The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History

The “American revolution was a constitutional crisis within the... British empire,” and the exact nature of that crisis has recurred throughout U.S. history, according to this eye-opening study. Historian Peterson (The City-State of Boston) explains that colonial-era Britons took “enormous pride” in the checks and balances of the British constitution, with its “perfect... triad of King, Lords, and Commons.” From the Magna Carta onward, the British constitution was seen as a guarantee against tyranny. When the American colonists rebelled, he explains, it was because they felt the “government that had failed to uphold [the constitution’s] principles.” Diagnosing what led to this failure, Peterson pegs imperial expansion as the culprit: the British constitution was “stretched to fit the distended body of the empire,” he writes, “until at last the fabric was torn asunder.” The U.S. constitution was in a similarly “precarious condition” in the lead-up to the Civil War, he argues, when imperial expansion into frontier territories likewise caused a rupture of representation (with both Native dispossession and the expansion of slavery playing a role). Another such crisis is underway today, he contends, with mass migration into cities having caused a major imbalance in representation. Throughout, Peterson traces how U.S. courts have repeatedly used “originalism” to reinforce representational imbalances rather than remedy them. The result is a penetrating look at what ails American democracy. (Mar.)