We the People

In this groundbreaking contribution to American history spanning three tumultuous centuries—beginning in the 1780s and concluding with the Supreme Court era of Chief Justice Roberts—Jill Lepore, the bestselling author of These Truths, notes that the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. This was the same year that conservatives invented a theory of constitutional "originalism," which has since provided the bulwark of reactionary thought in America.

Suffocating the very process of the Amendment was not the original intention of the Founding Fathers, who believed that the Amendment itself was so foundational to the American constitutional tradition that it was to be used as a self-regulatory mechanism to bring about necessary political changes. In reality, the reverse has occurred.

In this panoramic work of American history—rich with characters and plot and even suspense—Lepore argues that the Supreme Court has usurped the power of the amendment. In doing so, it has throttled the power of the states, undermined the idea of representative government, increased the polarization of American politics, contributed to political violence, and led to the very obsolescence of the U.S. Constitution.

In the tradition of Charles A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the United States, Lepore presents her work with freshness and a vision of radical thought that will be debated for years to come.