Since my last blog post, I have been doing a lot of research on Magna Carta. Magna Carta is a charter that was drafted in 1215 by Britain’s King John in response to a group of barons asking for their rights to be documented in a legal form. Since then Magna Carta has influenced many governmental systems and documents around the world, including the United States Bill of Rights. The charter was not incredibly influential when it was first written, but since then it has become the basis for many important documents.
This week I have mainly been reading a lot of books and articles on the history of Magna Carta, but I have also started researching how Magna Carta has influenced the British government. Magna Carta’s influence on the British government was not as monumental as its influence on the founding of the United States government. This idea is going to form the base of my PowerPoint in which I plan to compare and contrast how and why these two differ. I have also been considering, and speaking with the director of the Center, about looking into how Magna Carta influenced other governments that had once been under English control; I think it will be interesting to see how Magna Carta influenced other English colonized countries.