The Second Creation

Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era

By: Jonathan Gienapp

Narrated by: Kristoffer Tabori

A stunning revision of our founding document’s evolving history that forces us to confront anew the question that animated the founders so long ago: What is our Constitution?

Americans widely believe that the United States Constitution was created when it was drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788. But in a shrewd rereading of the founding era, Jonathan Gienapp upends this long-held assumption, recovering the unknown story of American constitutional creation in the decade after its adoption - a story with explosive implications for current debates over constitutional originalism and interpretation.

When the Constitution first appeared, it was shrouded in uncertainty. Not only was its meaning unclear, but so too was its essential nature. Was the American Constitution a written text, or something else? - Was it a legal text? Was it finished or unfinished? What rules would guide its interpretation? Who would adjudicate competing readings? As political leaders put the Constitution to work, none of these questions had answers. Through vigorous debates they confronted the document’s uncertainty, and - over time - how these leaders imagined the Constitution radically changed. They had begun trying to fix, or resolve, an imperfect document, but they ended up fixing, or cementing, a very particular notion of the Constitution as a distinctively textual and historical artifact circumscribed in space and time. This means that some of the Constitution’s most definitive characteristics, ones which are often treated as innate, were only added later and were thus contingent and optional.

©2018 President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2019 Post Hypnotic Press Inc.

A Fascinating History

History is at its most powerful when it unearths the construction of deeply significant norms and practices that makes you question your assumptions about how society functions. This book is a poster child for that in that it makes you think about the way we view and talk about the US constitution. It also exposes the myths surrounding popular notions of the sanctity of “the framer’s intentions”. Can not recommend this strongly enough. Majestically written, engaging, thorough and paradigm shifting.

An important corrective

Gienapp’s The Second Creation offers a thorough, and perhaps exhaustive, account of constitutional creation and interpretation in the early American republic. It serves as an important corrective to both existing historical scholarship and (perhaps more importantly) judges attempting to hide their partisan activism under the guise of “originalism.”

Great book, frustrating narration

The substance of this book is terrific; a well-researched, very insightful account of how people thought about the nature of the Constitution, and constitutions generally, in the Founding era, with important (arguably fatal) implications for originalist interpretation theories. But I completely agree with other reviewers about the narration: the narrator's constant announcement of "quote/unquote"--often several times in one sentence, dozens of times in a minute--is distracting to the point of being unbearable. And it's wholly unnecessary in an audio narration, where quoted material can be conveyed by voice intonation instead announcing every quotation mark.

Ratifying Convention Breathed Life into Constitution

James Madison said that. It is a living constitution because We The People breathed life into it! Those first ten years of congress of which Madison was involved created the originalist and living constitution concept. And Madison played every side of it. Fascinating and ground breaking research and weaving the the research into understandable form from my limited perspective.

Quote, Unquote

Terrific book. The issue is with the reading of it. It’s an academic book that constantly quotes other sources, and the reader begins and ends each quotation by saying “quote/unquote.” This happens sometimes multiple times per sentence and quickly becomes grating. It adds little to no value for a listener but is very distracting.

Infuriating Narration

I was very much looking forward to hearing this book. The underlying content (so far) is impressive, as I expected, BUT I will not listen to the rest. The performance is maddening in one very specific way. As I had heard, Mr. Gienapp took extraordinary pains to reference and accurately cite his sources, often using multiple fragments of Founders' writings in a single paragraph, or even in a single sentence. He carefully put any direct quotations between quotation marks. This is admirable. However, instead of setting such quotations off by using inflection, as many narrators do, this performer, Mr. Tabori, insists on saying, "quote" at the beginning and "unquote" at the end of every such citation. The result is a narration that is SO choppy that the meanings of the sentences becomes fragmented and difficult to follow. I am only partway through Chapter 1, and I have heard the words "quote" and "unquote" more than one hundred times already. It has become like listening to nails on a chalkboard. This approach to quotations is not a reading style. It is a tic.