EVENT UPDATE 11/6: Jill Lepore is unable to travel to Portland for personal reasons; she will be appearing virtually in a hybrid event with interviewer Geoff Norcross.

Join us for a special event with Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths, and most recently, We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. Lepore will be in conversation with OPB’s Geoff Norcross.

Note: A General Admission Festival Pass (wristband) may get you into this event on first-come first-served basis, however if you purchase an add-on book ticket, you are guaranteed a seat. (Add-on book tickets have sold out, but there will be 600+ seats available on a first-come, first-served basis.)

Book add-on: $35 for a priority seating general admission ticket which includes a copy of We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. Price is in addition to a required General Admission Day-of Festival Pass (wristband), sold separately.

ABOUT WE THE PEOPLE: A HISTORY OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION

From the best-selling author of These Truths comes We the People, a stunning new history of the U.S. Constitution, for a troubling new era.

The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world but also one of the most difficult to amend. Jill Lepore, Harvard professor of history and law, explains why in We the People, the most original history of the Constitution in decades—and an essential companion to her landmark history of the United States, These Truths.

Published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding—the anniversary, too, of the first state constitutions—We the People offers a wholly new history of the Constitution. “One of the Constitution’s founding purposes was to prevent change,” Lepore writes. “Another was to allow for change without violence.” Relying on the extraordinary database she has assembled at the Amendments Project, Lepore recounts centuries of attempts, mostly by ordinary Americans, to realize the promise of the Constitution. Yet nearly all those efforts have failed. Although nearly twelve thousand amendments have been introduced in Congress since 1789, and thousands more have been proposed outside its doors, only twenty-seven have ever been ratified. More troubling, the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Without recourse to amendment, she argues, the risk of political violence rises. So does the risk of constitutional change by presidential or judicial fiat.

Challenging both the Supreme Court’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation and the flawed theory of “originalism,” Lepore contends in this “gripping and unfamiliar story of our own past” that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. The framers never intended for the Constitution to be preserved, like a butterfly, under glass, Lepore argues, but expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution through an orderly deliberative and democratic process.

Lepore’s remarkable history seeks, too, to rekindle a sense of constitutional possibility. Congressman Jamie Raskin writes that Lepore “has thrown us a lifeline, a way of seeing the Constitution neither as an authoritarian straitjacket nor a foolproof magic amulet but as the arena of fierce, logical, passionate, and often deadly struggle for a more perfect union.” At a time when the Constitution’s vulnerability is all too evident, and the risk of political violence all too real, We the People, with its shimmering prose and pioneering research, hints at the prospects for a better constitutional future, an amended America.