Akhil Reed Amar's Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840–1920 covers a period of American history that most of us learned as a series of familiar episodes: the crisis of the 1850s, the Civil War, Reconstruction's rise and fall, the boom of the late 19th century, and the reforms of the Progressive Era. In the standard telling, the Constitution is the province of officials in the federal government—amended in dramatic fashion after the war, interpreted by courts in a mostly linear