NY University Press, 1990

Never before assembled in a single volume - the major writings on the Constitution from six critical traditions. Here is the other side in most of the key disputes over the Constitution from 1789 to the present, the side that was barely heard during the recent Bicentennial celebrations. Yet, it was often the popular side, raising many troublesome questions about the nature of American democracy that still remain to be answered. Now that the applause has subsided, every fair-minded person will want to know what these critics of the Constitution have to say about who did, and is still doing, what to whom, and why. Section 1 outlines the main events and problems that led up to andcontributed to the calling of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Section 2 concentrates on what actually happened at the convention. Section 3 deals with the two-hundred-year history of interpretations and amendments that followed. Section 4 offers a number of ideas that should prove helpful in constructing the adequate theory of the Constitution that still eludes us. Skillfully woven into one volume the forty contributors include voices as varied as those of Gore Vidal, I.F. Stone, Ralph Nader, E.P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, Sheldon S. Wolin, Joan Hoff, Karl Marx, Jackson Turner Main, Charles A. Beard, and W.E.B. Du Bois joined - perhaps surprisingly - by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Thurgood Marshall...