Our Story

Our Story

From the beginning, FPP’s mission has been to participate meaningfully in America’s institutional life at the highest levels of leadership. Colonel Ronald D. Ray returned from Vietnam, a highly decorated US Marine, graduated from the University of Louisville law school and practiced law until the age fifty when he began First Principles with his wife Eunice and his research assistant Dr. Linda Jeffrey. 

The Ronald D. Ray Library of American History is a dynamic project of First Principles, Inc. that blends the best of the past with the promise of the future. The library aims to provide a resource as timeless as the Constitution and as forward-thinking as the Founding Fathers themselves. Through its unique combination of digitizing a large collection of historical books and documents, and applying AI technology, the library seeks to create an interactive experience where history comes alive. The library’s mission to promote an informed and engaged citizenry is more important than ever.

Here you will find the yield of Colonel Ray’s experience, training, and life’s devotion to his military oath to protect America from all “enemies both foreign and domestic.” His curated collection of 8,000+ history, government, and religion books are being scanned and digitized to preserve what he read, retrieved, and referenced throughout his life. As emerging artificial intelligence (AI) is being developed, we are working with experts in the field to train our own large language model (LLM) to search for answers only within the Colonel Ray’s book collection and archive.

In addition to his vast collection of books, Colonel Ray read five daily newspapers and assorted professional and academic journals which served as a “content analysis” tool for the work of First Principles, produced both in print and over broadcast, via radio and television. His collection of 40,000 documents in the FPP Archive serve as a time capsule from a period at the closing of one century and the beginning of a new. They are scanned and available to search through the FPP team who are ready to assist you in your research projects.

Over its 30 years, First Principles published and distributed works of enduring and historic significance and now is making those works available via AI search for Americans who want to inform themselves, their representatives, and all those in leadership positions at all levels of American society and government to uphold, support, and defend America’s founding and first principles.  

Colonel Ray passed away in 2020 and didn’t get to see the massive undertaking of scanning his beloved books and archive which begin in 2006. Likely, he could not have imagined the development of an AI “librarian” to search the books and provide historically grounded answers to future researchers. He no doubt would have delighted in knowing that there were those who would follow along equipped by his books and archive to serve alongside him as a watchman on the wall of America.