So the effort was to place Magna Carta in an American context as a charter of fundamental rights (or, one might say, the rights of 13th-century English barons) known to have inspired this country’s founding fathers. The Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process, the exhibit informs us, is a “direct descendant” of Magna Carta’s declaration, “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice.”

Having decided to construct a fully American exhibit around Magna Carta, it was obvious to the archives staff that the story had to be an evolutionary one. Alice Kamps, one of the five in-house curators who put the exhibit together under the direction of the archivist, David S. Ferriero, explained this to me when I called the archives after my visit. Magna Carta was written by and for “landed barons, noblemen who were a very small part of the population,” Ms. Kamps said, and by the same token, it was only “white, property-owning Americans” who fully enjoyed the rights granted by the new Constitution. The goal of the exhibit, she explained, was to show how people have used law to claim rights, and also to show the conflict that these claims engendered along the way. Evolution, the exhibit demonstrates, has not been a straight-line progression. The curators see the story as “inspiring, not discouraging,” Ms. Kamps said.

The exhibit makes good use of technology, with a long, table-height touch-screen that permits people to dig deeper into the archives’ collections on the topics covered. But there’s nothing like seeing an original document. Those on display are wonderfully eclectic, varied enough to offer different gee-whiz moments to different visitors. Here were mine:

From the women’s rights section -- a pamphlet put out by the War Department in 1943, urging employers to hire women to fill employee ranks depleted of men. These were the inducements that this government pamphlet described:

“Women are pliant -- adaptable.”

“Women are dexterous -- finger-nimble.”

“Women are good at repetitive tasks.”

“Women can be trained to do almost any job you’ve got.”

The security guard standing nearby looked up when I laughed out loud, her face a stoic mask.

In the fascinating section on immigration, which chronicles how immigrants have been alternately welcomed, exploited, admired and despised, there is a newsletter published in one of the Pacific Northwest detention camps in which Japanese-Americans were confined during World War II. The “news” reported in the June 5, 1942, edition of the “Evacuazette” was breathtaking in its banality, but at the same time deeply touching in its effort to claim some semblance of normal community life: a screening of the movie “Sun Valley Serenade” had to be postponed because of a faulty projector.

Finally, again in the women’s rights section, there is a draft of the bill that became Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the foundational federal law that prohibits employment discrimination. As originally introduced, the bill referred to race and religion, but said nothing about sex. Famously, a conservative Virginia Democrat, Rep. Howard W. Smith, chairman of the House Rules Committee, added sex to the list of protected categories as an amendment from the floor. The copy in the exhibit shows, in Mr. Smith’s handwriting, the notation “after the word religion insert the word sex.” The commentary explains that “historians still debate his motives.”

Oh no, they don’t, I said to myself. The received wisdom, at least as I always heard it, was that the congressman, no friend of civil rights, added sex as a poison pill, a killer amendment by which he hoped to sink the whole enterprise. I made myself a note to do some research on this point when I got home. To my surprise, I found several articles in the academic literature that cast doubt on the conventional wisdom and plausibly made Mr. Smith’s motives out to be at least ambiguous. So I learned something -- as will anyone who visits this complex and engaging exhibit. I’m not sure what Chief Justice Burger would have made of it. But I think Justice Marshall would have come away satisfied. Flag-waving and bell-ringing can grow old, but the Constitution as a work in progress is, and will remain, a story worth telling.