compromise about the issue of slavery in the United States; the decade ended with a presidential election fought over whether the country would embrace a free-labor or slave-labor future. The Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision in 1857, declaring that African Americans could never be citizens and had no rights the nation need respect, ruined the best hopes of moderation and sectional peace. Few Americans could imagine how close emancipation loomed, in blood and sacrifice, on the historical horizon. For African Americans, however, that prospect was at the heart of their sense of birthright, their religion, and their political hope. The abolition movement began to attract moderate northerners after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It pledged that the federal government would recover slaves from their sanctuaries in the North, gave the people seized no legal recourse, and required civilians to assist in fugitive retrieval. Broadsides like "Read and Ponder" linked the fight to free slaves with the defense of democracy, denouncing a law that "disregards all the ordinary securities of PERSONAL LIBERTY, which tramples on the Constitution, by its denial of the sacred right of Trial by Jury." Beginning in the 1830s abolitionists attempted to garden broad support for the end of slavery by distributing broadsides to expose the brutality of the institution. "Slave Market of America" asserts that slavery violated the word of God, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. Born a slave in Maryland, Frederick Douglass escaped to New York in 1838 and remained a fugitive until his freedom was purchased from Hugh Auld in 1846 by a group of British friends. The transaction illustrated that slaves were property, profits from the sale of cotton and other cash crops produced by the labor of slaves created tremendous wealth for slaveholders. Even people without slaves such as northern mill owners and merchants profited from goods produced by slave labor.
3. NCC_130414_199.JPG: Hundreds of thousands of Americans read Uncle Tom's Cabin when it was published in 1852. The book crystallized the chasm between the beliefs of proslavery and anti-slavery ideology. Replying to an invitation to speak before a Scottish abolitionist group, author Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that she was publishing "a Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin containing all the facts & documents which confirm the story -- truth darker & sadder & more painful to write than the fiction was." In its 1857 Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had no constitutional right to exclude slavery from the territories and that black people possessed "no rights" protected by the Constitution. The Republican Party used the ruling to argue that a conspiratorial "Slave Power" endangered the rights of all American citizens. This exhibition was developed by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in partnership with the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and is curated by David W. Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of History at Yale University, and Susan F. Saidenburg, the Gilder Lehrman Institute. Abraham Lincoln had always hated slavery but hoped that prohibiting its extension would lead to its abolition. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, followed by the Dred Scott Decision, threatened that hope. Lincoln's notes for his famous "House Divided" speech in 1858 reveal his sense of the terrible choices that lay ahead: "A house divided against itself can not stand ... I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect... it will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it... or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the sates." A parody of the 1860 election, this cartoon highlights the impact of the Dred Scott decision on the campaign. Four presidential candidates dance with members of their constituency to a tune played by Dred Scott -- note Lincoln dancing with an African American woman, a reference to Democrats' claims that Republicans favored amalgamating the races.
4. NCC_130414_204.JPG: War and Fugitive Slaves: 1861-1862: In the wake of Abraham Lincoln's election, seven Southern slaveholding states seceded from the Union. Four more border slave states of the upper South seceded after the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861. When the Civil War began, both the United States and the Confederate States sought a war of limited aims that did not address the question of slavery. The Lincoln administration's policy, "denial of asylum," provided that escaped slaves be returned to "loyal" Union slaveholders. But military events, abolitionists activists, and especially the volition of slaves themselves undermined the official stance. As waves of blacks moved toward Union lines, the word "contraband" entered American language as the symbolic and legal name for the wartime escaped slave. With increasing pressures for or against emancipation on both sides, the scale and purpose of the war rapidly changed. More than 80 percent of eligible voters participated in the election of 1860, one of the highest turnouts ever. Ten Southern states did not list Lincoln on the ballot, and the Democrats had split, North and South. The election results reflected the divisions in the nation: Lincoln won all the electoral votes from every Northern state but New Jersey, gaining a majority of 180 electoral votes even though he attracted less than 40 percent of the popular vote. Jefferson Davis, who became president of the Confederacy, argued that the war was about states' rights as well as the need to protect slavery. In January 1861, he wrote: "The temper of the Black Republicans is not to give us our rights in the Union, or allow us to go peaceably out of it. If we had no other cause, this would be enough to justify secession, at whatever hazard." Lincoln publicly asserted on July 4, 1861, that the Union entered the war to preserve the republic in his Special Message to Congress: "This is essentially a People's contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men."
