Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Constitutional history
A critical but forgotten part of the Civil Rights era was the campaign to undo the white supremacist constitutions in many states.
Editor’s note: A.E. Dick Howard is the longest serving law professor at the University of Virginia and an internationally respected authority on constitutional law.
Our greatest Chief Justice defined the Constitution and ensured that the rule of law prevailed at a time of presidential overreach and bitter political factionalism.
A leading expert who helped a dozen nations write their constitutions explains how the Founders' ideas have had a lasting influence at home and abroad.
Editor's Note: Professor Dick Howard has been in a unique position to see first-hand the impact of the ideas of our Founders around the world.
Taft is remembered for emphasizing constitutional restraint as president, but he also set aside more public lands and brought more anti-trust suits than his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt. And he set the standard for integrity and personal conduct in the White House.
Jeffrey Rosen is a historian, law professor, and President and CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
His experiences in the Civil War shaped the mind of one of our greatest jurists.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was one of the most influential judges ever to take the bench, serving as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court for 30 years and largely defining First Amendment rights as we now understand them.
It is important to tell the story of the Constitution’s origins in a way that demythifies it. Impressive as they were, the men who wrote the Constitution were not demigods; they had interests, prejudices, and moral blind spots.
Should Mick Jagger get off of his cloud? And make room for Red Cloud? Was the Architect of Liberty a lousy architect? And who let the poodles out? Our fifth annual survey puts them all in their place.
We tend to see the Constitution as permanent and inviolable, but we’re always wild to change it.
Six weeks into the 104th Congress, the balanced budget amendment (the BBA) that had passed the House almost made it through the trickier procedural shoals of the Senate with the two-thirds majority needed to propel it on to the state legislatures.
In this year of the bicentennial of the Constitution, American Heritage asked a number of historians, authors, and public figures to address themselves to one or both of these questions:
It's the only industrial nation in which the possession of rifles, shotguns, and handguns is lawfully prevalent among large numbers of its population.
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