Description

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A valuable resource for students, teachers, and citizens looking to better understand US Constitutional history

With Liberty and Justice for All?: The Constitution in the Classroom is designed to help teachers and students generate analysis and debate in our nation's classrooms about an aspect of US history that has produced intense disagreements about rights and wrongs: constitutional history. For more than two centuries, Americans have argued about what the US Constitution permits or requires (or not), and what values and ideals it enshrines (or not)--indeed, who is to be included (or not) in the very definition of "We the People."

This book provides abundant resources to explore key moments of debate about the Constitution and its meaning, focusing on fundamental questions of citizenship and rights. It analyzes American history through the use and misuse of the Constitution over time, from early disputes about liberty and slavery to more recent quarrels over equality and dignity. With a foreword by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, this book's succinct and probing essays by prize-winning historians--including Linda Greenhouse, Mary Sarah Bilder, Annette Gordon-Reed, Eric Foner, Sam Erman, Julie Suk, Laura Kalman, and Melissa Murray--provide the core of the book. Their topics encompass woman suffrage, school desegregation, Japanese internment, McCarthyism, all dramatic turning points in American history. Carefully selected and annotated primary sources and focused discussion questions provide teachers with the tools to bring constitutional history into the classroom with ease.

As this book amply demonstrates, United States history is constitutional history. A companion website provides additional resources for teachers.

About the Author

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Steven A. Steinbach teaches United States History and American Government courses and has served as history department chair at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. Previously he was a partner in the Washington, DC, law firm of Williams & Connolly LLP, where he specialized in criminal and civil litigation. Maeva Marcus, a past president of the American Society for Legal History, is Research Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Constitutional Studies at the George Washington University Law School. She serves as the general editor of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States. Author of Truman and the Steel Seizure Case: The Limits of Presidential Power, she also edited the eight-volume series The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789-1800. Robert Cohen, professor in the Department of Teaching & Learning at New York University, has written or edited more than a dozen books about United States history, including Rethinking America's Past: Howard Zinn's The People's History of the United States in the Classroom and Beyond. He is co-founder of the NYU-Steinhardt-NYU School of Law Constitution in the Schools Partnership program.