5. NCC_130414_211.JPG: Americans understood that the war to save the Union was a war that would determine their futures. Jacob Dodson, a free black man, wrote to Secretary of War Simon Cameron in 1861, noting that more than 300 African Americans in Washington City wanted to enlist in the Union Army, but Cameron declined their offer as a matter of Union policy. "I desire to inform you that I know of some three hundred... reliable colored free citizens of this City who desire to enter the service for the defence of the City." -- Jacob Dodson to Secretary of War Simon Cameron, April 19, 1861 "this Department has no intention at present to call into service of the Government any colored soldiers" -- Cameron's response to Dodson, April 23, 1861 "Before morning I had begun to feel that I had truly escaped from the hand of the slave master... I never would be a slave no more." -- John Washington, remembering his first night of freedom along the Rappahannock River, 1862 As the US Army crossed into the South, thousands of slaves fled plantations to freedom behind Union lines. Once they reached the military, they formed camps and often found work with the Army as teamsters, cooks, and laundresses. When a Confederate slaveholder demanded that Union General Benjamin Butler return three slaves who had escaped into Fort Monroe, Virginia, in June 1861, Butler refused. Since slaves had been used to build Confederate fortifications, Butler announced they were subject to confiscation as "contraband of war."
6. NCC_130414_217.JPG: Emancipation: 1863: On September 22, 1862, President Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. He gave the Confederates until January 1, 1863, to lay down their arms and return to the Union, or he would announce freedom for most of the enslaved people in the Confederacy. In the final Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order rich in its military, political, and moral meanings, Lincoln declared that slaves in the "states in rebellion" "are and henceforth shall be free." It took time, enormous bloodshed in so many battles to come, and the bravery of hundreds of thousands of blacks themselves to make this document, and the events that flowed from it, one of the greatest turning points in American history. The Emancipation Proclamation was a carefully crafted legal document in which President Lincoln, as commander in chief, justified emancipation as a military act against the states in rebellion. Effective on January 1, 1863, the Proclamation redefined the war's purpose: the restoration of the Union and the end of slavery. Emancipation remained a temporary wartime measure until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1863. Americans react to the Emancipation Proclamation: "... not more than one soldier in a hundred that I see but that is utterly opposed to the emancipation proclamation." -- Wallace [Southgate], 12th Vermont Militia, from Fairfax Court House, Virginia, to R.W. Southgate, January 18, 1863 "How is the Proclamation to be inforced? Through fields of blood 'and carnage sounding in death groans,' for the rebels never will surrender their long lived institution." -- Amos Lewis, a Union civilian in Wisconsin, to Seth Lewis, January 16, 1863 "Iff it is glorious to enlist the oppressed it is ceartainly doubly so to be privelidged to lead them against their oppressors." -- William Brunt, Union captain, December 2, 1863 During 1861, Frederick Douglass criticized President Lincoln for not making war on slavery and not enlisting blacks in the Army. After the Emancipation Proclamation, Douglass and other black leaders toured the country recruiting African Americans to "join in Fighting the Battles of Liberty and the Union."
7. NCC_130414_230.JPG: Many Union soldiers doubted the bravery and ability of the new black troops. The extraordinary personal courage of African Americans under fire helped change Northern white opinion. In July 1863, the 54th Massachusetts led a bloody and unsuccessful assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. The 54th Massachusetts sustained devastating losses -- 281 dead, missing, and wounded of 650 men. Hannah Johnson was the daughter of an escaped slave whose son was fighting in the famed 54th Massachusetts Infantry. She wrote to President Lincoln urging him to treat the men fairly. "I am a colored woman and my son was strong and able as any to fight for his country and the colored people have as much to fight for as any... I have but poor edication but I never went to schol, but I know just as well as any what is right between man and man.... I know that a colored man ought to run no greater risques than a white, his pay is no greater his obligation to fight is the same." -- Hannah Johnson to Abraham Lincoln, July 31, 1863 After the Emancipation Proclamation authorized African Americans to serve in the Union Army, enlisted blacks played a critical role in freeing former slaves. Sergeant Major Christian A. Fleetwood, 4th US Colored Troops, valiantly defended the American flag at the Battle of Chapin's Farm, Virginia, in 1864 and was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1865. In March 1864, Fleetwood described an expedition in Virginia that brought in 502 contrabands: "I had the pleasure of depriving our southern brethren of over fifty contrabands, four or five horses, with carts, wagons &c. five or six ox teams and carts, and a considerable part of their good temper. For all of which I am truly thankful." -- Christian Fleetwood to "Mother Gibbs," March 31, 1864 Racist policies persisted despite the courage demonstrated by black troops. Some officers refused to command black soldiers at all. In contrast, General William Birney, superintendent of black enlistment, urged legislation to equalize the treatment of US Colored Troops. "The legislation needed for the U.S. Colored Troops is: 1. Equalization of pay. 2. Freedom of the wife & children of each enlisted man. What a shame for the Government to allow the wives & children of its soldiers to be slaves! 3. Permanency of this branch of the service. An officer in the USCT risks more than any other. He ought to have a permanent commission and be made an officer of the regular service." -- William Birney, Union general stationed in Maryland, to John A. J. Creswell, December 27, 1863
