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A short, accessible collection of key historic writings about presidential impeachment, as part of a new Penguin Classics series on liberty and constitutional rights. A Penguin Classic With the Penguin Liberty series by Penguin Classics, we look to the U.S. Constitution’s text and values, as well as to American history and some of the country’s most important thinkers, to discover the best explanations of our constitutional ideals of liberty. Through these curated anthologies of historical, po...

The debate over the Constitution reached a climax in Virginia during June 1788 as a closely divided Convention vigorously debated the merits of the new frame of government. Virginians, like many other Americans, realized the importance of the Old Dominion in the ratification process. Without Virginia's approval, the Union would be incomplete and divided. This third Virginia volume contains the last two-thirds of the Convention debate, which turned on whether to adopt the Constitution uncondition...

In this landmark book, Daniel Crofts examines a little-known episode in the most celebrated aspect of Abraham Lincoln's life: his role as the ""Great Emancipator."" Lincoln always hated slavery, but he also believed it to be legal where it already existed, and he never imagined fighting a war to end it. In 1861, as part of a last-ditch effort to preserve the Union and prevent war, the new president even offered to accept a constitutional amendment that barred Congress from interfering with slav...

The United States has become ever more deeply entrenched in powerful, rival, partisan camps, and its citizens more sharply separated along ideological lines. The authors of this volume, scholars of political science, economics, and law, examine the relation between our present-day polarization and the design of the nation's Constitution. The provisions of our Constitution are like "parchment barriers"-fragile bulwarks intended to preserve liberty and promote self-government. To be effective, the...

The Old State House in Hartford, Connecticut, was the site of two key political conventions in the early nineteenth century. The legislatures of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island sent official delegations to the first "Hartford Convention" at the end of 1814, when the War of 1812 was going badly. This convention threatened to make a separate peace with Britain if certain amendments to the United States Constitution were not accepted, and fell into disgrace when the war came to an unex...

This book is the most comprehensive review of all the major proposals to rewrite, revise, or even replace the U.S. Constitution, covering more than 170 proposals from the nation's beginnings to the present day. The U.S. Constitution was carefully written by a remarkable group of men, but subsequent generations of Americans have devoted enormous time and energy to "improving" it. From colonial times to the present day, Americans of all political persuasions have campaigned to reform, remake, or...