Founding Documents: Writing the United States into Being

This chapter draws on range of old and new texts, including Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, the Constitution, and the recent Broadway musical Hamilton to consider the “representational contract” of liberal founding as it is continually renegotiated by new populations over time. The first four texts, and the events they called forth, in many ways form the origin story of the early American republic. In each case an authored text makes the case for what would later become communal law. But they also left problems that are alive enough today to require continual reconsideration. The chapter's goal is to describe these problems and the scholarly debates that surround them.