The Lives of the Structure: Ten Distinctive Minds that Formed America’s Supreme Legislation

In an interesting mix of biography and historical past, Joseph Tartakovsky tells the epic and surprising story of our Structure via the eyes of ten extraordinary people―some famend, like Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson, and a few forgotten, like James Wilson and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Tartakovsky brings to life their struggles over our supreme legislation from its origins in revolutionary America to the period of Obama and Trump. Sweeping from settings as various as Gold Rush California to the halls of Congress, and crowded with a vivid Dickensian solid, Tartakovsky reveals how America’s distinctive constitutional tradition grapples with questions like democracy, racial and sexual equality, free speech, financial liberty, and the function of presidency.

Becoming a member of the ranks of different nice American storytellers, Tartakovsky chronicles how Daniel Webster sought to avert the Civil Struggle; how Alexis de Tocqueville misunderstood America; how Robert Jackson balanced liberty and order within the battle towards Nazism and Communism; and the way Antonin Scalia died warning Individuals in regards to the ever-growing attain of the Supreme Courtroom.

From the 1787 Philadelphia Conference to the conflict over homosexual marriage, this can be a grand tour via two centuries of constitutional historical past as by no means instructed earlier than, and an schooling within the ideas that maintain America in probably the most astonishing experiment in authorities ever undertaken.