| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 101.3

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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 101.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

A Community Built on Words: The Constitution in History and Politics

By H. Jefferson Powell

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. x, 251. Notes, index. $35.00.)


What explains the success of the United States from uncertain beginnings through more than two centuries of challenges and change: our people, our values, our culture, our natural resources, our faiths? All plausible, and partial, answers. Legal scholar H. Jefferson Powell suggests another: our words, particularly the words of our Constitution.	1
Powell's rich and ambitious book covers impressive ground, twenty-one chapters devoted to a series of constitutional controversies that span the years 1790 to 1944. Some controversies are relatively familiar: the M'Culloch v. Maryland (1819) decision that upheld Congress's authority to establish a national bank and found expansive congressional power to enact federal legislation, and the infamous Korematsu (1944) decision that upheld the wartime internment of more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans. In other chapters, Powell introduces readers to little-known constitutional events of substantial import, such as an obscure period in 1808-1809 that he describes as "one of the most important in the entire history of American constitutional law," in which a Supreme Court Justice, a federal district court judge, and a President each made decisions that were politically unpopular and contrary to personal preferences for the sake of fidelity to the law (p. 110).	. . .

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