Liveright
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In “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” (to be printed Sept. 16 by Liveright), Harvard professor and New Yorker author Jill Lepore explores the continued wrestle to amend America’s founding doc and hold it a residing framework for an evolving nation.
Learn an excerpt under, and don’t miss Tony Dokoupil’s interview with Jill Lepore on “CBS Sunday Morning” September 14!
“We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution”
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Introduction
The Philosophy of Modification
The individuals have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible proper to reform or change their authorities, each time or not it’s discovered antagonistic or insufficient to the needs of its establishment.
—James Madison, failed First Modification to the U.S. Structure launched into Congress, 1789
We the Folks. The Structure of the US is product of issues which are born, reside, thrive, decay, and die: bugs, animals, vegetation, concepts. As a way to type a extra excellent Union. Every of its parts started, way back, within the loamy earth, hatching and creeping or slipping, slick and squealing, from the womb of the thoughts. Set up justice, insure home tranquility. The textual content is written on parchment produced from sheep, fleeced, their hides soaked in lime, stretched and dried. Present for the widespread protection. The ink got here from the buds of oak leaves, swollen to the scale of musket balls by the eggs of wasps. Promote the overall welfare. Its phrases had been formed by quills usual from the feathers of molting geese. Safe the blessings of liberty. Its lofty, momentous concepts got here from the minds of males, lengthy since lifeless, and from the books they learn. To ourselves and our posterity. Of the almost 2 hundred written constitutions, the Structure of the US—probably the most influential structure on the planet—can also be among the many oldest, a relic, as brittle as bone, as exhausting as stone. Do ordain and set up.
However the U.S. Structure is neither bone nor stone. It’s an explosion of concepts. Parchment decays and ink fades, however concepts endure; in addition they change. The Structure tried to unravel historic issues having to don’t solely with the individuals and their rulers, the construction of presidency, and the character of rights, but in addition with the knowability and endurance of legislation. Ingeniously, it accounted for the passage of time.
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“We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution”
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