Informational Essay 1. Read the "Original Ten Amendments: The Bill of Rights" and familiarize yourself with
the concepts.
2. Complete the “Bill of Rights" chart: read the amendments again, summarize each one in
your own words, and write the application for at least five amendments. In other words,
the final column is an opportunity for you to state the amendment's relevancy or use in
today's world. For example, the first amendment protects American citizens' right to
practice whatever religion they want or a journalist's right to publish their opinion.
3. Review your chart, and choose the three most important or interesting amendments (to
you)
4. Write an essay focusing on those three amendments. Be sure to include some of the
amendment's official language (in quotations) and paraphrase other parts in your own
words. Include at least one way each amendment you chose is still relevant today in each
body paragraph.

Some of the State constitutions drawn up during the Revolution included bills of rights. The most famous and influential of these was Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason in 1776. (Mason also had a large hand in writing the Virginian Constitution at about the same time. Strictly speaking, the Declaration of Rights was not part of that constitution.) It is upon Mason’s Declaration of Rights that much of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution is founded. The principal author of the Bill of Rights, however, was James Madison.

All early Americans with any serious interest in politics knew something about the English Bill (or Declaration) of Rights of 1688. But, as in many other matters, American leaders tended to be influenced more by recent or colonial American precedents and example than by those from British history. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both earnestly supported the idea of a national bill of rights, and so did many other leading men.

We shall now examine those ten amendments, one by one, with a view to grasping their original purpose or meaning. For people of our time, the phrases of those amendments, like the phrases of the original Seven Articles of the Constitution, sometimes require interpretation. What did those words mean, as people used them near the end of the eighteenth century? One way to find out is to consult the first great dictionary of the English language, Samuel Johnson’s, published at London in 1775; or, later, Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). It is important to understand precisely, so far as possible, the meanings intended by the men (chiefly James Madison and George Mason) whose phrases are found in the Bill of Rights, because many important cases of constitutional law that affect millions of Americans are today decided on the presumed significance of certain phrases in the Bill of Rights. As the English jurist Sir James Fitzjames Stephen wrote in Victorian times, “Words are tools that break in the hand.” We therefore need to define the concepts which lie behind the words of the Bill of Rights.Explanation:

C. Odysseus does not want to reveal their only means of escape.

Explanation: