The Folks’s Structure: 200 Years, 27 Amendments, and the Promise of a Extra Good Union

The 233-year story of how the American folks have taken an imperfect structure—the product of compromises and an artifact of its time—and made it extra democratic

Who wrote the Structure? That’s apparent, we predict: fifty-five males in Philadelphia in 1787. However a lot of the Structure was really written later, in a sequence of twenty-seven amendments enacted over the course of two centuries. The true historical past of the Structure is the astonishing story of how subsequent generations have reshaped our founding doc amid among the most colourful, contested, and controversial battles in American political life. It’s a narrative of how We the Folks have improved our authorities’s construction and expanded the scope of our democracy throughout eras of transformational social change.

The Folks’s Structure is a sublime, sobering, and masterly account of the evolution of American democracy.

From the addition of the Invoice of Rights, a promise made to save lots of the Structure from close to sure defeat, to the publish–Civil Warfare battle over the Fourteenth Modification, from the rise and fall of the “noble experiment” of Prohibition to the defeat and resurgence of an Equal Rights Modification a century within the making, The Folks’s Structure is the primary guide of its type: a significant information to America’s nationwide constitution, and another historical past of the persevering with battle to appreciate the Framers’ promise of a extra good union.