The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is offering a “self-paced” course, The Fate of the American Constitution, led by John Fabian Witt, YLS.
Since 1787, the United States Constitution has aimed to hold together a divided political community around a set of basic agreements. Some now call it the oldest constitution in the world still in effect today; others insist that though the textual template has remained in many respects the same, we have actually had two or three, or maybe even four constitutional orders over time. Either way, its history has been one of tumult, controversy, and sometimes mass violence from the very start. This course takes up the social and political history of the document and the practices that have arisen around it, from the founding era to the 1937 transformation that now hangs in the balance. Readings and lectures draw on multiple disciplinary approaches to history and law and foreground competing perspectives on the past.
--Dan Ernst
