How the Americans Became a Constitutional People

The Daily Signal Podcast

The Daily Signal

News, Government, Politics, Daily News

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2022

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This latest podcast is a conversation with Gordon Wood, the great historian of the American Founding, on his new book, Power and Liberty, which details how Americans drafted, ratified, and incorporated written constitutions as fundamental laws into their politics and government.

On the creation of the American Constitution, Wood observes, "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. I know of no one in 1776 that anticipated the kind of federal government that emerged 10 years later. Something awful had to happen in those 10 years to explain the Constitution. I find that it's harder to explain the Constitution than it is to explain the Revolution itself."

Wood also takes on the 1619 Project: "What's interesting about the Revolution is that the Revolution makes slavery a problem for the first time in Western civilization and leads to a massive assault on the slave systems of the New World. . . . The Northern states, almost immediately in 1776, mount a massive assault on slavery, which had been legal in all of these Northern states. By 1804, all the Northern states have abolished slavery, the first states in the history of the world, or at least the modern world, to abolish slavery."

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Saturday edition of the Daily Signal Podcast. I'm Richard Reitch. Today I'm
0:10.5	speaking with Gordon Wood, History Professor Emeritus at Brown University on his new book
0:16.6	Power and Liberty. It's my honor to talk with Gordon Wood today about his new book, Power
0:34.5	and Liberty. Constitutionalism in the American Revolution. Gordon Wood is one of our master's
0:40.3	historians of the American founding. He's the author of numerous books on a subject, books for
0:46.5	which he has received numerous awards. I first started reading Gordon Wood's scholarship my
0:53.2	senior year in undergraduate studies and his book Creation of the American Republic published in
0:59.3	1969 won the Bancroft Prize. His book Radicalism of the American Revolution published in 1992
1:07.5	won the Pulitzer Prize for History, along with the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize. His book Empire of
1:15.5	Liberty, the History of the Early Republic in 2009 was given the Association of American Publishers
1:21.9	Award for History and Biography and that list goes on and on. In 2011 he was awarded a national
1:29.6	humanities medal by President Obama and the Churchill Bell by Colonial Williamsburg. Gordon Wood
1:35.9	would be glad to have you all the program today. I'm glad to be here. So thinking about your new
1:41.1	book Power and Liberty, Constitutionalism in the American Revolution, you turn to, I'm kind of
1:48.4	thinking of it as how did the Americans become a constitutional people. So maybe talk about the book
1:56.3	and what you aim to do with it. Well, the Constitutionalism was really, I think, modern
2:04.4	constitutionalism was really set off by the American Revolution. When we think about creating
2:10.2	constitutions and we've created dozens of them since World War II throughout the world,
2:16.7	they're written documents and it's the American experience that really made that fix. They had
2:22.3	been some written documents earlier but generally speaking people had not thought of constitutions
2:27.5	in the way they think of them now as a single written document. It's the American experience
2:33.6	in 1776 each of the states wrote out their constitution and the federal constitution which occurred
	...

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