8. NCC_130414_233.JPG: The Process of Emancipation: 1864-1865: Across the South and on the rivers and ocean waves, in the last two years of the Civil War, everywhere the Union Army and Navy gained control slavery was slowly destroyed, liberating black people from centuries of thralldom. Approximately 500,000 to 600,000 slaves attained the security of Union lines, a contraband camp, or some garrisoned town by 1865. They embraced and created their own freedom in countless ways, and many suffered enormously to do so. More than 700,000 Americans, white and black, died as the conflict transformed from a war for either Union or Southern self-determination into a war for or against slavery. Frederick Douglass had demanded an "abolition war and an abolition peace." Whether the shattered nation could fulfill the promise of those lofty words remained to be seen. Newly freed slaves faced severe hardships. In this letter, the Western Sanitary Commission informed President Lincoln that many in the Mississippi Valley were lacking provisions, clothing, bedding,a dn cooking supplies. To meet the emergency, Commission members volunteered "to prevent or lessen the sufferings of the coming winter and spring." This print depicts a joyous reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in an African American home. The Confederacy fiercely rejected the Emancipation Proclamation. The Confederate government resolved to deny black soldiers the protections offered white prisoners of war, treating them all as fugitive slaves and therefore property. "And 'resolved, That Congress shall approve the action of the Executive in refusing to entertain any proposition for treating their own recaptured Negroes otherwise than as the property of those from whom they were abducted by the enemy, and to whom the laws require their restoration." In this diary excerpt from the summer of 1864, Private William Woodlin of the 8th US Colored Troops proudly described the bravery of the black troops under fire in the trenches south of Richmond, Virginia. "... we came to the 4th line on the New Market road where our brigade made a charge one at a time but they were repulsed. our Regt leaving 65 men in all the 7th lost three whole Co's. captured. We held our position that night but the Johnnies made a furious attack on the 30th three times but were repulsed with great loss: by the colored troops of the 10th & 18th Corps."
9. NCC_130414_239.JPG: Placed in segregated regiments, blacks received lower pay than white soldiers. The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment refused to accept any wages until May 1864, when the government passed a bill mandating equal pay for black soldiers. In this strongly worded letter Francis Fletcher, a member of the 54th, condemned the US government for discriminating against black troops. "Just one year ago to day our regt was received in Boston with almost an ovation... in that one year no man of our regiment has received a cent of monthly pay all through the glaring perfidy of the U.S. Gov't ... All the misery and degradation suffered in our regiment by its members' families is not atoned for by the passages of the bill for equal pay." By the end of the Civil War, roughly 200,000 black men enlisted in the US military and made up 10 percent of the Union Army. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war -- 30,000 of infection or disease. The brave soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts had sustained the heaviest loss -- 281 men, killed, missing or wounded. This photograph of former slaves in New Orleans was sold in the North to fund "the education of Colored People in the department of the Gulf." The image demonstrated that slavery was not solely a matter of color. The Senate had passed the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery in April 1864, but it had failed in the House. Fearing that the Emancipation Proclamation, as an executive order, could be overturned in the courts, Lincoln launched an effort to persuade Congress to pass the amendment. It was ratified by the states in 1865. "At the last session of Congress a proposed amendment... failed for lack of the requisite two thirds vote in the House of Representatives. Although the present is the same Congress, and nearly the same members, and without questioning the wisdom or patriotism of those who stood in opposition, I venture to recommend the reconsideration and passage of the measures at the present session." An amendment to the Constitution of the United States: "Article XIII. Sec. 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Sec. 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
