Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution

By: Woody Holton

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Average Americans were the true framers of the Constitution.

Woody Holton upends what we think we know of the Constitution's origins by telling the history of the average Americans who challenged the framers of the Constitution and forced on them the revisions that produced the document we now venerate. 

The framers who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were determined to reverse America's post-Revolutionary War slide into democracy. They believed too many middling Americans exercised too much influence over state and national policies. That the framers were only partially successful in curtailing citizen rights is due to the reaction, sometimes violent, of unruly average Americans.  

If not to protect civil liberties and the freedom of the people, what motivated the framers? In Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, Holton provides the startling discovery that the primary purpose of the Constitution was, simply put, to make America more attractive to investment. The linchpin to that endeavor was taking power away from the states and ultimately away from the people. 

In an eye-opening interpretation of the Constitution, Holton captures how the same class of Americans that produced Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts (and rebellions in damn near every other state) produced the Constitution we now revere.  

Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution is a 2007 National Book Award finalist for nonfiction.

©2007 Woody Holton (P)2018 Tantor

A different approach

A different look at background and sausage making that led to our Constitution and Bill of Rights. A bit repetitive but still quite informative.

Very good book.

A very good book. Well researched and a great read. I have both the hard back and now the audible copy. I have listened to it three times while I travel and require readings from it for my high school students.

History in the service of politics

This author argues that equity of outcome was always a goal of the American Revolution. Equity of outcome is a Marxist principle and its use here distorts both the Founding and the Founders, who were more interested in equality of opportunity.

Lots of data and wrong interpretations.

Excellent research. But left-populist bias permeates every line and offers nothing but straw men as the arguments against his thesis.