Writing It All Down: The Art of Constitution Making for the State and the Nation, 1776-1833

Archives of Maryland Documents for the Classroom
Maryland State Archives
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Suggested Reading List

Bowen, Catherine Drinker. The Lion and the Throne. The life and Times of Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634). Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1956, especially pp. 482-503. [Bowen provides a well-written, if possibly over-dramatized, account of Coke's role in preparing the Petition.]

Constitutional Convention Commission. Constitutional Revision Study Documents. Baltimore: King Brothers, Inc., 1968..

Dumbauld, Edward. "State Precedents for the Bill of Rights." Journal of Public Law, 7 (1958): 323-344.

Foster, Elizabeth R. "Petitions and the Petition of Right," Journal of British Studies 14 (1974), 21-45.

Friedman, Dan. "Tracing the Lineage: Textual and Conceptual Similarities in the Revolutionary-Era State Declarations of Rights of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware." Unpublished.

Guy, J. A. "The Origin of the Petition of Right Reconsidered," The Historical Journal 25 (1982), 289-312.

Howard, A. E. Dick. The Road from Runnymede. Magna Carta and Constitutionalism in America. Charlottesville: The Univesity Press of Virginia, 1968.

[Johnson, R.C., M.F. Keeler, M.J. Cole, and W. B. Bidwell, eds.,] Commons Debates 1628, III, 627-34; IV, 1-186 passim, esp. 181-86, for the Petition of Right.

Lewis, H. H. Walker. The Maryland Constitution of 1776. n.pl., n.pub., 1976.

Morgan, Edmund S. Inventing the People. The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988.

On p. 25, n. 14, Morgan cites the most recent references for the proceedings in Parliament on the Petition of Right as well as recent scholarly comment. He writes that "The manner of presenting the Petition of Right and of the king's response to it were subjects of intense discussion in the Commons. The consensus seems to have been against presenting the petition as a bill but insisting on the king's answering it in Parliament, in such a way that the courts would be obliged to honor it. Onuf, Peter, ed. Maryland and the Empire, 1773. The Antilon-First Citizen Letters. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

This debate between the leading Constitutional Lawyer in Maryland, Daniel Dulany, Jr., and the future Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence from Maryland, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, centers on the colonial interpretation of the Petition of Right. Papenfuse, Edward. "The `Amending Fathers’ and the Constitution: Changing Perceptions of Home Rule and Who Should Rule at Home," in The South’s Role in the Creation of the Bill of Rights. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1991, pp. 51-75.

Papenfuse, Eric Robert. "Maryland’s Five Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787" in Maryland: Unity in Diversity. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1990, pp. 39-49.

Revised introduction from Papenfuse, Edward C. and Gregory A. Stiverson, eds. The Decisive Blow is Struck. A Facsimile Edition of the Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of 1776 and the First Maryland Constitution. Annapolis: Hall of Records Commission, 1977.

Relf, Frances Helen. "The Petition of Right." The University of Minnesota Studies in the Social Sciences, Number 8 in Bulletin of the University of Minnesota, December 1917. [The standard work on the Petition of Right.]

Rutland, Robert Allen. The Birth of the Bill of Rights. 1776-1791. rev. ed. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983.

Stiverson, Gregory. "Maryland’s Antifederalists and the Perfection of the U.S. Constitution." Maryland Historical Magazine, 83 (Spring 1988): 18-35.

Young, Michael B. "The Origins of the Petition of Right Reconsidered Further," The Historical Journal 27 (1984), 449-52.

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The Documents for the Classroom series of the Maryland State Archives was designed and developed by Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse and Dr. M. Mercer Neale and was prepared with the assistance of R. J. Rockefeller, Lynne MacAdam and other members of the Archives staff. MSA SC 2221-04. Publication no. 3918. © 1993 Maryland State Archives.

For further inquiries, please contact Dr. Papenfuse at:
E-mail: edp@mdarchives.state.md.us
Phone: MD toll free 800-235-4045 or (410) 260-6401

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