American History Hit - How to Amend the Constitution

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

Why has it been so long since the US Constitution was amended? The incredible Jill Lepore joins Don to explore how the Constitution was designed for amendment, and how this has been utilised through its history.Jill is a staff writer for the New Yorker, David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and author of multiple books. The most recent is 'We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. June 8th, 1789, Federal Hall, Wall Street, New York City. Men in powdered wigs and dark-colored formal coats sit at wooden desks.

Sunlight filters through tall windows, casting long shafts of light across the floor. Outside are the streets of a growing capital, alive with commerce. But inside this room, the air is heavy and still in the summer heat. James Madison, the slight, soft-spoken congressman, from Virginia, rises adjusting his notes. All eyes turned towards him. Madison commands respect. He has already played a central role in drafting the Constitution,

but today he stands for a different reason. He stands to amend it. The Constitution is barely a year old, but critics, especially from the States, have pressed for more explicit individual protections. They want a bill of rights. Madison has heard their concerns. He understands the need for the change

because he knows that the strength of this document, indeed the strength of the union, depends on it. Greetings, welcome back to American History Hit. Don Wildman here, glad you're listening. This is a special episode today. A Constitution, by definition, is a set of written rules designed to guide and limit the powers of a government providing a stable framework for the exercise of public power.

straightforward idea, hardly simple. Most of us in our daily American lives take this for granted, our stable framework having upheld itself with one major interruption, we're going on for 250 years, and we can largely chalk that up to the document at the center of our civic life, the United States Constitution. Consider the alternative. A government without a constitution vested by the people ceases to be a government of laws. It becomes a rule of individuals and factions. history shows us all too often where that leads. Since ratification of the United States Constitution, the U.S. has been a government of laws, some of them abhorrent, but their rudeness in constitutional soil has made them changeable,

amendable, setting our constitutional governance apart from so many despotisms and dictatorships. It is this notion of a dynamic, responsive constitution that concerns the brand new, soon-to-be-released book We the People, authored by Jill Lepoor, a David Kemper Woods 41 Professor of History at Harvard University, who has been publishing important books since the 1990s, like The Name of War, The Secret Life of Wonder Woman, and These Truths. She's a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine and host and producer of original podcast series, like The Last Archive. Her knee-buckling list of scholarly achievements goes on, but let's just talk to her.

Jill Lepore, it is a true privilege to welcome you to American History Hit. Oh, thanks so much for having me. The U.S. Constitution, let's discuss. a document that should evolve with its times, as Madison himself intended. You mentioned this right in the introduction. This was one of the core reasons to revisit this fabled history, yes? Yeah, for me, I got really fascinated by the idea of amendment and concerned about why it's been abandoned in the United States at the level of the federal government.

There are 195 nations in the world today. A lion's share of those countries have written codified constitutions. What makes the U.S. Constitution so unique to this day? I suppose the age will start there, right? Yeah, I mean, as a national constitution, it is among the very oldest. I think the oldest written constitution in the world that is still in use and has been continuously in use is that of my home state, Massachusetts from 1780, yeah, go Bay State. But, you know, I think it's easy to assume that written constitutions have been around for much longer than they have. I mean, I think we might assume that they go back to the beginning of writing itself, but that is not the case.

fundamental law was generally unwritten. And it's really an 18th century invention. It's a particular technology of the 18th century. And when people started writing down constitutions, when you think about it, you know, for half a minute, you immediately see the dilemma. You know, you're writing down fundamental law and you want it to last. That's why you're writing it down. You want it to be legible and transparent, available to the people for their inspection. But you know that things are going to need to change. And, you know, England has an unwritten constitution. It is always adapting. You always evolving. And the colonists in Britain's North American colonies thought that was a big part of the reason for the parliament's ability to exert tyrannical authority over the colonies, because they could

never say, here's the place in your constitution where this is, they kept saying your taxation is unconstitutional. And then there was no place to point to. So, you know, this was one of the things Tom Paine said about American constitutionalism. You could keep it in your pocket. You could take it out and say to the government, this is constitutional, this is not. So it was a sort of innovation of great determination on the part of the American patriots to decide to write the thing down. But then what do you do when you need to change it? So fundamental to written constitutionalism as it was designed in the United States is

