You might wonder why this site is called Understanding Our Freedoms. Well in addition to the understanding we can achieve OF EACH OTHER through good communication, the original inspiration for this site was the concept of making the most fundamental documents which the U.S. was founded upon UNDERSTANDABLE for everyone.

Since the majority of Americans have never even read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, let alone the Federalist Papers, I had the idea of removing the most fundamental barrier that prevents people from reading them... MISUNDERSTOOD WORDS. So while there are many sites that exist that have these documents available to be read, HERE you will find those documents with a special feature: Merely hover your mouse over the less commonly known words in the document (which you will find in bold as you read) and SURPRISE, an info balloon pops up giving you the exact definition of the word.

In this manner, I think we can get more and more people to become familiar with the foundations of our country, and we will all benefit from having more well-informed citizens participating in our democracy.

The concept of the importance of "word-clearing" anything you study is actually something discovered by L. Ron Hubbard in the 1960's. He investigated why it was that people have a hard time comprehending what they study, and found three primary "Barriers to Study". By far the most important of the three was misunderstood words. Factually, many common difficulties people encounter in study derive directly from misunderstood words.

Specifically, have you ever come to the bottom of a page and forgotten what you just read? Perhaps you attempted to "solve" this by re-reading the paragraph over and over to get it to "sink in". As you continued to read, you may have noticed yourself yawning over and over, though you weren't yawning before you started reading. You may have found yourself daydreaming while reading and having to pull your attention back to the page over and over. After a while, your eyes may have started to cross and you may have found yourself falling asleep. After this happenned over and over in a subject, you probably decided you didn't want to study that subject anymore.

The truth is that this cycle of mental and physical phenomena is caused by passing a word or symbol you do not understand. And it is not only the words that you KNOW you do not know, but also the words that make you pause when you read while you try to figure out the meaning. That is enough to cause all of the above symptoms, not to mention the confused ideas people walk away with when they "study" something without clearing up the words.

What I have done is essentially embed a glosssary in these documents. It is not a replacement for full and proper "word-clearing". If you would like to learn more about word clearing, or the other barriers to study, click here.

I hope this site opens up the door to more people READING and UNDERSTANDING these important documents.