A stunning revision of our founding document’s evolving history that forces us to confront anew the question that animated the founders so long ago:
What is our Constitution?
Praise for The Second Creation
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“Gienapp’s study—intellectual history as textual exegesis at its best—offers a convincing and invaluable examination of the words and ideas that marked the evolution of the American constitutional imagination."
— Karen J. Greenberg, The Nation
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"The Second Creation is a brilliant and timely intervention in American constitutional history."
— Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia
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"No one in the future can be considered a literate commentator on the history of the Constitution and American constitutional development who has not carefully read and reflected on Jonathan Gienapp’s stunning book The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era.”
— Sanford Levinson, Balkinization
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"Sophisticated . . . throws a wrench in the logic of judicial originalism by demonstrating the flexibility of the Constitution’s meaning during its first years."
— Nick Burns, The Spectator
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“[A] relentlessly intelligent and substantive book . . . [The Second Creation is], if not outright the best first book on the American founding since Gordon Wood’s legendary 700-plus-page dissertation was rewritten into The Creation of the American Republic, among only a select few that could compete for that honor.”
— Alan Gibson, American Political Thought
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"[Gienapp's] fascinating and provocative story is told with great mastery and drama."
— Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law School
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“[A]n intriguing, highly readable, engaging, and extraordinarily thought-provoking work.”
— Sandra B. Placzek, Law Library Journal
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"Gienapp’s elegant reconstruction of the contested terrain of early American constitutional interpretation has wide-ranging implications for how we understand the earliest debates over the Constitution’s meaning."
— Saul Cornell, Fordham University
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"I am tempted to suggest that this may be the most important book about the Constitution since Max M. Edling’s A Revolution in Favor of Government, if not Gordon S. Wood’s Creation of the American Republic.”
— Brian Steele, William and Mary Quarterly
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"Jonathan Gienapp's new book, The Second Creation, is a marvelous study of the earliest debates over constitutional language, meaning, and interpretation. In virtually every respect, the book is brilliantly conceived, meticulously researched, and masterfully executed.”
— John Mikhail, Constitutional Commentary
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"This important book . . . deserves the attention of anyone seeking to understand how the twists and turn of contingency propelled and gave lasting form to the founding of the Republic.”
— David Konig, Journal of American History
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"This marvelous book will provoke conversations on a host of issues that animate political and constitutional history. Gienapp has written a study that will shape our understanding of the Constitution for years to come.”
— Christopher Childers, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
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“[F]or students and scholars of the period, The Second Creation’s absorbing tale of constitutional possibility serves as a powerful reminder of the dynamism and uncertainty that characterized the Founding Era, and encourages us to re-examine received truths about the very nature of our foundational charter.”
— Kevin Arlyck, Law & History Review
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"Gienapp . . . provides a decisive and necessary intervention in discourse over the place and nature of the Constitution in US history and politics. . . . Deeply researched and convincingly argued, Gienapp's work should be read by all who are interested in the early American Republic and US constitutionalism.”
— Kevin Gannon, Choice
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"For this reason, as well as the stunningly rich and sophisticated treatment of constitutional argument, The Second Creation belongs with such works as Rakove, Original Meanings in the constitutional canon.”
— Mark Graber, Balkinization
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"The Second Creation by Jonathan Gienapp is a remarkable book. Gienapp has done impressive original research, and he writes about complex matters with admirable clarity.”
— Aviam Soifer, Eighteenth-Century Studies
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"Among the many achievements of Jonathan Gienapp’s Second Creation is the book’s elegant and decisive dismantling of many tidy just-so stories that constitutional law scholars tend to tell themselves about the period between 1787 and 1796.”
— Alison L. LaCroix, Balkinization
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“[Gienapp’s] account of the development of constitutionalism during this period is convincing and enlightening.”
— Michael J. Faber, Perspectives on Politics
Prizes and Accolades
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2019 Best Book in American Political Thought Award
American Political Science Association
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2017 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize
Harvard University Press
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Outstanding Academic Title for 2019
Choice
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Book of the Year for 2018
Spectator USA
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Finalist: 2019 Frederick Jackson Turner Award
Organization of American Historians
2019 Publius Symposium
A Conversation about Jonathan Gienapp’s
The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era
Co-hosted by the Stanford Constitutional Law Center and the Stanford Center for Law and History
Balkinization Symposium
Podcasts
New Books Network
Riches & Power
The Age of Jackson Podcast
Laws Dimensions: Musings on Law, Politics, and Culture