Introduction
Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840-1920 is the second volume of Akhil Amar’s grand trilogy, a constitutional history of the United States.[1] This is a bold and ambitious project. As Amar, who is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, stated in his first volume, The Words that Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840, we have multitudes of books on this and that constitutional issue, narrow monographs that never see beyond their particular subject or particular period.[2] But we have precious few treatments of our constitutional history that are wide-angled and multigenerational and that sweep over the entire exciting 250-year history of our constitutional struggles.[3]
Amar rightly believes that our constitutional conversation that chugs along in courtrooms, classrooms, newsrooms, family rooms and everywhere in between needs a better historical foundation than it has at present. And who could quarrel with that? He hopes that his trilogy will unite history and law in a broad and multigenerational narrative that seeks both to understand the past and to evaluate it using proper historical and legal tools of analysis.
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[1] Akhil Reed Amar, Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840-1920 (2025).
[2] Akhil Reed Amar, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840 (2021).
[3] See Amar, Born Equal, supra note 1, at 612 (“This book features original legal analysis and new historical conceptualizations based on deep immersion in primary sources. The preceding pages routinely present arguments and facts not found in any other modern work.”).