A shelf
The Founding
The Declaration of Independence
The source. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Everything the brand draws from, and much of what the country claims to be, begins in this...
The Constitution of the United States
The operating document, the one that turns the Declaration's promise into a working machine of divided power. The Preamble alone seeds half the catalogue: we the...
The Bill of Rights
The first ten amendments, won because the Anti-Federalists pressed for them and Madison wrote them into being. The First protects speech, press, assembly, and worship. The...
The Federalist Papers
Eighty-five essays written at speed to argue New York into ratifying the Constitution, and still the best gloss on what the Constitution is for. Hamilton, Madison,...
The Anti-Federalist Papers
The other side, and they were not wrong. Writing as Brutus and the Federal Farmer, the Anti-Federalists warned that the new central government was too strong,...
Two Treatises of Government
The argument the Declaration is built on, nearly sentence for sentence. Government rests on the consent of the governed. People carry natural rights into society rather...
Common Sense
The pamphlet that made independence thinkable to ordinary people, because Paine wrote the way they spoke and aimed straight at the idea that some men are...
The Second Founding
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments read as what they were: a refounding of the country, an attempt to write the promise of equality into the...
These Truths
The single-volume national history most scholars think impossible, attempted anyway, and organized around the country's own stated ideals. Lepore asks whether the facts of American history...
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
Why the Revolution was more radical than its powdered-wig reputation suggests. Wood traces how a hierarchical colonial society, where rank and deference ordered everything, became within...
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
What the revolutionaries were actually reading and arguing about, reconstructed from the pamphlets they wrote to one another. Bailyn found a generation steeped in classical history...
America's Constitution: A Biography
The Constitution read the way the founders asked it to be read: closely, clause by clause, word by word, as a written instrument that rewards attention....
Our Declaration
A close reading of the Declaration of Independence as a still-living argument, taken slowly, word by word, the way a sacred text or a great poem...
The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?
The closing note of the shelf, and the brand's own thesis in Douglass's words. Having every reason to read the Constitution as a slaveholders' charter, Douglass...