Beau Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Chair in Government at Skidmore College. The author of three books, including the award-winning A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law (Stanford University Press, 2021), Breslin writes a weekly column in The Fulcrum and has appeared on C-SPAN, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, Listening to America, Consider the Constitution, and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. on political science from the University of Pennsylvania. From 2011-2018, he was Skidmore’s Dean of the Faculty.
SESSION INFO:
Saturday, October 5, 10:30am at City Center Room 2B: Saving Democracy: A Conversation with Corey Brettschneider & Beau Breslin
Books
About A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law
What would America's Constitutions have looked like if each generation wrote its own?
"The earth belongs...to the living, the dead have neither powers nor rights over it." These famous words, written by Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, reflect Jefferson's lifelong belief that each generation ought to write its own Constitution. According to Jefferson each generation should take an active role in endorsing, renouncing, or changing the nation's fundamental law. Perhaps if he were alive today to witness our seething debates over the state of American politics, he would feel vindicated in this belief.
Madison's response was that a Constitution must endure over many generations to gain the credibility needed to keep a nation strong and united. History tells us that Jefferson lost that debate. But what if he had prevailed? In A Constitution for the Living, Beau Breslin reimagines American history to answer that question. By tracing the story from the 1787 Constitutional Convention up to the present, Breslin presents an engaging and insightful narrative account of historical figures and how they might have shaped their particular generation's Constitution.