what I call the philosophy of amendment, that commitment to change through revision. Exactly. That it was created during the 18th century, as you mentioned, puts it right in the world of the Enlightenment, influenced by all of that which made the Enlightenment, the references to Greek democracy, Roman republicanism, and all those British legal traditions like the Magna Carta and so forth. I mean, that also contributed to the uniqueness of this document. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I mean, it's really building on a world of charters, so not just, you know, Magna Carta the Great Charter, which in itself, right, was a really important check on

the power of the king. We will write down and force you to sign, you know, said the barons, the nobleman, force you to sign that there are certain things you cannot do to us. The declarations of rights that came out of the English Revolution of the 17th century were also part of that tradition. But there's a kind of everydayness to it in Britain's North American colonies because each of the colonies had a written charter. And those were also really influential. They don't have to go back to antiquity, but people would say, well, oh, you know, we in Pennsylvania, here's our charter, it says our governor can do this, but not that. And so the idea that upon declaring independence, now nearly 250 years ago, that the new United States would not write down its fundamental law,

that was not among the possibilities. There had been a real accommodation to a familiarity with the idea that the way you limit the power of a government is to, right? down and circumscribe its powers, and then also to write down and define your rights. Right. It always belies the complexity of the thing when you hold one of these little pamphlets that is the United States Constitution that was indeed intended to slip right into your pocket. It's incredibly small, really, but there it is. It ends up being a very, very big conversation.

Part of that is the we, the people aspect of it. This was, I say, vested by the people. It was written and ratified by representatives of the people. We can argue about who they were and what they really represented. But that was the idea, the popular sovereignty defined this. Power came from the people. Yeah, and that is articulated first in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their create and with certain inalienable rights among these life, liberty,

the pursuit of happiness. So the consent of the governed, the ability of the people to govern themselves is declared. That's one of the things. It's not just a Declaration of Independence. It is a Declaration of Rights. That document is both of those things. And remember, you know, the colonies in the states had been declaring rights all along. So, you know, John Adams was always miffed that Thomas Jefferson got so much credit for writing the Declaration of Independence. He's like, there was not an original idea in it. You know, we'd already decided on these ideas. Yes, that's why they were self-evident. But the realization of that at the level of the federal government awaits the Constitution. Yeah. I'm going to remind people as we speak that the reason we're talking about this is the book that you are coming out with, which is a full history of the U.S. Constitution called We the People. And that's really exciting timing because, of course, we're facing the 250th of the country, the Declaration of Independence. But beyond that, 11 years from now will be the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution as well. So we're entering into this founding era of America, this anniversary of this anniversary.

of it, and that's what's so important. Article 5 is the article that talks about amendments. It itself was a condition of ratifying this Constitution for many of these representatives who were arguing over in 1787, right? Yeah, so I think one thing that's important to remember about this anniversary season that we're entering, we think about it as, okay, this is 203 anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but it's also the anniversary of the first state constitutions, Yeah. You know, which begin, you know, the war starts in 1775, early 1776. Thomas Payne published his common sense, and he says, you know, we need to become independent,

and the states start drafting their own constitutions. Because they're essentially without a government. And when they draft those constitutions, they set up some fundamental ideas about what a written constitution will be. Each of those state constitutions is another experiment and like, how should we set up a government? And one of the things that happens with those early constitutions is people get the idea that there are certain requirements. So in Massachusetts, it's rights a constitution in 1776. The legislature writes it, and then they send it to the people for ratification, and the people say they reject it.

The first constitution of Massachusetts rejected for two reasons. One, the people of Massachusetts say, we don't want the legislature writing a constitution that makes no sense, they can give themselves whatever power they want. You know, we need to have a special elected body. They call it a convention, a constitutional convention. We elect people that are not members of the legislature because they want to think critically about it. They want the people want to have that power.

And yes, you let us ratify it or not ratify it, but you didn't give us power to amend it. And so Massachusetts has to go back to the drawing board and write a new constitution that comes out of a constitutional convention and includes this amendment provision, which gives to the people the power to revise the document. And so that's 1780 when that finally gets ratified. So by the time the constitutional convention for the nation itself opens in 1787, there's this expectation.

