We the People
A History of the U.S. Constitution
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2025
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post, New Yorker, Smithsonian, Bookpage, and the Chicago Public Library
Longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
"[Lepore's] 15th book, We the People, a history of the U.S. Constitution, may be her best yet, a capacious work that lands at the right moment, like a life buoy, as our ship of state takes on water." —Hamilton Cain, Los Angeles Times
From the best-selling author of These Truths comes We the People, a stunning new history of the U.S. Constitution, for a troubling new era.
The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world but also one of the most difficult to amend. Jill Lepore, Harvard professor of history and law, explains why in We the People, the most original history of the Constitution in decades—and an essential companion to her landmark history of the United States, These Truths.
Published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding—the anniversary, too, of the first state constitutions—We the People offers a wholly new history of the Constitution. “One of the Constitution’s founding purposes was to prevent change,” Lepore writes. “Another was to allow for change without violence.” Relying on the extraordinary database she has assembled at the Amendments Project, Lepore recounts centuries of attempts, mostly by ordinary Americans, to realize the promise of the Constitution. Yet nearly all those efforts have failed. Although nearly twelve thousand amendments have been introduced in Congress since 1789, and thousands more have been proposed outside its doors, only twenty-seven have ever been ratified. More troubling, the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Without recourse to amendment, she argues, the risk of political violence rises. So does the risk of constitutional change by presidential or judicial fiat.
Challenging both the Supreme Court’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation and the flawed theory of “originalism,” Lepore contends in this “gripping and unfamiliar story of our own past” that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. The framers never intended for the Constitution to be preserved, like a butterfly, under glass, Lepore argues, but expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution through an orderly deliberative and democratic process.
Lepore’s remarkable history seeks, too, to rekindle a sense of constitutional possibility. Congressman Jamie Raskin writes that Lepore “has thrown us a lifeline, a way of seeing the Constitution neither as an authoritarian straitjacket nor a foolproof magic amulet but as the arena of fierce, logical, passionate, and often deadly struggle for a more perfect union.” At a time when the Constitution’s vulnerability is all too evident, and the risk of political violence all too real, We the People, with its shimmering prose and pioneering research, hints at the prospects for a better constitutional future, an amended America.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If you’ve ever wanted someone eminently qualified to explain the United States Constitution to you—preferably in a way that’s utterly engaging yet never dumbed down—well, you might feel like historian and Harvard professor Jill Lepore wrote this just for you. In the same vein as her acclaimed doorstopper history of the U.S., These Truths, We the People combines plainspoken language with scholarly research, drawing on the copious documents written by the framers to recount how they conceived the Constitution to function over the coming centuries. And she makes the radical case that, in many ways, they failed. We were pretty blown away by just how explicit the founders were that they felt the Constitution should be amended easily and often. And yet, as Lepore painstakingly catalogs, the success rate for proposed amendments—especially those with popular support—is microscopic. If you want to understand how the supreme law of the U.S. functions (and maybe how it doesn’t), pick up We the People.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Control of the U.S. Constitution as a "living" and inevitably changing text has passed from the hands of the people to those of elites, argues bestselling historian Lepore (These Truths) in this stylish and clear-eyed study. For the nation's first 150 years, the process of amendment was the main path, she contends, by which the Constitution was reinterpreted. These changes would often come after periods of massive upheaval—12 amendments were passed after the Revolutionary War, three after the Civil War, seven after WWI—or following intense, sustained activism, like the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. From FDR's administration onward, however, politicians "abandoned constitutional amendment" in favor of "applying pressure on the Supreme Court"; as a result, Lepore asserts, the Constitution is still "changing all the time" via judicial decisions that are influenced by a select few elites in government and industry. Lepore's narrative tracks various amendments and state constitutions formed in the 19th and early 20th centuries in order to excavate how this shift happened, from the dispiriting failure of the Reconstruction amendments to the surprisingly outsized influence of a constitution formed by Native Americans in Oklahoma. Today, she writes, after the spectacular, prolonged failures of "lost amendments" like the ERA, amendment itself has come to be seen as a boondoggle. Citing mounting threats like climate change and authoritarianism, Lepore urges the public and legislators to seriously take up the cause of amendment once again. It's a galvanizing and paradigm-shifting take on America's slow descent into plutocracy.
