The Constitution before the Judgment Seat: The Prehistory and Ratification of the American Constitution 17871791

About this book

Originally published in German in 1988 the late Jrgen Heidekings exhaustive study of the debates over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution compares the methods used to call state ratifying conventions and explores everything that made up the ratification debate from town meetings and festive culture to private correspondence and print media. In Heidekings view the construction of a new political process was an unintended but key result of ratification debates over the federal Constitution. Heidekings work anticipated diverse strands of subsequent scholarship; this translation can claim to provide not only an invaluable account of the ratification debates but also a master narrative for integrating future studies.