The Second Creation: Fixing the American Structure within the Founding Period

A surprising revision of our founding doc’s evolving historical past that forces us to confront anew the query that animated the founders so way back: What’s our Structure?

People broadly imagine that the US Structure was created when it was drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788. However in a shrewd rereading of the Founding period, Jonathan Gienapp upends this long-held assumption, recovering the unknown story of American constitutional creation within the decade after its adoption―a narrative with explosive implications for present debates over constitutional originalism and interpretation.

When the Structure first appeared, it was shrouded in uncertainty. Not solely was its which means unclear, however so too was its important nature. Was the American Structure a written textual content, or one thing else? Was it a authorized textual content? Was it completed or unfinished? What guidelines would information its interpretation? Who would adjudicate competing readings? As political leaders put the Structure to work, none of those questions had solutions. By vigorous debates they confronted the doc’s uncertainty, and―over time―how these leaders imagined the Structure radically modified. They’d begun attempting to repair, or resolve, an imperfect doc, however they ended up fixing, or cementing, a really explicit notion of the Structure as a distinctively textual and historic artifact circumscribed in area and time. Which means a few of the Structure’s most definitive traits, ones which are sometimes handled as innate, had been solely added later and had been thus contingent and optionally available.