We'll never get this thing ratified unless we grant to the people the power to amend it. Because otherwise it's just a usurpation of power. It's a seizure of power. So they know they have to put that in. It's quite uncontroversial that they're going to put in. And that becomes Article 5 of the Constitution. Yeah, right. I love the metaphor you use in the introduction about the farmers amending their soil, that this was part of the idea that you, every season, have to refresh how you're growing your foods and get a bigger harvest.

And that was, I just want to state out that, you know, we're going to get into some complexities of Article 5 and so forth. But that was really the idea that it is a changeable and dynamic document, which, you know, doesn't seem that way these days, which we'll discuss. there is a built-in irony to the constitution. You have this rulebook, the guide for established governments, but you have upfront the need for it to change. Let's talk about the method of doing this. There's a lot of arguments about certain elements of this these days, electoral college, big controversy and so forth. But part of the problem is that it's so difficult to change this constitution, right? Was it meant to be? No, so it really is kind of a Goldilocks problem. They, you know, they want the, constitution to last. They have no idea whether it's going to less, but they would like it to

less. They're trying to provide stability for a fragile new union. So they want it to be amendable, but they don't want it to be too hard. They don't want it to be too easy. They don't to be too hard. And what they settle on is double supermajority. So any proposed amendment has to pass by a supermajority of two thirds in both the House and the Senate, and then it has to be ratified by three quarters of the state. And that seems to them quite high. It's, you know, to impeach a president is a two-thirds vote in the Senate. That's, you know, a treaty ratification.

Like, that's a very high bar. It's not a simple majority. And then to go through the states, that's a lot as well. But it turned out almost immediately to be a much higher bar than they anticipated. Because in 1787, when they came up with that calculation, that formula, there were no political parties in the United States. Right. Political parties don't emerge until the end of the 1790s and really don't get firmly established until the election of 1800. So once you have a party system, a two-thirds supermajority is extremely difficult.

And they also didn't really anticipate that sectionalism, which was strong in 1787, to be sure, would become much stronger. So they also could not have anticipated the kind of party polarization that has seized and really paralyzed the United States. since the 1970s. So, and that's the last time we really amended the Constitution. Given the nature of political culture in the United States today, it is effectively impossible to amend the Constitution. That's really troubling. That is keep you up at night kind of troubling. I just want to underscore what you just said. There are two ways to change this Constitution, two-thirds majority in both House and Senate, which was the original way. And then they added to it, right, that the state legislatures had to have that option as well. That was kind of the people

versus the federal government idea. Yeah, it's a little bit different than that. So to become part of the Constitution, an amendment has to pass either a two-thirds majority in Congress or three-quarters of states, but it also has to be ratified. So the ratification process is always the same. It has to pass three-quarters of the states. Right. But the process of being sent to the states. It can be sent to the states via Congress or via a convention of the states, which has not ever happened. But it is, you know, it's constitutionally feasible. And the reason for that, and I think that's what you're referring to, was sort of the same thing that Massachusetts people said, we can't just rely on the legislature to decide how to, because what if we want to

limit congressional powers? So, for instance, a very, it was a very long campaign. Under the terms of the original constitution, the people did not allow. the Senate. The state legislators elected the Senate. And that's a little bit like the electoral college right. Like the framers of the Constitution didn't trust the people to elect the Senate. They thought, oh, we'll filter out the public will, popular will have the Senate be elected by state legislators. How to get, getting rid of that, amending that out of the Constitution was really difficult because it had to get through the Senate. Yeah. So eventually people like, you know what we're going to do, we're going to hold a convention of the states and we will hold our

new constitutional convention. And then not only will we eliminate this, you know, indirect election of Senate, but we'll introduce all kinds of other things that you guys don't like, but that the people like. And under the threat of a constitutional convention, this is in 1911, the Senate caves and says, okay, okay, we don't want to you to have a convention. So we will pass this and send you. to the states and then it was immediately ratified. So the idea that the states themselves could have, could propose amendments is original to the Constitution. It's just, it's just only ever been a threat.

