iA great resource that is actually recommended by College Board is the National Constitution Center website. Their interactive Constitution is quite amazing.
This website does for the Constitution what Genius.com does for music. It annotates, questions and illuminates points much like I am trying to do. In fact, it is work done by people much smarter and accomplished than me. As an example, the Preamble has two articles attached to it. One is by Erwin Chemerinsky called "Give Meaning to the Preamble" The second is by Michael Stokes Paulsen and is called "The Preamble's Significance for Constitutional Interpretation". While the Supreme Court may not take much stock in this part of the Constitution there is definitely meaning and importance behind the goals, the order and the wording of the Preamble. They both take a nicer spin on 'We the people" than I did to be fair but it is a great read if you want more perspective from much better sources. Keep reading my friends!
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We are just beginning our journey into the Constitution, last time we worked on the first three words of the Preamble. Now we will delve into the very first goal of this Constitution.
"In Order To Form A More Perfect Union" Now that is a mouthful. What the heck does more perfect mean? How can you improve upon a perfection, right? It's either perfect or it is not. Is this American Exceptionalism...we are already perfect but now we will be more perfect? No, but to understand this phrase and the reason why this goal is FIRST we need to some background and context.
Yeah I know what you're thinking, whenever someone says Preamble your brain automatically goes to this.
That alone tells us that Americans value the words of the Preamble but do we really think about them? Are these words we just memorize in middle school without really contemplating what they say and why they say it?
When I broke down the Declaration of Independence I had to spend a lot of time on the most famous phrases. The Preamble itself will probably take me a long time to digest. To be honest, this first article will probably not get past the first three words... A couple of years ago I had a simple mission; to a model deeper thinking by taking on a powerful text and breaking it down word by word, line by line.
I decided to tackle one of the most important and influential documents in American history, the Declaration of Independence. As the link shows, it was an ambitious project but one of my prouder moments as an educator and an academic. In 2017 I tried to tackle this again with the great "Letter from Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King Jr. I did not get far but the desire to push our understanding and really close read the documents and the world around us continues. Little did I know that I was being strangely prophetic in my document selection these past few years. AP US Government and Politics is undergoing a redesign for the 2018-19 school year and one of the major changes is creating a "required document" list known as the "Foundational Documents". What is on this list? Shocker, both the Declaration and King's great work are both on the list. So I decided to use this College Board list to give me my newest document to parse through. This summer I want to really look at the Constitution. I cannot promise to get through all of it, I know I could finish the King project and I will but there are reasons why I want to do the Constitution now. 1. It perfectly mirrors the Declaration. These two seminal documents always belong together but their relationship remains undefined? Are they complementary? Opposed? Congruent? Somewhere in-between? The relationship from the dream of the Declaration to the plan of the Constitution is something scholars will always be able to write and theorize about. 2. Now seems like a good time to brush up on the laws of our land. 3. Practically it makes sense. The Declaration was meant to help students with their APUSH summer assignment and this project can help AP GOV students with their summer assignment. I will be breaking down the Constitution bit by bit, looking at word choice, connecting thoughts to today, looking for inherent contradictions and everything else that is involved with reflection and analysis. It is time to fight back against the superficial and shallow existence of learning that can become too common in our world. I would love it if you would be willing to contribute to the site too. Whether you are a colleague, former student, random person who found this...just let me know. I do not claim to be the expert on the Constitution and your perspective and analysis has value. Let's model the active and engaged citizenry that the Framers wanted in the first place! |