Founding Figures Laboratory

The Founding Figures Laboratory houses studies, teaching strategies, and curated primary sources that explore how numbers shaped the founding and early governance of the United States. It examines how early Americans used, and often struggled to use, enumeration, data collection, and quantitative reasoning in matters of taxation, representation, apportionment, and constitutional design. By focusing on the role of counting and calculation in the Revolutionary and Constitutional periods, the lab invites students, educators, and researchers to reconsider the American founding not just as a political or ideological event, but as a formative moment in the history of information and governance.

 

Contact Us

Edward J. Blum, Ph.D.
Project Director
Email: [email protected]