Preeminent constitutional scholar and Yale University professor Akhil Reed Amar joined the Museum as the distinguished lecturer for the fifth Carl M. Buchholz Memorial Lecture. His talk focused on his most recent book The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840, which provides a history of the American Constitution's formative decades.
In The Words That Made Us, Akhil Reed Amar unites history and law in a vivid narrative of the biggest constitutional questions early Americans confronted, and he expertly assesses the answers they offered. His account of the document’s origins and consolidation is a guide for anyone seeking to properly understand America’s Constitution today.