The U.S. Constitution is often depicted in popular films, teaching lessons about what this founding document means and what it requires. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington educates how a bill becomes a law. 12 Angry Men informs us about the rights of the accused. Selma explores the importance of civil rights, voting rights, and the freedom of speech. Lincoln shows us how to amend the Constitution. Not only have films like these been used to teach viewers about the Constitution; they also express the political beliefs of directors, producers, and actors, and they have been a reflection of what the public thinks generally, true or not, about the meaning of the Constitution. From the indictment of Warren Court rulings in Dirty Harry to the defense of the freedom of the press in All the President’s Men and The Post, filmmakers are often putting their stamp on what they believe the Constitution should mean and protect. These films can serve as a catalyst for nationwide conversations about the Constitution and as a way of either reinforcing or undermining the constitutional orthodoxies of their time. Put another way, these films are both symbols and products of the political tug of war over the interpretation of our nation’s blueprint for government and politics. To the contemporary student and the casual reader, popular films serve as an understandable way to explain the Constitution. This book examines several different areas of the Constitution to illuminate how films in each area have tried to engage the document and teach the viewer something about it. We expose myths where they exist in film, draw conclusions about how Hollywood’s constitutional lessons have changed over time, and ultimately compare these films to what the Constitution says and how the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted it. Given the ever-present discussion of the Constitution in American politics and its importance to the structure of the U.S. government and citizens’ rights, there is no question that the popular perceptions of the document and how people acquire these perceptions are important and timely.

Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice. The story of camp as you’ve never seen it before. Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II -- but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien; HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.

“BEST PLAY OF THE YEAR” New York Times · New Yorker · TIME · Hollywood Reporter · Newsweek · BuzzFeed · Forbes · New York · NPR · Washington Post · Entertainment Weekly · Los Angeles Times · Chicago Tribune Finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama When she was fifteen years old, Heidi Schreck started traveling the country, taking part in constitutional debates to earn money for her college tuition. Decades later, in What the Constitution Means to Me, she traces the effect that the Constitution has had on four generations of women in her family, deftly examining how the United States’ founding principles are inextricably linked with our personal lives.

This book analyzes how films have accurately or inaccurately portrayed the powers, rights, and freedoms within the U.S. Constitution, and it also explores how filmmakers' lessons about the Constitution have changed over time. This book would make an excellent addition to a course or research on constitutional law or film analysis.

Americans revere their Constitution. However, most of us are unaware how tumultuous and improbable the drafting and ratification processes were. As Benjamin Franklin keenly observed, any assembly of men bring with them "all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests and their selfish views." One need not deny that the Framers had good intentions in order to believe that they also had interests. Based on prodigious research and told largely through the voices of the participants, Michael Klarman's The Framers' Coup narrates how the Framers' clashing interests shaped the Constitution--and American history itself. The Philadelphia convention could easily have been a failure, and the risk of collapse was always present. Had the convention dissolved, any number of adverse outcomes could have resulted, including civil war or a reversion to monarchy. Not only does Klarman capture the knife's-edge atmosphere of the convention, he populates his narrative with riveting and colorful stories: the rebellion of debtor farmers in Massachusetts; George Washington's uncertainty about whether to attend; Gunning Bedford's threat to turn to a European prince if the small states were denied equal representation in the Senate; slave staters' threats to take their marbles and go home if denied representation for their slaves; Hamilton's quasi-monarchist speech to the convention; and Patrick Henry's herculean efforts to defeat the Constitution in Virginia through demagoguery and conspiracy theories. The Framers' Coup is more than a compendium of great stories, however, and the powerful arguments that feature throughout will reshape our understanding of the nation's founding. Simply put, the Constitutional Convention almost didn't happen, and once it happened, it almost failed. And, even after the convention succeeded, the Constitution it produced almost failed to be ratified. Just as importantly, the Constitution was hardly the product of philosophical reflections by brilliant, disinterested statesmen, but rather ordinary interest group politics. Multiple conflicting interests had a say, from creditors and debtors to city dwellers and backwoodsmen. The upper class overwhelmingly supported the Constitution; many working class colonists were more dubious. Slave states and nonslave states had different perspectives on how well the Constitution served their interests. Ultimately, both the Constitution's content and its ratification process raise troubling questions about democratic legitimacy. The Federalists were eager to avoid full-fledged democratic deliberation over the Constitution, and the document that was ratified was stacked in favor of their preferences. And in terms of substance, the Constitution was a significant departure from the more democratic state constitutions of the 1770s. Definitive and authoritative, The Framers' Coup explains why the Framers preferred such a constitution and how they managed to persuade the country to adopt it. We have lived with the consequences, both positive and negative, ever since.

Den amerikanske forfatning som tegneserie

In “an unabashedly biased, deeply researched book” (SF Gate), Ed Asner—the actor who starred as Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show—reclaims the Constitution from the right-wingers who think that they and only they know how to interpret it. Ed Asner, a self-proclaimed dauntless Democrat from the old days, figured that if the right-wing wackos are wrong about voter fraud, Obama’s death panels, and climate change, they are probably just as wrong about what the Constitution says. There’s no way that two hundred-plus years later, the right-wing ideologues know how to interpret the Constitution. On their way home from Philadelphia the people who wrote it couldn’t agree on what it meant. What was the president’s job? Who knew? All they knew was that the president was going to be George Washington and as long as he was in charge, that was good enough. When Hamilton wanted to start a national bank, Madison told him that it was unconstitutional. Both men had been in the room when the Constitution was written. And now today there are politicians and judges who claim that they know the original meaning of the Constitution. Are you kidding? In The Grouchy Historian, Ed Asner leads the charge for liberals to reclaim the Constitution from the right-wingers who use it as their justification for doing whatever terrible thing they want to do, which is usually to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. It’s about time someone gave them hell and explained that progressives can read, too.