Yeah. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. We're discussing Article 5, which is about the amendability of the U.S. Constitution. Those two aspects of how to change this Constitution are in company with the judicial interpretation. You can take this to the courts. This is not, you know, to fix the Constitution per se, but to affect change on a legal level. It has been found that maybe working through the courts is a better way of doing this, straight to the Supreme Court.

This is called judicial interpretation, correct? Yeah, or judicial review, and its critics call it judicial supremacy. Okay. Was this foreseen by our founders? Foreseen probably written into the Constitution. Absolutely not. Yeah. Yeah, the powers of the Supreme Court are delineated in the Constitution, of course,

but never does it says it falls to the Supreme Court to decide the constitutionality of the laws in the way that the court then exercise that power. That said, it is very old, the practice of judicial review, and it is first asserted by the court in 1803 in a case in which the court overturns a federal law. Before the Civil War, the court only declares law passed by Congress, unconstitutional twice. Like, it's not a common thing for the court to do so. It has become far more common. And, you know, one way I think most legal scholars would understand judicial review is the reason the court gains and executes such power over what the constitution

means is because Article 5 doesn't really work. So the Constitution does need to change. Like, circumstances change. Things change. Like, it's a very old document. It needs to be updated in all kinds of ways. And in the kind of vacuum that is created by the problem of Article 5, not really working because of the party system, the court steps in and changes the Constitution by way of new interpretations. Exactly. What brings about amendments?

It's usually war and crisis, right? Yeah, so what is that interesting? The U.S. Constitution has one of the lowest amendment rates in the world. Most constitutions, first of all, don't last that long. you know, 20 years is, I think, the average. And most constitutions are very frequently amended. This is the case in the United States, in all the states. There have been, you know, more than 200 constitutional conventions in the United States in the states, amending or replacing state constitutions. So Americans really believe we should be amending constitutions all the time,

as do peoples all over the world. Like, they're really important legal instruments, but they need updating. With the federal constitution, there have been 27 amendments. it's ratified, but really only in bursts. Right. So the first 10, which are now known as the Bill of Rights, were ratified all at once in 1791, essentially. The Civil War amendments, which are the product of that war, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments are ratified all in a go.

The Progressive Era amendments are ratified, four of them, right around the time of the First World War. There are four amendments ratified between 1961 and 1970, when the U.S. is engaged in war in Vietnam. I think it's really the upheaval of war that often includes kind of political revolutions at home. Yeah. That makes possible, you know, the kind of the constitutional door, this is what Washington always called the amendment provision. We need to leave the door ajar.

But it really only ever gets pushed open during the tumult of war. And then a bunch of changes are squeezed through. and then the door kind of slams shut again. Right. It's interesting. I mean, how much the nuclear age has had to do with this, you know, nuclear deterrence has created no world wars anymore. And so the sense that war, you know, unifies us against our common enemy is no longer

part of American life. And so you wonder how much that's affected the amendment process in the end. Or it might say the end of the draft, the military draft. So the last time we really meaningfully amended the U.S. Constitution was 71, which was lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, which really came out of the anti-war movement, right? All these young men being sent off to fight in Vietnam and couldn't even vote at home. And then in 1973, also out of the anti-war movement, the U.S. ends conscription. Exactly. So the U.S. has been involved in many wars since 1973, but it is the poor who fight

those wars, and it has a different political purchase. We talk, I mean, it's a long time, 30 years, but there's been longer times. There was 61 years from 1804 to the Civil War that no amendments were made. That included the entire, you know, early Republic period and antebellum. 43 years between the 15th, which was in 1870 to the 16th, which was 1913. I guess we've already addressed what these have in common. Are we heading now into a longer period that's going to break that record? Well, I don't really count. The 27th Amendment was ratified in 1992, but I don't honestly count it. So I think we are in a very long period. The 27th Amendment was first proposed in 1789. So it wasn't really a new idea when it was ratified in 1992. So we are in a very long drought, constitutionally speaking.

And I think it contributes to the political instability of the United States. I think it contributes to the sense of inertness in our politics. I think across all political persuasions, Americans believe that the federal government isn't working especially well. And you might like what it's doing, but you might not like how it's doing. Like, let's say you're a Trump supporter and you really believe in what the Trump administration is doing. I think you might also think, well, that's a little bit too much executive power for my taste. What if I didn't like who was in the White House?