10. NCC_130414_244.JPG: The Legacy of Emancipation: Civil War to Civil Rights, 1865-1964: In his Second Inaugural Address in March 1865, President Lincoln declared that "somehow ... all knew" that slavery had been the war's essential cause, and emancipation one of its great results. But the Reconstruction years and beyond would fundamentally challenge just how much "all" accepted these results. With the South crushed, the Rpeublican-controlled Congress enacted the Fourteenth Amendment (enshrining birthright citizenship and equal protection of the law) and the Fifteenth Amendment (guaranteeing the rights to vote for all men regardless of race). Emancipation led to this revolutionary transformation of the Constitution. Since the 1860s, we have never stopped debating the meanings and extent of the amendments, and history suggests that we likely never will. With economy of words, speaking transcendently to history, and with a religious tone, President Lincoln explained the Civil War -- its cause, its character, and its immediate consequences. Though he hoped to "bind" the "nation's wounds," Lincoln declared for all time that "this mighty scourge of war" was rooted in slavery. "One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves... These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war... Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toll shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, and true and righteous altogether." At the end of the war, on the ground in the devastated South, Union soldier William Allison captured the chaos brought on by emancipation. Freed slaves searched for loved ones and asserted claims to their labor, to their time, and soon to their civil and political rights. Former slaveholders struggled between acquiescence and defiance. "The negro question is not yet settled, and the South is now experiencing the evil effects of it. A lady who had suffered from these refractory freed men exclaimed a pack of tigers in our midst.' I told her that perhaps her former ill-treatment of them had made them tigers, and that now she must reap as she had sowed." -- Sgt. William Allison in Danville, Virginia, to Stockton Bates, May 19, 1865 The Radical Republicans in Congress, among them Senator Charles Sumner, opposed President Andrew Johnson's plan for rapid and lenient Reconstruction by presidential means. They supported a longer, harsher reconstruction under Congressional control. In 1866-1868, Congress locked horns with Johnson in an unprecedented constitutional and political struggle to determine the meaning and future of emancipation and the nation itself. Sumner states in an October 1866 speech: "Let the President prevail, & straightway the plighted faith of the Republic will be broken; -- the national creditor & the national freedman will be sacrificed; -- the Rebellion itself will flaunt its insulting power... the rebel region will be handed over to misrule & anarchy." -- Charles Sumner, Notes from a speech on Reconstruction and the South, October 10, 1866
11. NCC_130414_252.JPG: The Fourteenth Amendment represents the most immediate and enduring legacy of emancipation in American constitutional law. Section 1 enshrines birthright citizenship, the "due process of law," and "equal protection of the laws" into the Constitution. Since 1866, interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment have been omnipresent in debates over American law and our definitions of a civil society. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and 1868 mandated black male suffrage in the former seceded states, leading to the election of African American men to political office. This stimulated the rise of white terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, dedicated to destroying black and Republican political activity. This menacing notice targeted a black Republican recently elected sheriff in Georgia. The Khan committed hundreds of murders and wounded and tortured several thousand people before it was temporarily all but destroyed by federal troops in the 1870s. "To Jeems, Davie, you must be a good boy... I am Ku Klux sent here to look after you and all the rest of the radicals and make you know your place. I have got my eye on you every day..." The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909 by black and white activists, became the early twentieth century's most prominent civil rights organization. Its research division kept careful statistics on lynching, mob murders, and ritual executions predominantly committed against African Africans. This broadside was distributed to encourage support of federal anti-lynching legislation. This placard was carried by Memphis sanitation workers striking for equitable wages in April 1968. The declaration "I Am a Man" echoed the famous anti-slavery slogan, "Am I not a man and a brother." This poster demonstrates that by the late 1960s the Civil Rights Movement had entered a crucial and volatile stage of economic activism and rising demands for political equality. On August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. In this excerpt King challenged his audience, the nation, and the world to recognize that the goal of black equality, one hundred years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, remained unfulfilled. "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice... But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination."
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: National Constitution Center
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The National Constitution Center is the first and only nonprofit, nonpartisan institution devoted to the United States Constitution and its legacy of freedom. Located on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, Pa., the Center serves as an interactive museum; a hub of civic education; and a national town hall for constitutional dialogue, regularly hosting government leaders, journalists, scholars, and celebrities for public discussions including presidential debates. The Center houses the Annenberg Center for Education and Outreach, which offers civic learning resources both onsite and online.

