We the People

(Hardback)

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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, the same year that conservatives invented a theory of constitutional theory of "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.

Author Bio

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, where she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, the humanities, and American political history. She is the author of The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (winner of the Bancroft Prize), New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), The Secret History of Wonder Woman (winner of the American History Book Prize), If Then (longlisted for the National Book Award) and many other titles. She is a staff writer at the New Yorker, host of the podcast The Last Archive, and was the winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in 2021.