We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

We the People by Jill Lepore offers an accessible and comprehensive exploration of how the U.S. Constitution came to be and what it continues to mean today. Lepore argues that the Constitution was never a flawless blueprint. Instead, she shows the document as a product of debate, compromise, and clashing visions that is meant to be continuously amended. Moving between the 18th century and the present, Lepore illustrates how Americans have repeatedly turned to the Constitution to settle conflicts over rights, citizenship, and national identity.

Throughout the text, Lepore argues that the Constitution’s power lies in the ongoing public conversation it inspires. She contends that to sustain a healthy democracy, citizens must engage with the document actively and inclusively, recognizing that “the people” has always been a changing and expanding idea. The book centers on three main themes: The Limits of Constitutional Change, Constitutional Interpretation as a Political Pathway, and Democracy’s Fragility in the Face of Inequality. Lepore is a historian and staff writer for The New Yorker. Her work has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Bancroft Prize and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. 

This guide utilizes the 2025 hardcover edition by Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Content Warning: This book includes visual depictions and historical accounts of sexual violence, physical violence, and racialized violence. 

Summary

In We the People, Lepore examines the U.S. Constitution as both a historical artifact and a living document shaped by generations of argument. She emphasizes that the Constitution emerged from profound disagreements about power, representation, and the very definition of citizenship, and that these tensions have never fully disappeared. By tracing how Americans have invoked the Constitution in moments of crisis and transformation, Lepore highlights the ways the document has been used to broaden rights for some while restricting them for others. Her central claim is that constitutional democracy depends on an informed and engaged public, and that understanding the document’s contested past is essential to navigating the political challenges of the present. Rather than treating the Constitution as fixed, Lepore invites readers to see it as an ongoing project that requires continual interpretation and collective responsibility. 

Lepore opens We the People by tracing the origins of the U.S. Constitution and situating it within a much longer global and intellectual history of law, governance, and political thought. Lepore emphasizes that the Constitution did not emerge fully formed or universally revered; instead, it was the product of improvisation, compromise, and uncertainty. Early American leaders drew from ancient legal codes, Enlightenment philosophy, English common law, and colonial experience, crafting a document designed to balance power while remaining adaptable. From the outset, amendment was understood as essential rather than exceptional. Yet even as the Constitution promised popular sovereignty, its protections were narrowly defined, excluding women, enslaved people, Indigenous nations, and many without property from political participation.

Lepore also highlights how early debates over interpretation shaped the Constitution’s authority and legitimacy. Conflicts between Federalists and Anti-Federalists revealed deep anxieties about centralized power, representation, and the meaning of “the people.” The Bill of Rights emerged not as a guarantee of inclusion but as a negotiated response to fears of tyranny, while early elections and political parties exposed tensions between democratic ideals and elite control. Throughout Part 1, Lepore underscores a central paradox: the Constitution was both an aspirational framework for self-government and a document structured by exclusion and inequality.

Part 2 traces the 19th century as a period of profound constitutional struggle, marked by fierce contests over interpretation and authority. Lepore shows that although social conditions changed rapidly—through westward expansion, population growth, and increasing demands for political inclusion—the Constitution itself remained largely unchanged for decades. Slavery, in particular, immobilized federal reform, forcing constitutional conflict to play out through courts, state conventions, and extra-legal movements. The Supreme Court’s assertion of interpretive supremacy, culminating in decisions such as Dred Scott v. Sandford, narrowed constitutional meaning even as marginalized groups organized conventions and petitions to articulate alternative visions of citizenship and rights. These competing claims revealed interpretation as a powerful political tool—one that could either expand or constrict democratic belonging.

The Civil War and Reconstruction marked a constitutional rupture that exposed both the possibilities and limits of change. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments fundamentally reshaped the Constitution, redefining freedom and citizenship while leaving many exclusions intact. Debates over women’s suffrage, Native citizenship, territorial governance, and imperial expansion demonstrated that democracy remained fragile, especially when constitutional language was used to justify inequality. By extending the constitutional story to Hawaiʻi and Native nations, Lepore reveals how American constitutionalism operated as an instrument of empire as well as reform. Across this section, the Constitution emerges as an ongoing struggle rather than a settled framework—its meaning continually contested in the tension between democratic ideals and the realities of power.

Part 3 traces constitutional change in the United States from the early 20th century through the post—World War II era, a period marked by mass movements, expanded federal authority, and intensified debates over interpretation. Lepore opens this section with the women’s suffrage movement, highlighting the 1913 parade in Washington, D.C., where women marching for a constitutional amendment were met with public hostility and violence. She follows the movement through its internal racial divisions, foregrounding the activism of Ida B. Wells and other Black suffragists, while situating suffrage within the broader rise of Progressivism under Woodrow Wilson. During this period, constitutional amendments—once rare—were ratified with increasing frequency, reshaping democratic participation and federal power.

As the section unfolds, Lepore turns to conflicts over constitutional meaning during periods of social anxiety and economic crisis. Conservative figures such as James Montgomery Beck warned against constitutional reform, while critics linked progressive movements to fears of socialism and the Bolshevik Revolution. Debates over labor protections, child labor laws, and women’s equality played out through legislation, proposed amendments, and Supreme Court decisions, including resistance to the New Deal and shifts in constitutional interpretation. Lepore traces how ideas such as the “living Constitution,” articulated by Charles Beard, gained prominence as courts gradually accepted broader federal authority. The section culminates in the civil rights era, with Brown v. Board of Education and the advocacy of figures like Thurgood Marshall and Ethel L. Payne, showing how constitutional rights were advanced through litigation, journalism, and public pressure—while also revealing the persistent resistance to change that defined modern constitutional history.

The final section of the text traces the late 20th and early 21st centuries as a period in which faith in constitutional amendment steadily declined, even as reverence for the Constitution itself intensified. Lepore shows how amendment became politically impractical amid polarization, while constitutional change increasingly occurred through judicial interpretation, appointments, and cultural conflict rather than collective revision. Through debates over women’s rights, civil rights, and democratic norms, Lepore argues that abandoning amendment weakened democratic participation and deepened inequality.