In May 1787 delegates from across the country--including George Washington, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin--gathered in Philadelphia and, meeting over the course of a sweltering summer, created a new framework for governing: the Constitution of the United States.

Describes how the Constitution came to be written and ratified. Also includes the full text of the document produced by the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

"Ada and Bea are on a tour of Washington, DC, learning all about the US Supreme Court, from its founding in 1789 to today. Along the way, they hear from the Constitution, important justices, and key figures from landmark cases, such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, gaining an understanding of how the Court has shaped our lives"--

Examines the history of the U.S. Constitution written in 1787, and describes the events that led to its formation, those involved, Amendments that were added over its two-hundred-year history, and more.

Constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar tells the story of America's constitutional conversation during its first eighty years -- from the Constitution's birth in 1760 through the 1830s, when the last of America's early leaders died. Amar traces the threads of Constitutional discourse, uniting history and law in a narrative that seeks both to reveal this history anew and to make clear who was right and who was wrong on the biggest legal issues confronting...

"The Federalist Papers -- 85 essays published in the winter of 1787-8 in the New York press -- are some of the most crucial and defining documents in American political history, laying out the principles that still guide our democracy today. The three authors -- Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay -- were respectively the first Secretary of the Treasury, the fourth President, and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in American...

Written by a historian this is an account of the men who met in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 to design a radically new form of government. The author takes readers behind the scenes and beyond the debate to show how the world's most enduring constitution was forged through conflict, compromise, and, eventually, fragile consensus during a time when many Americans feared that a combination of financial distress and civil unrest would doom...