The groundbreaking ceremony, attended by President Bill Clinton, was held on September 17, 2000—213 years to the day after the original Constitution was signed. The National Constitution Center officially opened its doors on July 4, 2003, joining other historic sites and iconic attractions in what has been called "America's most historic square mile" because of the proximity to historic landmarks such as Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, officiating at the opening ceremonies, said, “The Constitution Center and Independence Hall, together with the Liberty Bell, form a place that every American should visit. It will contribute each and every day to the reinforcement of the basic principles that bind us together as a nation and a people.”

About

The National Constitution Center was created by the Constitution Heritage Act in 1988. Approved on September 16, 1988, and signed by President Ronald Reagan, the act defined the National Constitution Center as “within or in close proximity to the Independence National Historical Park. The Center shall disseminate information about the United States Constitution on a non-partisan basis in order to increase the awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.”

The Center is located at 525 Arch Street—an address specifically chosen because May 25th (5/25) was the date that the Constitutional Convention began in Philadelphia in 1787 as shown in Timeline of drafting and ratification of the United States Constitution.

The architectural firm of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners designed the National Constitution Center. Critic Witold Rybczynski of The “New York Times” wrote, “Quiet but assertive, respectful of its surroundings, considerate of its public, this building is destined to take its place among the nation's leading public monuments.”

Ralph Appelbaum Associates designed the Center’s visitor experiences and exhibition hall. The total square footage of public space is 160,000 square feet, including galleries. The Center contains 75,785 square feet of exhibit space. The Center is made of American products, including 85,000 square total square footage of public space is 160,000 square feet, including galleries. The Center contains 75,785 square feet of exhibit space. The Center is made of American products, including 85,000 square feet of Indiana limestone, 2.6 million pounds of steel, and a half-million cubic feet of concrete.

Main Exhibition

The museum’s main exhibition features three primary attractions, which are intended to engage both adults and children:

Visitors start their museum experience at Freedom Rising, a 17-minute, 360-degree theatrical production narrated by a live actor in the Kimmel Theater. The production traces the American quest for freedom and creates a stirring environment in which visitors come to see themselves as a force in the life of the Constitution and the Constitution as an ongoing force in the lives of American citizens. After viewing the performance, former First Lady Laura Bush said, “I found Freedom Rising so moving I wanted to weep at the end of it. I want to encourage people to come here.”

The Story of We the People, in the Richard and Helen DeVos Exhibition Hall, is an interactive exhibition highlighting the history of the Constitution through more than 100 hands-on and multimedia exhibits. Visitors also can take part in free educational activities led by the Center’s staff.

Exhibition highlights include:

A copy of the Emancipation Proclamation

The chance to recite the Presidential Oath of Office on camera

A genuine, 20th-century jury box

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s Supreme Court robe

The American National Tree exhibit, featuring touch screens which tell the stories of 100 Americans – a few of them well known, but most of them unheralded – whose actions have influenced constitutional history

Signers’ Hall is a stylized evocation of the Assembly Room in the Pennsylvania State House (today called Independence Hall) where the signers of the Constitution met on September 17, 1787. The room is occupied by life-sized bronze statues of 42 men: the 39 delegates who signed as well as the three who dissented. Extensive research was conducted to make the statues as lifelike and accurate as possible. Visitors have the opportunity to sign their names alongside the 39 signers.

Feature Exhibitions

In June of 2013 the National Constitution Center debuted The 1968 Exhibit. It brings one of America’s most colorful, chaotic, culture-shifting years vividly to life, The 1968 Exhibit illuminates the power of “We the People” to exercise and expand our freedoms. Visitors are able to travel through 12 exhibition areas corresponding to the months of the year—as well as three lounge spaces (bean bag chairs included) inviting playful interaction with 1968’s most enduring and influential music, movies, fashions, and more. Whether you remember the year personally or discovered Hendrix online, The 1968 Exhibit will rock you.

