Our leaders swear to uphold it, and our military to defend it. It is the blueprint for the shape and function of government itself and what defines Americans as Americans. But how many of us truly know our Constitution? The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation uses the art of illustrated storytelling to breathe life into our nation's cornerstone principles.
The trials of the American Revolutionary War revealed the many flaws of the United States’ first constitution, The “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.” The Articles granted each state the right to veto any action, meaning that any action taken under the Articles could be canceled out by a single state. This situation made it necessary to create a new Constitution. Now the far-seeing forefathers who founded the United States faced the problem of creating a document that would not only satisfy the rebellious colonists but would lay out the nation’s path for the future.
Many reference works offer compilations of critical documents covering individual liberty, local autonomy, constitutional order, and other issues that helped to shape the American political tradition. Yet few of these works are available in a form suitable for the classroom, and traditional textbooks overlook these topics. The American Republic overcomes that knowledge gap by providing critical original documents revealing the character of American discourse on the nature and importance of local government, the purposes of a federal union, and the role of religion and tradition in forming America's drive for liberty. Bruce Frohnen is an Associate Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University College of Law.
The U.S. Constitution: A Very Short Introduction explores the major themes that have shaped American constitutional history--federalism, the balance of powers, property, representation, equality, rights, and security. Informed by the latest scholarship, this book places constitutional history within the context of American political and social history. We do not operate today under the same Constitution created by our founding fathers or the Constitution as completed by the Bill of Rights in 1791 or even the one revised by the Reconstruction amendments. Nor are we the same nation. As our circumstances have changed, so has our Constitution.
Most Americans are unaware of how tumultuous and improbable the drafting and ratification process was for the Constitution. Based on prodigious research and told largely through the voices of the participants, Michael Klarman's The Framers' Coup narrates how the Framers' clashing interests shaped the Constitution and American history itself. Definitive and authoritative, The Framers' Coup explains why the Framers preferred such a constitution and how they managed to persuade the country to adopt it. We have lived with the consequences, both positive and negative.
A true-life suspense story, The Summer of 1787 takes readers into the sweltering room in which delegates struggled for four months to produce the flawed but enduring document that defined the nation, then and now.
Original Intents fully explains the political, economic, and constitutional ideas of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison as their thinking developed from the American Revolution through the early 1790s. It shows how their ideas developed and changed as they engaged with each other and eventually began to have serious debates and arguments. The book shows that there is no single original meaning or intent in the Constitution and that Hamilton sought to build a republican United States that was completely incompatible with the republic that Jefferson and Madison wanted. By the early 1790s, the two Virginians had come to despise Hamilton and detest his vision, the feelings he fully shared about them, and their values and ideas.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian serves as a guide to the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, providing historical contexts and offering interpretive commentary.
Forrest McDonald, widely considered one of the foremost historians of the Constitution and the early national period, reconstructs the intellectual world of the Founding Fathers--including their understanding of law, history political philosophy, and political economy, and their firsthand experience in public affairs--and then analyzes their behavior in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in light of that world. No one has attempted to do so on such a scale before. McDonald's principal conclusion is that, though the Framers brought a variety of ideological and philosophical positions to bear upon their task of building a "new order of the ages," they were guided primarily by their own experience, their wisdom, and their common sense.
Methods of Interpretation: How the Supreme Court Reads the Constitution examines the various methodologies the Supreme Court, and individual justices, have employed throughout history when interpreting the United States Constitution. Rather than attempting to set forth an overall theory of constitutional interpretation or plunge into the never-ending scholarly debate over interpretative theory, Lackland H. Bloom Jr. focuses exclusively on what the Court and individual justices have done and said about constitutional interpretation in the course of deciding constitutional cases. He identifies many of the best, and a few of the worst, examples of particular interpretative methodologies, as well as the best examples of explicit discussions of constitutional interpretation by the Court and individual justices. Professor Bloom focuses particularly on the Supreme Court's approach to constitutional interpretation since it is the Court that sets the standards. Although commentators may have the final word on what constitutional interpretation should be, he argues that the Court essentially has the final word on what it actually is.
The exact phrase, 'state of nature,' was used thousands of times in the British colonies between 1630 and 1810, in juridical, theological, medical, political, economic, and other senses. From the plurality of meanings, a distinctive American state-of-nature discourse started to emerge by the 1760s. It combined existing European and American semantic ranges and sidelined others in moments of intense contestation, for instance during the 1765-66 Stamp Act crisis, and the 1774 First Continental Congress. This text examines how the increasingly distinct and coherent American state of nature came to justify independence at least as much as colonial formulations of liberty, property, and individual rights did.
Few events in the history of the United States were of greater consequence than the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Although most histories have focused on the issues and compromises that dominated the debates, the exchanges were also shaped by the dynamic personalities of the fifty-five delegates who attended from twelve of the thirteen states. In The Men Who Made the Constitution, constitutional scholar John R. Vile explores the lives and contributions of all delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, including those who left before the Convention ended and those who stayed until the last day but refused to sign. The Men Who Made the Constitution includes a bibliography of key sources, engravings of delegates for whom portraits were created, a quiz on key facts, and a transcript of the Constitution of the United States. This work is the perfect reference for students and scholars, as well as professional and amateur historians, of colonial and early American history, constitutional law, and American jurisprudence.
History of the origin, formation, and adoption of the Constitution of the United States, with notices of its principal framers.
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, "Father of the Constitution," were two of the most important Founders of the United States as well as the closest of political allies. Yet historians have often seen a tension between the idealistic rhetoric of the Declaration and the more pedestrian language of the Constitution. Moreover, to some, the adoption of the Constitution represented a repudiation of the democratic values of the Revolution. In this book, Jeff Broadwater explores the evolution of the constitutional thought of these two seminal American figures, from the beginning of the American Revolution through the adoption of the Bill of Rights, revealing how their collaboration--and their disagreements--influenced the full range of constitutional questions during this early period of the American republic.
In this powerful new interpretation of America's origins, Max Edling argues that the Federalists were primarily concerned with building a government that could act vigorously in defense of American interests. The Constitution transferred the powers of war-making and resource extraction from the states to the national government thereby creating a nation-state invested with all the important powers of Europe's eighteenth-century "fiscal-military states." A strong centralized government, however, challenged the American people's deeply ingrained distrust of unduly concentrated authority. To secure the Constitution's adoption the Federalists had to accommodate the formation of a powerful national government to the strong current of anti-statism in the American political tradition. Taking advantage of a newly published letterpress edition of the constitutional debates, A Revolution in Favor of Government recovers a neglected strand of the Federalist argument, making a persuasive case for rethinking the formation of the federal American state.
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