Project Description

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From "one of our most prodigious constitutional scholars" (Jonathan Eig), the definitive history of how the ideal of birth equality reshaped the American Constitution, from antebellum debates over slavery and secession, to the Civil War and emancipation, to women’s suffrage

In 1840, millions of Black Americans groaned in the chains of slavery. By 1920, millions of American men and women of every race had won the vote.  

In Born Equal, the prizewinning constitutional historian Akhil Reed Amar recounts the dramatic constitutional debates that unfolded across these eight decades, when four glorious amendments abolished slavery, secured Black and female citizenship, and extended suffrage regardless of race or gender. At the heart of this era was the epic and ever-evolving idea that all Americans are created equal. The promise of birth equality sat at the base of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. But in the nineteenth century, remarkable American women and men—especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln—elaborated a new vision of what this ideal demanded. Their debates played out from Seneca Falls to the halls of Congress, from Bleeding Kansas to Gettysburg, from Ford’s Theater to the White House gates, ultimately transforming the nation and the world. 

An ambitious narrative history and a penetrating work of legal and political analysis, Born Equal is a vital new portrait of America’s winding road toward equality.

SPECIAL BONUS:
Read the remarks by the great historian, Professor Gordon S. Wood, at the Yale Law School conference on Born Equal.

SPECIAL BONUS: Read the remarks by the great historian, Professor Gordon S. Wood, at the Yale Law School conference on Born Equal.

Click to read the full text of Professor Wood's take...

“A pointed, closely argued study of the long historical arc leading to civil equality for all.”―Kirkus (starred review)

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“Legal scholar Amar tracks the evolution of constitutional rights from the heights of ‘slavocracy’ in the 1840s and ’50s through women winning the right to vote in 1920.... An elegantly written and thorough survey of America’s second founding.”―Publishers Weekly

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“Akhil Reed Amar is the most accomplished scholar of his age cohort in both law and history because he writes superb books like Born Equal, which will change the minds of everyone across the political spectrum from Federalist Society members to Bernie Sanders leftists. The history told in this book goes to the very core of what it means to be an American citizen and to understanding our Constitution. Amar knows, that for all our faults, the United States is, as President Ronald Reagan called it, ‘A Shining City on a Hill.’ This book brilliantly proves that Ronald Reagan was right! Born Equal is one of the most important books ever written.”―Steven Gow Calabresi, Clayton J. & Henry R. Barber Professor, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law

“Akhil Reed Amar is one of our most prodigious constitutional scholars, one of our finest teachers, and, as if that were not enough, a writer of stunning grace and power. Born Equal is a masterpiece—and one that could not be better timed, as we struggle yet again to define and deliver the American promise of equality. Essential reading.”―Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life

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