About the archive
The Capture Cascade Ledger is a documentary archive of 4,288 verified events tracing the systematic capture of American democratic institutions. Methodology, sources, license, and how to contribute.
The Cascade Ledger is a structured, source-cited chronology of verified events tracing the systematic capture of American democratic institutions. It spans 1142 to the present and is maintained as a living research infrastructure — every entry is dated, cited, classified, and connected to the actors and capture lanes it touches.
The archive exists because patterns of institutional capture are easier to obscure than to document. What looks like isolated incidents in the daily news reveals systematic coordination when mapped chronologically against named actors, court records, and primary documents. This site is the data layer; the long-form analysis lives at The RAMM.
4,288 verified events · 7,682 actors · 6,239 tags · 1142–2026. Court records, government filings, and reporting from established outlets.
What’s in this section
The pages below document the editorial standards, sourcing, license, and contribution process behind the archive.
- MethodologyThe framework, editorial standards, importance scale, and capture-lane taxonomy used to classify every event in the archive.
- SourcesHow the archive classifies citations by reliability, what each tier requires, and how source quality maps to editorial status.
- ContributeHow to suggest events, flag corrections, and contact the editor. The archive is open source and version-controlled.
- License & attributionThe data is CC BY-SA 4.0. The code is MIT. How to cite the archive in journalism, research, and downstream datasets.