“How do you decide what a very old legal document means?” That’s the question animating the latest book by Harvard professor and New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore, who appears on the cover of our September 15 issue. We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (Liveright/Norton, September 23) offers a chronicle of how the Constitution came to be and how it has been interpreted and amended. For a book about a “very old legal document”—the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787—it’s unexpectedly lively and impassioned, not to mention a powerful rejoinder to the so-called “originalists” who argue that the Constitution must be understood exactly as its 18th-century framers intended.
As We the People amply demonstrates, the original framers themselves had very little consensus about what the Constitution meant, only agreeing that it would have to be amended as time passed and the young nation evolved. The mechanism for doing that was Article 5—but, as Lepore observes, the bar for amendment is high, and that recourse has not been significantly utilized since way back in 1971, when the voting age was lowered to 18. As Lepore tells contributor Mary Ann Gwinn, “Evil Knievel was jumping over cars on his motorcycle in 1971!” You can read their full conversation here.
We the People is the kind of nuanced corrective that we in the United States need so desperately now, when knowledge of our history and understanding of civics feel as if they’re at an all-time low. Here are three more new titles that go beyond patriotic platitudes:
Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840-1920 by Akhil Reed Amar (Basic Books, September 16): A Yale law professor looks closely at one of the monumental flaws in the Constitution as originally drafted: the continued existence of slavery in the United States. The situation was complex; some states, such as Vermont, included a prohibition on slavery in their own constitutions. The institution wouldn’t be banned nationally until the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865 and even then, as Amar details here, inequality continued. Our starred review calls the book a “pointed, closely argued study.”
The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America by Jeffrey Rosen (Simon & Schuster, October 21): In a follow-up to The Pursuit of Happiness (2024), the president and CEO of the nonprofit National Constitution Center dissects the political philosophies of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, whose conflict over the power of the executive branch—not as simple as it is sometimes portrayed—continues to spark debate during the presidency of Donald Trump. Our reviewer calls the volume “a lucid work of political history.”
The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding by Joseph J. Ellis (Knopf, October 28): The acclaimed author of American Creation (2007) and Founding Brothers (2000) continues his decadeslong study of early U.S. history with this “provocative, revisionist view of the first years of the Republic,” according to our starred review. For all their lofty ideals about freedom and democracy, the Founding Fathers nevertheless oversaw “two unquestionably horrific tragedies,” the author writes: the maintenance of slavery and the dispossession of Native Americans.
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