And I don't think anyone really thinks Congress is working well. And if you like the kinds of decisions that the Supreme Court is making, you still probably think, wow, it's probably not great that they have that much power right now. The balance between the three branches, I think most Americans would agree who are paying attention at all, is completely out of whack and there's no real way to fix it. Right. I mean, and the gridlock and the sense of inertness that you're talking about is probably more traceable from the party system than it is from the Constitution, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's all, but it's, it's all kind of a big ball of how do you affect change any longer?

Right. But I suppose that your book is an attempt and in a bigger sense, the anniversary, as we look down the ages, is an attempt to refresh this argument, and that speaks to optimism, that there is a way to do that. The problem is that Constitution doesn't give us that option, does it? Any other way of looking at this than supermajorities? Yeah, but I do think there's something to be said. I mean, obviously, this is the core belief of mine as a historian, right?

that I do think there are reasons to pay attention to how amendment efforts in the past have succeeded and failed. So one of the most notable failures in recent history of an attempt to amend the Constitution was the Equal Rights Amendment, which was first proposed in Congress in 1923, is passed in 1972 and is widely expected to be ratified, goes to the states. again, like 1971, we'd just ratified another amendment. And this huge, you know, 80% and above public support for the Equal Rights Amendment, which guarantees equal rights regardless of sex.

My mom was out there. Yeah. My mom was probably not. But I think one of the things people really thought, oh, this won't take very long, we'll surely be able to celebrate on July 4th, 1976 at the bicentennial where we have fireworks, we'll celebrate this beautiful new amendment. And it fails. And the failure is, I think, one of the reasons amendment becomes impossible. People are like, we put so much into getting the ERA ratified and it failed.

We're never going to do that again. We're just going to go to the courts. But I think one of the reasons the ERA fails is that the people who were supported it didn't really have a good ground game in the states. They didn't expect opposition. They didn't think about it. But if they had looked, for instance, at the child labor amendment, this was an amendment that passes Congress in 1924.

so the year after the ERA was first introduced, goes to the states, same thing. Everybody expects, it's going to be immediately ratified. Like, people don't, you know, there's huge public support for the idea that there should be laws regulating the labor of children under 60. Right.

It just seems like a no-brainer. Of course, this thing's going to be immediately right. We've just ratified the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. Like, we're ready to keep going. We're going to protect children from exploitation. And it is a very similar campaign to defeat it where there's a great ground game in the States

by people who are opposed to the child labor amendment and it is never ratified. Wow. And you know, you're sort of like, well, how amendment happened so infrequently that people kind of forget how to fight for it. So like if the ERA people, they had studied what happened to the child labor amendment,

they might have thought, oh, here's some tricks we should know. Here's some places we should expect opposition. Here's some strategies that might work. Like you can't just say in like a lot of national speeches, we love this thing. Yeah. You know, you really have to organize in the states and you have to talk to legislators and you have to have to have, you know, chapters of whatever organization out there, you know, doing pamphleteering. It just like the reason, one of the reasons I wrote the book, because, you know, I don't, I'm not trying to argue for specific amendments.

I'm trying to argue for we should be able to imagine a better constitution than we have and expect that we ought to have the power to amend it. When were the superstars at work in this process? Is that the Gilded Age period when they really kind of get it as far as how to change this thing? I find inspiration on a lot of these different constitutional moments or what some legal scholars call a constitutional moment. I think the abolitionists waged some really interesting and fierce battles about how to amend the Constitution with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, which also involved suffragists who thought that was their moment. I mean, in terms of just the beautiful speeches made in Washington, John Bingham, who is chiefly responsible for writing the 14th Amendment, which puts in place the birthright citizenship, due process, equal rights under the law,

he makes just some incredible speeches about what it means. And historians talk about these three amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th as the second founding. They are essentially like a new constitution. And the 39th Congress, which begins to meet in 1865, is often thought of as effectively a second constitutional convention where these guys get together and they say, we have just waged a war, it's not even over it when they began. You know, 750,000 Americans die in that war to end slavery

and hold together the union. and we have to keep this constitutional door open long enough to fundamentally change the Constitution. Yeah. And it's just an extraordinary run of years. So I think John Bingham is really powerful. The speeches that Frederick Douglass gives in the years leading up to that moment are just mind-blowing.

