How Americans Became a Constitutional People

A new book by Gordon S. Wood, the great historian of the Founding, details how Americans drafted, ratified, and incorporated written constitutions into their politics and government as fundamental laws.

“Instead of reforming the Articles [of Confederation], they throw them out and create an entirely new government—the federal Constitution that we have with us today, something that nobody in 1776 even imagined in their wildest dreams,” Wood observes of the Founders in talking about “Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution.”