Livestream of Today's 12 pm EST Book Talk at the National Archives

My book talk today in honor of Constitution Day at the National Archives will be carried on YouTube live here.

Book Talk and Signing at National Archives Sept. 18 12 p.m.

Please join me in the McGowan Theater of the National Archives September 18, at noon, for a book talk and signing.  The address is: 700 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20408.  Reserve a seat here.

An Independence Day Book Review by the Daily Beast

Tom Arnold-Forster reviews America's Forgotten Constitutions for the Daily Beast:

America’s Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community, by Robert L. Tsai, is a history of constitutions written instead and in place of the U.S. Constitution. Looking at a diverse group of “folk legal theorists” from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, Tsai assembles a collection of eight alternatives to the federal republic imagined in 1787. It’s a nicely conceived book, with each “defiant vision” taking up a chapter. And it’s engaging to read: Tsai is a law professor but avoids legalese. He writes briskly but attentively.

He shows that “We the People” has been a problem from the start, and that much has hinged on exactly how plural the pronoun is thought to be....

Rather than dismissing these ideas as silly utopias, Tsai treats them as part of the American legal tradition. And the result is counterfactual in the best sense: an array of unfamiliar and unsettling ideas, which show that the “original meanings” of 1787 (or their malleable afterlife in a “living constitution”) are not the only ones to have existed....

So Tsai gives us a history “characterized by adaptation and reversal, innovation and regression, fragmentation and reorganization.” He suggests that the United States is less about stable liberalism and expanding freedom than aggressive democracy and applied power....his picture is far richer than the grim founder worship usually found in American political orthodoxy.

For Tsai’s constitution writers, the U.S. Constitution stands as an obligatory model, something they necessarily define themselves in relation to....And all, in the end, underline just how largely the Constitution figures in the American political imagination: less a charter of freedom than a document of power.

The full review can be found here.

My Essay in the Boston Globe in honor of Independence Day

Go here.

Read the Constitutions Featured in America's Forgotten Constitutions

For readers interested in a closer look at the documents discussed in my book, America's Forgotten Constitutions, I have included links to the constitutions below.

1.  The Indian Stream Constitution (1832)

2.  Icarian Constitution (1850)

3.  John Brown's Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States (1858)

4.  Constitution for the Confederate States of America (1861)

5.  Constitution for the State of Sequoyah (1905)

6.  Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution (1947)

7.  The Code of Umoja (amended 1985)

8.  Northwest American Republic Constitution (2006)

Seen on the Shelf at Politics & Prose

Write-Up in Hometown Paper

From the Port Townsend Leader.