Course Introduction: Reading America's Written Constitution
This introductory lecture outlines a textual, article-by-article approach to the Constitution, emphasizing its democratic, pro-slavery, and national security dimensions.
The Constitution is about 8,000 words, start to finish. Akhil Reed Amar explains how to read all of it, in textual order, and what to look for in the one sentence that opens it.
This introductory lecture lays out the plan for the course: the Preamble, then Articles I through VII, then the amendments in the order they were added, from the Bill of Rights through Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, and the modern amendments of the 1960s and after. Amar names the three themes he will track throughout: how democratic the document was in its own historical context, how pro-slavery it also was and how close that contradiction came to destroying it, and how much of it was driven by national security and geostrategy. He introduces the companion book, America's Constitution: A Biography, discusses the course image drawn from the National Constitution Center, and closes with the assignment: read the text, and reread the Preamble.