The Constitution Before the Judgment Seat

Originally published in German in 1988, this exhaustive study of the debates over the ratification of the US Constitution compares the methods used to call state ratifying conventions and explores everything that made up the ratification debate, from town meetings and festive culture to private correspondence and print media. In Jürgen Heideking's view, the construction of a new political process was an unintended but key result of ratification debates over the federal Constitution.