Highlights include:

Awe-inspiring artifacts such as an actual Bell “Huey” helicopter used by the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War
Icons of space exploration, including a full-size replica of the Apollo 8 command module
The vibrant Music Trip Lounge, with rock-star memorabilia like original concert tickets, posters, and autographs; and an opportunity to design and share your own groovy album cover
An immersive environment—utilizing authentic news footage and oral histories—that recreates the buzz and tumult of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, both on the streets of Chicago and the floor of the convention hall

In May, 2013 the Center announced that as part of a landmark agreement between the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and The New York Public Library, that the National Constitution Center will display one of the 12 surviving copies of the Bill of Rights starting in fall of 2014. The Center—the museum of “We the People”—will be the first institution in Pennsylvania to exhibit this rare, original document to the general public. Many of the rights and liberties Americans cherish—such as speech, religion, and the right to a fair trial—were not enumerated in the original Constitution drafted at the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 but were included in the first 10 amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791. In displaying this historic document for “We the People,” the Center will provide visitors of all ages with a better understanding of the Constitution, the essential freedoms it protects, and its enduring relevance in our daily lives.

Civic Education

Through its Annenberg Center for Education and Outreach, the National Constitution Center offers onsite and online civic education programs as well as a study center that develops and distributes teaching tools, lesson plans and resources. Thanks to a grant from The Annenberg Foundation, the Center has become a national resource on Constitution Day.

In September 2006, the Center helped launch Constitution High School, a college preparatory, city-wide admission school and “the only Philadelphia School District high school whose theme is Law, Democracy, and History.” According to the school’s website, Constitution High School is “a unique collaboration among the School District of Philadelphia, the National Constitution Center and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History” and aims to “develop the next generation of engaged citizens and civic leaders in government, public policy, and law.”

Public Engagement

As a national town hall, the Center has welcomed former presidents, Supreme Court justices, journalists, pundits, scholars and entertainers at political discussions and book events. Among the numerous high-profile guests who have appeared at the Center are Presidents Barack Obama, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Vice President Dick Cheney; First Lady Laura Bush; Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan; Newt Gingrich; Karl Rove; Donna Brazile; and distinguished journalists including Tavis Smiley, Gwen Ifill, Tina Brown, Andrea Mitchell, and Tom Brokaw. The Center has hosted several debates, including a 2008 Democratic presidential primary debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama , a town hall meeting with Senator John McCain, and a 2006 Pennsylvania Senatorial debate between Republican incumbent Rick Santorum and Democratic challenger Bob Casey.

Liberty Medal

In 2006, the Center became the home of the Liberty Medal, an annual award established in 1988 to recognize those “men and women of courage and conviction who strive to secure the blessings of liberty to people around the globe.” Liberty Medal recipients have included George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Bono, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Steven Spielberg, Tony Blair and Dr. Robert M. Gates.

NCC and Presidents

Former President George H.W. Bush served as chairman of the Center’s Board of Trustees beginning in 2007; it is the only organization of which Bush served as chairman. His successor, Bill Clinton, has served since 2009.

On March 18, 2008, Senator Barack Obama delivered a speech on race issues entitled "A More Perfect Union" at the Center, while campaigning for the presidency.

The National Constitution Center hosted then-Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Pennsylvania presidential primary debate on April 16, 2008.

Interesting Facts

Two days after the Constitution was signed, the document’s full text was printed in a local newspaper, ‘’The Pennsylvania Packet & Daily Advertiser’’. A rare copy of this first public printing of the Constitution is housed at the National Constitution Center, in an alcove adjacent to ‘’Signers’ Hall’’. The Center received its copy of the first public printing of the Constitution on September 11, 2001.

The U.S. flag hanging in the Center’s Grand Hall Overlook has traveled around the country and flown over every state and territory capitol. Before the Center’s official opening, it was hung at the Center by Muhammad Ali in a Flag Day ceremony on June 14, 2003.

It took 18 months and 50 artists to produce the 42 bronze statues of the Founding Fathers in ‘’Signers’ Hall’’.

In the Media

“At the other end of the mall sparkles a modernist jewel of America's civic life, the National Constitution Center” – George Will, ‘’The Washington Post’’

“Since opening in 2003, [the National Constitution Center] has put forward a vision of constitutional history both left and right have embraced.”—’’The New York Times’’

“The National Constitution Center has established itself as one of the city’s cultural celebs, attracting a million visitors a year, putting pizzazz into civic and educational offerings, hosting blockbuster exhibitions, and attracting the nation’s intellectual cognoscenti and media elite like bears to honey.”—’’The Philadelphia Inquirer’’
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].