The Making of America: The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution,   ISBN:9780880800174

Customer Rating: 

This book has the look and feel of something designed for classroom use...perhaps high school or community college level in a class on government.

The typeface (slightly larger point-size than for many books) and the layout of the pages gives that impression right off the bat.

The book has lots of illustrations--all black and white and mostly reproductions of charts, old political cartoons, etc. They are all appropriate to the subject. The text is broken up by subheads --two or three per page--which is more consistent with something geared to the student attention span.

The text does go into fairly complete discussions of various articles of the constitution, various branches of government, with short bios on the individuals who were in attendance at the original conventions.

Lots of quotations from founding individuals and lots of citations that refer the reader to the Federalist Papers (I also bought this book), de Tocqueville, and/or others.

I bought the book because the description in Amazon.com sounded like something that would be quite apropos to my desire to understand America and American history more fully. These things can be more meaningful to you at other stages of life than they were in high school anyway!!

I read some of the customer reviews, including the two negative reviews. All were helpful in my decision making. The seriousness of the two negative reviews really caused me to pause. Was this book worth buying? But then I read the positive reviews and noted that there are 33 positive 5-star reviews and only two 1-star reviews. (Evidently this is not an in-between book so no 2, 3, or 4-star reviews so far.) I own other books on American history and a few are not of the "fair and balanced" mode, so I figured that I could ferret through an ultra-right wing book as much as I do through an ultra-leftist view.

I am glad that I listened to the 33 positives. The two negative reviews are justified in that the author/editor of this book has chosen to include a lengthy quotation from a 1934 book on U.S. economic history which includes remarks about slavery that would be offensive to anyone who understands that slavery was an evil thing. This quote comes on pages 729-730 of The Making of America. I would say that it might have been better if such a quote were set off from the rest of the text by a different typeface or with a box around it, or etc. This would help us to know that it is not part of the actual text. The book does include comments elsewhere that describe slavery as evil and notes as well that several of the Founding Fathers sought to phase it out, etc. I would say that the two negative writers were one-issue people.

Overall, this book does what it sets out to do.

Customer Rating: 

Contrast the sound content of this 1985 textbook to textbooks whose content is always in a state of flux - always being revamped in new editions ostensibly to stay abreast of the latest developments in their subject matter (but more likely in order to stay ahead of students' reselling and sharing last semester's edition).

This is a textbook the likes of which your children will never get in school in any edition from a textbook publisher like Pearson, McGraw-Hill, or Houghton-Mifflin.

You will have to educate your children on this material yourself once you've used it to fill in some of the gaps in the civics/government component of your own public education...

Customer Rating: 

A few nuggets of scholarly wisdom from this steaming pile:

"White schoolchildren would `envy the freedom' of `colored playmates.' Slave food, even if monotonous, was plentiful. Corn bread and bacon were the mainstays, with plenty of fruit and vegetables in season. In hog-killing time, countenances were unusually greasy."

Newly sold slaves "usually a cheerful lot." "The tendency was to sell families as units, if for no other reason [than] to keep the slaves contented. The gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains. At the other extreme, when the Central of Georgia railroad company in 1858 equipped a Negro sleeping car to assist in the slave trade it set a standard not always maintained in a later generation. When on the block, the slave was as likely to hinder as to help in his sale. Some, out of a vain conceit in bringing a high price, would boast of their physical prowess, in which case an unwary purchaser would likely be cheated. Others would malinger, because of a grudge against owners or traders or in order to bring a low price and be put at less tiring labor. Dealers, also, adopted the tricks of horse traders to make their merchants more attractive--the greasiest Negro was generally considered the healthiest." [The Making of America, pages 731-732]

Slaves hampered efficiency of white labor. "In the management of slave labor the gang system predominated. The great majority of owners, having at the most only one or two families of Negroes, had to work alongside their slaves and set the pace for them. Slavery did not make white labor unrespectable, but merely inefficient. The slave had a deliberateness of motion which no amount of supervision could quicken. If the owner got ahead of the gang they all would shirk behind his back." [The Making of America, page 732]

Cruelty rare, slave owners "the worst victims." "Excessive toil occurred only where the masters or overseers were feeble witted as well as brutal. A persistent rumor among abolitionists was that sugar planters followed a policy of working slaves to death in seven years as a matter of economy. The persons spreading such reports were as ignorant of Negro nature as they were of conditions in the sugar mills. Furthermore, they overrated the ability of the masters to know how to kill a slave in the given time instead of leaving him a broken-down burden to the plantation. When they set out to prove the accusation they returned with no evidence, but convinced that the practice existed in some obscure region which they had not succeeded in ferreting out. Harriet Martineau, after watching slaves go through the motions of work without tiring themselves, considered the planters as models of patience and observed that new slave owners from Europe or the North were prone to be the most severe. Numerous observers, of various shades of opinion on slavery, agreed that brutality was no more common in the black belt than among free labor elsewhere, and that the slave owners were the worst victims of the system." [The Making of America, pages 733-734]

Southern life a "nightmare" of fear--for white people. "The constant fear of slave rebellion made life in the South a nightmare, especially in regions where conspiracies were of frequent occurrence. The extermination of white civilization in Santo Domingo was followed in the nineteenth century by several other bloody outbursts in the West Indies, which never failed to cause ominous forebodings in America. [...]



Of course, there is no reason given for why, if the slaves were such a happy, greasy, contented lot, there was such danger of a slave rebellion.

That this book is even for sale through Amazon ought to make each and every Amazon customer feel the need to take a shower.

Customer Rating: 

You will know what the founding father's intended when they drafted our nation's constitution. Learn about the participants in the constitutional convention. Study over 270 principles that the founders systematiclly included in the constition, illustrated by quotes and anecdotes from the constitutional convention in the participants own words. A must read.

Customer Rating: 

We had either this book or one very similar (it might have been published earlier as the Miracle of America) growing up. Dr. Skousen writes at a level that is intuitive enough for a child and yet deep enough for an adult. It provides amazing insights into how the Founding Fathers of this nation intended to preserve our liberties and our inalienable rights endowed by a Creator through the framework of a Constitution that would keep our government chained down and restrained from oppressive actions as practically as possible.

Like the holy scriptures themselves, this book provides us with a knowledge of our god given rights and of common law as understood by our forefathers. You'll be shocked to realize just how many of our freedoms have slowly been eroded away by the collective accumulation and arising predominance of civil law over common law. One example being the advise by many judges today to juries that they are obligated to only find the facts of the case as opposed to the original power of the jury to acquit when they found the laws themselves preposterous to the situation. The predominance of personal liberty and true rule by common law is founded on the original U.S. Constitution. Dr. Skousen has done an excellent job summarizing just how miraculous the founding of this nation was and providing meaningful explanations of each clause and Amendment to the Constitution. Some Amendments to the Constitution have eroded away some of the pristine ideals of true liberty (e.g. those that paved the way to our present income tax, while others have furthered the cause of liberty by leading to more equal rights and protection under the law to all men regardless of race and/or sex.

I would recommend that every freedom loving family have a copy of this book next to their copies of the word of God where every child can have easy access to this wonderful reference and realize their god given dignity and freedoms.