Honoring the Icons, Part 1

Ask any audience, left or right, north or south, to name America's defining texts, and the same short list comes back. Akhil Reed Amar calls it the symbolic constitution.

This lecture makes the case that a set of iconic texts supplements the written Constitution: the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Northwest Ordinance, the Gettysburg Address, Brown v. Board, and King's "I Have a Dream." Amar shows how they form a connected system, nearly all traceable to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and how party politics helped raise them into a shared American creed.