Federalist Reader - Read the Federalist Papers as 1787 newspapers
by•
All 85 Federalist Papers as the newspaper serial they originally were: period typography, a clean reader mode, short companion notes, and an email subscription that delivers one paper a week, or each on the anniversary of its original 1787–88 date.
Replies
The anniversary email timing is such a cool touch. One thing I'd love is a small "context map" at the start of each paper showing where it falls in the broader argument between Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, so I can follow the back-and-forth across weeks instead of reading each one in isolation.
@mutugantan82154 Thank you! Fun twist in the actual history: the back-and-forth wasn't between the three of them. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay wrote as a single voice, "Publius," and coordinated so tightly that historians still argue over who wrote about a dozen of the essays.
The real sparring partners were the Anti-Federalist writers (Brutus, Cato, Federal Farmer), publishing rebuttals in the same New York papers, sometimes the same week.
But the need you're pointing at is real. Hamilton actually laid out the plan for the whole series in Federalist No. 1, so a small "where we are in the argument" marker on each paper is doable. It's going on the list. (The themed guides and the notes on each paper cover some of this today, but a per-paper map would be better.)
Longer-term dream: pairing papers with the Anti-Federalist essays they were answering, so you really can follow the fight across the weeks. But that is going to take some work. The Anti-Federalist papers aren't nearly as well defined and came out in a myriad of ways. Sometime! Thanks for the push.
love how the period typography actually makes these feel like i am reading a 1787 paper rather than a modern website. the anniversary-based email subscription is a really thoughtful touch too.
@tansut69872 Thank you! That's exactly the feeling I was chasing. The look and feel got an honestly embarrassing share of the total hours. The type is IM Fell English and Caslon, self-hosted, with the period ligatures and the long-œ "FŒDERALIST" heading intact. I decided against some of the more period typography elements, like S's that look like f's, as they made it difficult to read.
And you might have spotted another detail: the aging is unique to every paper. Each of the 85 gets its own wear fingerprint generated from its paper number at build time - its own edge nicks, its own corner softness, and about two in three sheets have a lifted corner. No two papers match, but the wear is stable. No. 10 looks like No. 10 on every visit, like a real sheet that's been sitting in the same drawer. Compare the corners of any two papers sometime.
Glad the anniversary program landed too. The season opens October 27, the same day it did in 1787.
Still not as nice as having physical copies (the originals! ... or the reproduction ones that LetterJoy produces), but I think a lot better than the generic text you get from other sites.
The period typography really makes these feel like I'm reading the actual papers, not a modern rewrite. Love that the notes are short enough to stay out of the way.
@kezibannkbe Thank you!
The fonts took real experimentation. The gazette is set in the IM Fell types (English for the titles, the DW Pica text cut for the essays) and I tried a surprising number of options and variants before landing there. Honest admission: it's not strictly period-accurate. A 1787 New York paper would most likely have been set in Caslon (which I did use for the intro page, about page, etc.). The Fell types are actually older, seventeenth-century Oxford. But on a screen, Fell's worn letterforms give the feel of reading a historical document in a way clean Caslon never did. And the per-paper aging leans into the same effect (I put a lot of work into that too!). I chose the feeling over the footnote.
And if the styling ever tires your eyes, Reader mode resets everything in modern Caslon (still a nice callback to the original type). The notes stay short for the same reason: reading and thinking about the argument is the whole point. And there are other great scholarly works which are worth pursuing for someone truly dedicated to the details of the constitutional debate - I want to amplify them, not compete with them!
Love that you're preserving the original serial feel rather than just dumping text on a page. One idea: add a small toggle to compare Hamilton's or Madison's other writings side-by-side when one of their papers comes up, since authorship matters so much in a few of the later essays.
@enesseliml13127 Thank you - this is a great rabbit hole. The authorship question is very real. Hamilton and Madison both later claimed some of the same essays, and it stayed unsettled for about 175 years, until Mosteller and Wallace's 1963 statistical study tipped the disputed dozen toward Madison using function words alone. The tells are: Hamilton wrote "while," Madison "whilst." And Hamilton sprinkled "upon" everywhere. In Madison's essays the word is nearly absent.
Right now every paper is marked certain, joint, or disputed, and the notes flag the contested ones. See Federalist No. 51 and the companion note, "Commonly attributed to James Madison; authorship disputed." There are other sources that dig into this kind of detail far more heavily. Thinking of ways to link to them or surface their info here, but don't want to distract from the main purpose... getting people to read the papers!