With the writing of the Constitution in 1787, the framers set out a young nation’s highest ideals. And ever since, we’ve been fighting over it — what is in it and what was left out. At the heart of these arguments is the story of America. As a follow-up to the popular Washington Post podcast “Presidential,” reporter Lillian Cunningham returns with this series exploring the Constitution and the people who framed and reframed it — revolutionaries, abolitionists, suffragists, teetotalers, protesters, justices, presidents – in the ongoing struggle to form a more perfect union across a vast and diverse land.
Latest episodes
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59 sec
Introducing, "The Sports Moment"
Ava Wallace, sports reporter at The Washington Post, is in France to report on the Summer Games — and eat a lot of croissants. Join her through the entire run of the games, for sev…
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4 min
Introducing “The Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop”
Grenada’s Black revolutionary leader, Maurice Bishop, was executed in a coup in 1983, along with seven others. The whereabouts of their remains are unknown. Now, The Washington Pos…
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56 min
Listen to the first episode of “Field Trip”: Yosemite National Park
To hear the rest of the series, follow “Field Trip” wherever you listen. California’s Sierra Nevada is home to a very special kind of tree, found nowhere else on Earth: the giant s…
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3 min
Introducing “Field Trip”
Journey through the messy past and uncertain future of America’s national parks. The Washington Post’s Lillian Cunningham ventures off the marked trail to better understand the mos…
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4 min
Introducing "Broken Doors"
No-knock warrants allow police to force their way into people’s homes without warning. What happens when this aggressive police tactic becomes the rule, rather than the exception?…
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55 min
Ourselves and our posterity
In the "Constitutional" finale, we address listener questions about the history--and future--of the nation's governing document.
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52 min
The First Amendment
Why do First Amendment rights trump nearly every other right in America? Thank Jehovah's Witnesses.
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45 min
Privacy
How should the Constitution's privacy protections be translated for a new era? This is a question before the Supreme Court today, but it was also a question that captivated a justi…
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53 min
Prohibition
The passage and then repeal of the 18th Amendment, banning alcohol in America, highlighted the pitfalls of trying to legislate against vice.
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42 min
Taxes
Congress today faces the same question it faced a century ago when creating the modern tax system: What kind of society should America be?
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49 min
The common defense
One intention the framers had when creating the U.S. Constitution was to “provide for the common defense.” But who shoulders that duty has not always been so clear.
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41 min
War
What was the original point of the Second Amendment? We examine its colonial and revolutionary roots—plus its quiet companion, the Third Amendment—with renowned American history sc…
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39 min
Love
The words "marriage" and "love" appear nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. Yet 50 years ago, the Supreme Court issued a decision that would embed those concepts in the heart of the d…
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51 min
Fair punishment
"There is so much feeling of racial injustice around the issue of punishment. And you have to understand that those feelings have a history -- and that history is Parchman Farm."
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47 min
Fair trials
In 1963, the Supreme Court ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that states must offer a defense attorney to all poor people accused of crimes. The decision transformed the concept of fai…
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39 min
Congress and citizens
Is it a feature or a bug of the amendment process that an idea of James Madison's, more than 200 years ago, could be recently resurrected and etched into the U.S. Constitution?
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45 min
Senate and states
When the United States changed its process for electing senators, did that lead to a decline in state power? Or did it instead bring us closer to a "more perfect union"?
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49 min
Gender
From the American Revolution through today, women have been leading a long-burning rebellion to gain rights not originally guaranteed under the Constitution.
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52 min
Race
As powerful as it was to change the Constitution after the Civil War, and enshrine racial equality into our governing document, that wasn’t enough to change the reality of life in…
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47 min
Nationality
What makes someone American? A landmark Supreme Court case in 1898, involving a child born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents, would help answer that question.