Context: Article Five of the United States Constitution describes a process that allows for alteration of the federal Constitution. So far, 27 amendments have been fully added to the federal Constitution but there have been a lot of proposals that didn’t make it through. This dataset contains information about a whopping 11,797 Constitutional amendments that have been proposed to Congress from 1787 to 2014! Content: This dataset consists of 11,797 rows with 17 fields and was compiled by NARA volunteers that transcribed information from written records that were issued by Congress. Because a lot of the information comes from written records, the dataset may not be a complete record of all amendment proposals. Proposals before 1973 were taken from various government publications and proposals after 1973 are publicly available on https://www.congress.gov. 1. Identifier: Unique code generated by NARA that serves as a unique identifier. 2. Source_code: Code generated by NARA that represents the government publication or website where the information was transcribed. 3. Source_citation: Bibliographic citation of the government publication or website from which the information was transcribed. 4. Source_index_number: An index number listed within the source publication. 5. Title_or_description_from_source: Title or description of the proposed amendment, transcribed from the source publication or website. 6. Date_approximation: When the date is estimated, the term includes “circa”, otherwise it is left blank. 7. Year: Year that the amendment was proposed in Congress (YYYY format). 8. Month: Month that the amendment was proposed in Congress (blank if unknown). 9. Day: Day that the amendment was proposed in Congress (blank if unknown). 10. Congress: The number for the congress in which the amendment was proposed. 11. Congressional_session: The number or designation of the session of Congress in which the amendment was proposed. 12. Joint_resolution_chamber: The chamber of Congress in which the amendment was proposed. 13. Joint_resolution_number: The number assigned to the proposed amendment by Congress. (Amendments are submitted as joint resolutions) 14. Sponsor_name: The name of the member of Congress or group who proposed the amendment. (Blank if unknown). 15. Sponsor_state_or_territory: The U.S. state or territory represented by the amendment’s sponsoring member of Congress. 16. Committee_of_referral: The committee to which the amendment was referred for further consideration, following formal introduction to Congress. 17. Last_modified: the timestamp of the most recent modification made on the data contained within the particular row. Acknowledgements: The National Archives and Records Administration created this dataset as part of the Amending America initiative. To prepare for the 2016 "Amending America" exhibition at the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C., NARA volunteers and staff transcribed and edited over 11,000 entries representing proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as recorded by Congress. http://www.archives.gov/amending-america Inspiration: This is an interesting dataset because it contains a lot of history that isn’t necessarily reflected in the Constitution. You could use it to glean insight into the political climates at different times in the history of the United States. For instance, what kind of amendments were being proposed during the Civil War? Who proposed the most amendments? Historically, have there been more proposals during any particular time of year?