The Constitution begins with three words: We the People. But in 1787, who counted as “the people”? And what did it mean to take part in the political life of a brand-new nation?

Host Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey talks with Dr. Rosemarie Zagarri, professor of history at George Mason University and author of Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic and The Politics of Size: Representation in the United States, 1776–1850. They trace the shift from subjects of a king to citizens of a republic, and how each state wrote its own answer to who could vote, who could hold office and who belonged.

Zagarri shows how much politics happened outside the ballot box. Women boycotted British goods, wore homespun and drank herbal tea in protest. Some formed their own Daughters of Liberty. In New Jersey, women and free Black people who owned enough property could vote from 1776 until 1807, when the legislature took that right away. And she untangles the three-fifths compromise, and why counting people instead of places was a radical idea at the time.

Finally, what the founding era tells us today. Voting is essential. But citizenship has always been bigger than the ballot: petitioning, protesting, writing and speaking out. As Zagarri puts it, that’s how change happens.

The Constitution created a government. It did not create citizens. Once it took effect, Americans had to figure out what people needed to know to govern themselves, and who should get the chance to learn it. Again and again, their answer was education.

Host Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey talks with Dr. Mark Boonshoft, associate professor of history at Virginia Military Institute, where he directs the constitutional history program, and author of Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic. They look at why the founding generation worried so much about schooling: Benjamin Rush’s call to turn students into “republican machines,” fears about young Americans studying abroad, and a national university that the first six presidents wanted and never got.

Boonshoft also takes up the harder side of the story. Jefferson and Madison built the University of Virginia while the state’s common schools went without. The founders’ “aristocracy of merit” often kept power with the same people who held it before. And free Black communities who invested in schools saw their voting rights cut anyway. New York dropped the property requirement for white voters in 1821 and raised it for Black voters.

Finally, what cadets at VMI learn from constitutional history: that citizens drive constitutional change, and that the Constitution is something built and kept up, not just read. As Boonshoft puts it, you can’t defer the maintenance on the republic.

The Constitution began as an experiment. Once it took effect, