expansion of his doctoral dissertation. According to Ames, he had returned from his travels in Europe too late in the year to find a teaching assignment and decided to spend the ensuing months writing and researching instead. Ames' 400-page opus marked the first exhaustive catalog of proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution ever compiled. Ames personally visited a large number of state and federal offices to record the details of the thousands of amending resolutions that had been proposed during the preceding hundred years. In discussing his research, Ames concluded that many of the amendments had failed as they were "cures for temporary evils ... were trivial or impracticable ... [or] found a place in that unwritten constitution that has grown up side by side with the written document". He also opined that the majorities required for ratification of amendments were so large as to create "insurmountable constitutional obstacles" to amendment, a frequent criticism leveled during the Progressive Era. A review of the volume in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science concluded it was "a laborious and painstaking piece of work". The Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States During the First Century of Its History earned Ames the American Historical Association's Justin Winsor Prize. It was reprinted in 1970. Other works Other works by Ames included John C. Calhoun and the Secession Movement of 1850, Slavery and the Union 1845–1861, and The X.Y.Z. Letters, the latter of which he authored with John Bach McMaster. Ames also edited a volume of State Documents on Federal Relations, a multi-issue compendium of state legislative documents pertaining to the U.S. government. Archival preservation At the turn of the 20th century, the American Historical Association (AHA) undertook a nationwide effort to examine repositories of manuscripts and archival documents, and make specific recommendations for their future preservation. The initiative was partly influenced by Ames' advocacy of German historical methodology, learned during his year in Europe, which placed special emphasis on primary documentary sources. At the behest of the AHA, Ames spent several weeks in Harrisburg in 1899, examining Pennsylvania's state records, which were poorly organized and largely scattered across various state offices. He co-authored, with historian Lewis Slifer Shimmel, a report on their status, and in 1900 filed a separate report on the state of the Philadelphia municipal archives. Their report concluded that over the years Pennsylvania's public