How the Constitution Became Our Authoritative Text

In the chaos otherwise known as the Trump era of American politics, history, it seems, has leapfrogged into the foreground of discussions over the country's current predicament. In the search for answers about who we are as a nation and how we got here, a wave of new historical monographs has returned to the founders, their intentions, and their relevance for today. One such work, Joseph Ellis's engaging American Dialogue: The Founders and Us, compares attitudes toward race, equality, law, and foreign policy during the founding period and our own. Another, Jill Lepore's ambitious These Truths: A History of the United States, surveys these seminal issues by tracing the changing meanings of “liberty” and “equality” from the founding era to the present.

Jonathan Gienapp's The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era has a narrower scope, offering a close reading of constitutional history with no mention of the present. Yet his study nonetheless focuses on many of the structural and institutional issues that continue to consume us—including presidential powers, the role of Congress, and the use and abuse of originalist approaches to the Constitution—and in so doing raises questions that shine a light on today's national debates.