In the Beginning, Part 2 | America's Written Constitution with Akhil Reed Amar

Ratification was close in Virginia and New York, and one argument would have won votes easily: join now, leave later if you dislike it. The Federalists never made it. Akhil Reed Amar explains why. This lecture takes up what the Preamble left out and what it locked in. Amar looks first at exclusion: women, enslaved people, Native nations, and the tight founding-era link between bearing arms and holding the vote, a link he traces forward to the Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth, and the Twenty-Sixth. He then turns to "a more perfect Union," reading Federalist 5 and 11 alongside the 1707 union of England and Scotland to reconstruct the national security case for indivisibility: a single continental union gets the Atlantic as its moat and needs no standing army large enough to threaten liberty at home. The chapter ends on the contradiction that broke it, since the war the Constitution was built to prevent came anyway, over slavery and the West. Chapters: 00:00 The most democratic deed, restated 02:52 Who was left out, and in what context 05:02 Bearing arms and earning the vote 07:08 Slavery and the boundaries of "the people" 11:13 The world's largest corporate merger 13:17 The model: England and Scotland, 1707 16:50 The geostrategic case for union 20:27 Why the union broke anyway Learning objectives: After watching, you'll be able to: - Identify who was excluded from the founding-era franchise and on what stated grounds - Explain the founding-era connection between military service and voting rights - Summarize the Federalist argument that the union had to be indissoluble - Compare the American union with the 1707 union of England and Scotland - Judge how the pro-slavery Constitution undercut its own national security design 📺 Watch the full playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCq6-l8oFuvk 🎓 Enroll on Coursera for assessments and a certificate: https://www.coursera.org/learn/written-constitution 🌐 Explore more learning opportunities on Yale Online: https://online.yale.edu/courses/americas-written-constitution