There's a lot of great heroes to me. Is this taught, I mean, you teach it. Harvard Law as well. As a history professor, do you think this idea of changing the Constitution is taught aggressively enough in law schools? You know, it's actually, that's a really great question, Don, it's fascinating what kind of happened in my lifetime. Constitutional history moved out of history departments. Yeah. So like in the 70s with the rise of social history and then later by the kind of 90s, cultural history, history department is really dominated by social and cultural history, kind of a cultural turn. Everyone's studying the making of meaning. Military history

just kind of moves just into the military academies, like people start teaching military history. And that's part of the anti-war movement, like we should stop teaching war. But constitutional history is just kind of derided as constitutional worship and something from the right and of no real interest to a rising generation of young Americans who want to think about, you know, what we would call identity politics. They want to study just, you know, different groups, you know, women's history, like an incredible revolution, intellectual revolution takes place in these years, or like black history emerges Chicano studies, you know, what becomes gay studies.

Like, there's just an incredible blossoming of research into the archives that really had been entirely ignored. And one of the things that gets kind of thrown out as those things grow is constitutional history, which moves into law schools. Because, of course, in law schools, people need to know the history of the Constitution for the sake of precedent, right? They have a very different way of thinking about history. They're not, they're specifically not thinking about all those other people, right?

They really are just looking at what the Supreme Court says. Constitutional history in law schools really is just cases. Case, case, case, case, case, case, case, case, case, case. How does this case relate to that case? You know, we're looking at Plessy v. Ferguson, now we look at Brown v. Board of Education. Does anyone know who Plessy is? No. You know, does anyone know who Brown is?

No, these are just case names. Like, there are no people. in constitutional history and law schools. And not to criticize it, but that's just what it is. Meanwhile, all the people are in history departments. Right. And they're not really talking about the Constitution. So I think that's a problem for...

The compartmentalization of all. Yeah, for both sides, right? It's a problem in law schools that they don't, you know, there's just no sense of these cases are involved people and contests about the power between the distribution of power, not just within the government, between the people, between the people and the government. And in the history departments, there's no sense that the Constitution matters.

So I'm trying to kind of bridge that. That's what my position is sort of about. The book is, of course, about a lot more than the Article 5. But I wanted to talk about that because it's so much the spirit of the early pages of the book, for sure, when someone picks it up, that this thing is meant to be changed and meant to be dynamic. Also meant to be the center of people's thinking in terms of the United States. And that's the problem. Life has gotten very complicated.

And media has had a lot to do with that. And so we kind of find time in our days to think about what we think about and the Constitution has been shoved aside, as you say. 2006, we've mentioned it already, 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence also marks, as I say, the 11-year march towards the same of the Constitution in 2037. Think of this. A first grader entering next fall in 26 will graduate high school in 2037. That 11-year period is a generation of alpha-generation of kids who are going to hear about 250 all their schooling. I'm hoping that the Constitution will be part of that as well. Yeah, I hope so.

There's a real concerted movement in the United States to kind of renew civic education. Civics, I will confess, when I took civics, when I was in ninth grade, was a dreadful disaster of a course. Yeah. It was taught with such low energy and lack of affect and activity. But one of the things that happened during the bicentennial that was a great thing about the bicentennial in 1975, 1976, was that there was a tremendous local effort to think about the meaning of the founding of the nation. And not for the sake of veneration, but for the sake of public engagement and disputation and the celebration of dissent. One of my favorite moments from 1987, which was the 200th anniversary of the Constitution,

was when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who was the first Black American to serve as the Supreme Court Justice, gave this tremendous speech in which he said, I will not accept the invitation to speak to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the drafting of the Constitution, but I will accept the invitation to celebrate the 200 years of struggle to realize its promise. Well, get the book, folks. You will spend time with very accessible prose

that takes you through the history of much more than the Article 5, as I say, in the hands of this incredibly skilled writer. Thank you so much, Jill Rippur. It's been an honor to talk to you. Thank you. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays,

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