The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary
of American independence, yet the founding is controversial now in ways it has
not been in decades. The American Enterprise Institute offers a major
intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique
value of their national inheritance.
In the seventh volume of this series,
scholars of American history, law, and politics discuss how the American
Revolution unleashed the forces of constitution-making in the United States. As
states erected new governments in the wake of independence, they worked to
combine traditions of colonial self-government with both classical and novel
political theories.
Studying the revolutionary period shows how it gave birth to a constitutional culture that shaped the delegates and debates that would forge the nation’s enduring Constitution in 1787.
Akhil Reed Amar
is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University and the
author of The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation,
1760–1840 (2021).
Harvey
C. Mansfield is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor
of Government, Emeritus, at Harvard University and the author of The Spirit
of Liberalism (1978) and America’s Constitutional Soul (1991).
Jack N. Rakove is
the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and
professor of political science and (by courtesy) law at Stanford University. He
is the author of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the
Constitution (1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize for history.
Colleen
A. Sheehan is a professor of politics at Arizona
State University and the David and Patricia Caldwell Visiting Scholar on the
American Founding at the Heritage Foundation.
Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American
Enterprise Institute, where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in
Public Policy. The founder and editor of
National
Affairs, he is also a senior editor at
The
New Atlantis, a contributing editor at
National
Review, and a contributing opinion writer at
The New York Times