Democracy Reborn understands the Fourteenth Amendment to be the source of individual rights. After a brief synopsis of the Revolutionary Period, at the very beginning of the book, Epps discusses many of the major developments between Appomattox in 1865 and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. He carefully scrutinizes the Thirteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the men who tried to make the aspirations of constitutional and radical abolitionists a reality. The book ends with a capstone of core personalities—including Thaddeus Stevens, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Sumner—and how their lives ended before they had accomplished their ambition for a democratic America.

     While key portions of congressional debates are retold, they are described within the context of individual politicians and advocates for change. Thus, not only does Epps speak of the inquiries, drafts, and decisions of the Joint Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction but of the men who were a part of it. He carefully explains the political allegiances of Johnson, Sumner, Stevens, John A. Bingham, and William Pitt Fessenden. By explaining the positions they and others took on Reconstruction, Epps gets at the factions of the Reconstruction Congress.

     Epps's description of the nineteenth-century suffragette movement is told in the context of its central leaders (205–21). By the time of the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, Garrisonians embraced women's rights. Sara Grimk’ and Lucretia Mott struggled side-by-side with William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass to end the unequal treatment of blacks and women. Epps draws on the fruitful relationship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to follow the developments in women's rights, from support of the abolitionist movement to their disappointment with the use of "male" in the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment. Further, Epps gives an introductory overview of the post-bellum ruptures in the Equal Rights Association, the National Woman Suffrage Association, and the American Woman Suffrage Association over whether to place women's rights issues on hold while pursuing blacks' civil and political rights.

     Yet, the transition back into the proposed Fourteenth Amendment and the violence that followed its announcement (222 ff.) is awkward. It returns to the discussion of the final version of the Fourteenth Amendment without explanation of its connection to the feminist movement.

     The book closes with a birds-eye view of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence following Reconstruction, from the Slaughter-House Cases to Plessy v. Ferguson. The Supreme Court wrenched the primary power over civil rights away from Congress. The justices shifted the balance of power from the federal government back to the states, thereby limiting the significance of national citizenship and broadening the power of local forces. This culminated with the Rehnquist Court's resort to nineteenth-century jurisprudence to strike the Religious Freedom Restoration and Violence Against Women Acts. Epps finds it troubling that contemporary Americans fail to "grasp that their Constitution was changed by the second founders, that their eighteenth-century charter of limited government now contains that nineteenth-century values of equality, openness, and rule of law for all" (269–70).

     The work follows a generally solid chronological order. In places, Epps's transitions between subjects might have been improved to maintain an otherwise smooth narrative. For instance, after a discussions about the Committee of Fifteen (90–101), the Thirty-Ninth Congress's debate on voting rights in 1865 (104–19), and the Freedmen's Bureau bill (129–41), Epps returns to a discussion about the Civil War, black war refugees, and Sherman's March to the Sea (153–63). After an extensive doctrinal discussion on the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment (164–83), Epps turns his attention to Robert Dale Owen's proposed changes to the text, which Congress never adopted. Epps not only focuses on Owen's relevant political and social positions. He digresses about his early career, personal relationship with Fanny Wright, and trust in seances (187–98). This takes the reader through events stemming from 1826 to the Civil War. When Epps returns to Owen's draft of section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment (187), he's lost some of the momentum of his narrative.

     All in all, Epps has written an entertaining and informative single volume history of the Fourteenth Amendment. The work should teach well at the undergraduate level and provide the general reader a helpful introduction into the period.