The life-long Democrat who played Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show puts out a call to all liberals to reclaim the constitution from the right-wingers who use it as justification for every horrible thing they want to do. Thanks to free public education, anyone can read the Constitution-- and should. The men who wrote it couldn't agree on what it meant, so should you trust someone who claims they do? Asner, a life-long Democrat, puts out a call...

A Yale Law School professor offers a thought-provoking analysis of the history and tenets of the U.S. Constitution, detailing the original intent of the creators of the document, answering questions about the text, and critically assessing the evolution of the Bill of Rights and all other amendments. In America's Constitution, one of this era's most accomplished constitutional law scholars, Akhil Reed Amar, gives the first comprehensive account of...

"Constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar tells the story of America's constitutional conversation during its first eighty years--from the Constitution's birth in 1760 through the 1830s, when the last of America's early leaders died. Amar traces the threads of Constitutional discourse, uniting history and law in a narrative that seeks both to reveal this history anew and to make clear who was right and who was wrong on the biggest legal issues confronting...

"The Constitution is the most significant document in America. But do you fully understand what this valuable document means to you? In How to Read the Constitution--and Why, legal expert and educator Kimberly Wehle spells out in clear, simple, and common sense terms what is in the Constitution, and most importantly, what it means. In compelling terms and including text from the United States Constitution, she describes how the Constitution's protections...

Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of racial slavery. Some historians have charged that slaveholders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation's founding. Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers' work. Far from covering up a crime...

"Americans of late have taken to waving the Constitution in the air and proclaiming, 'The founders were on MY side! See, it's all right here!' But these phantom constitutions bear little relation to the historical one. By entering the world of the Constitution's framers, and experiencing it one day after the next as they did, Ray Raphael helps us understand how and why they created the document they did. Casting aside preconceptions and commonly held...

"One standard story about America is rooted in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Another story concerns America's moment of reckoning after the Civil War, when it was possible to believe that the country would transcend its racist roots. Kermit Roosevelt III argues here that today, with the country increasingly riven along violent divides, we can find a path forward by shifting our benchmarks from the first story, which fostered...