Books like The Summer of 1787

What’s fascinating about the making of the Constitution is how every point the framers debated in 1787 rang down through the ensuing years.

Should a state’s power be determined by its land size and resources—or the size of its population? Should we abolish slavery, or pass the buck to another generation? Who should get the right to vote—rich men or all men? Deciding these big three questions consumed much of the squabbles, and led to compromise. State’s rights, for example, led to creation of the bicameral structure of Congress.

The slavery question ultimately led to war in the 19th century, and the stinging legacy of the infamous Three-fifths Compromise. Their decisions on voting rights later resulted in amendments granting African Americans and women the right of suffrage. It’s almost as if you can glimpse America’s future in those 1787 debates.

The late Richard Beeman, then a professor at the University… show more.

This one is my absolute favorite. The Collier brothers wrote numerous books on American history for kids and adults alike.

Even though I knew that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 resulted in the creation of the U.S. Constitution, many times as I was reading this book—which is aimed squarely at adults—I found myself thinking, “I can’t wait to see how this ends!” The book is really that suspenseful, and reads like a novel.

The authors are especially good at describing the personalities of the players. My favorite is their analysis of the father-son nature of the bond between George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, who served as the general’s aide during the Revolutionary War.

I am willing to bet most fans of the musical Hamilton never quite grasped the nuances of that relationship. I also really loved their description of a famous moment in the deliberations when George Washington loses his… show more.

I’m not a Constitutional or legal scholar. If anything, I’d be considered a biographer, since my book focuses on the life stories of the men behind the document. For that reason, I’m deliberately omitting any books that discuss the ramifications of the Constitution in modern times.

But I do enjoy this book, by a journalist and Harvard Law School graduate, which carefully breaks down each of the Constitution’s seven Articles and 27 Amendments, and carefully spells out in plain language the meaning of each. Yes, there are plenty of readers who will take issue with the specifics, but I find that Monk’s treatment is even-handed, and she sprinkles the text with asides, quotes, and opinions from top thinkers along the way.

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence are universally referred to as “Signers.”

In family trees and genealogies, you’ll often find this word appended to their names as a badge of honor, delineating them from later and earlier relations who bore the same name. The men who signed the Constitution, however, or typically referred to as Framers or Founders; that’s the reason behind Fradin’s title.

This is a great book for kids, grades 4 to 7. The maps and etchings by illustrator Michael McCurdy are charming, and help set the scene and mood of each man’s story. I think it can be a helpful book for teachers and homeschoolers looking for short readings to help bring the Constitution to life in the classroom.

This book is a corrective. For over two hundred years Americans have been taught that enlightened slaveholders—and especially Jefferson and Madison—were initially the main champions of liberty and equality. But was that truly what happened? This book offers a different take on that story, and in my mind it deserves more attention than it has received.

What happened to our Constitution during the Civil War? Noah Feldman argues that Lincoln, whose goal was to save the Union, had to break the Constitution to do so. But this rupture created the possibility of a new order. The original Constitution was filled with compromises, most notably between the supporters and opponents of slavery. But a broken document could be mended to eliminate those compromises and produce an anti-slavery Constitution.

I think this book is really insightful—it will change the way you think about what it means to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States is a passionate, and passionately polemical, work of history devoted to the circumstances in which the young American republic, founded in 1776, was overthrown a decade later by a new, federal system of government. 

The driving force for this counter-revolution, according to Beard, himself an important figure in early twentieth-century progressive politics, was the anxious attempt of “our most considerate and virtuous citizens,” in the words of founding father James Madison, to protect their property – and, most crucially, their control over the money supply – from populist insurgents determined to democratize control over, both, the polity and the economy.

I am recommending this book because Malhotra et al take on a series of very difficult negotiations that look like they are impossible to solve and they show you how it was done. The book is very practical and demonstrates to the reader that many negotiations can be solved with the right frame of mind, creativity, and persistence. 

Imagine encapsulating the essence of the founding literature of the United States into a prose poem. That's Unaccompanied Sonata.

After reading this story, I understood how governments sometimes not only strip man of his freedom (always in the name of "the good of the people") but can also transform our greatest freedom-advocating voices into the merciless guards of an open-air intellectual prison.

This story left me with no answers. It left me with something better: a deep conviction about the necessity for us to invent better systems of governance.

There’s no one I like to read more about constitutional law than Akhil Amar. He has an incredible breadth of knowledge that’s matched by an amazing depth of insight. In this book, he goes through the constitution, clause by clause, and finds something new and unexpected to say about almost all of them. If you really want to understand the constitution, this is the definitive book.