The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

Pictures of the Bill of Rights

I was checking my site's traffic logs, and I noticed a lot of people are coming here on a search for "pictures of the bill of rights" or "bill of rights pictures". I suspect they're finding this site because of my entry with pictures of the Funeral for the Bill of Rights, but I imagine they're ending up disappointed (while being pleasantly surprised to find such a promising young activist like myself ;-)).

So I figured I'd give the people what they want, and hunt down some pictures of the Bill of Rights. All you random surfers, just remember who's got your back. (It's me -- Lance Brown, candidate for president in 2008.)

This page from the Library of Congress' America's Story collection has a version which is nice and authentic-looking -- which means it's pretty grubby and time-worn. Nice for that rustic feeling, but not great for reading.

This image from the National Archives looks to be the same as the one above, but lightened up considerably. Less rustic, slightly more viewable. Still can't read the small text though. The image is linked to from this "December 15th: Today in History" page, from the American Memory collections of the Library of Congress. All those source sites are great resources for historical documents and stuff, which is why I bother mentioning them all.

Here's a small one, also from the National Archives:

There is a high resolution image, which is huge and very detailed, and actually readable (although only a tiny portion of it fits on a screen at one time). It's 8 megabytes, which I think is the biggest .JPG file I've ever heard of. It'll take you over an hour on dial-up I think. With that warning in mind, here's a direct link to the image. You should probably right-click and do "Save Target As..." or whatever comparable function you have, unless you have a super-fast connection and you want to just pull it up in a browser window. That image is from this page -- the high-resolution image page of the National Archives "Charters of Freedom" collection, which I mention only because that same page has high-res versions of the Constitution (page 1, 2, 3, 4) and Declaration of Independence as well. (All those links also go to huge 8-10 MB .JPG images.)

Then of course a Google image search for "Bill of Rights" has about a zillion more versions and styles of Bill of Rights pictures to choose from, including other authentic-style ones like the ones above.

In my Google search, I discovered this really creative Bill of Rights flag image from Bangpound. The words of the Bill are in red, creating the stripes of the flag. It's for sale as a poster at Bangpound for 10 bucks. Very cool.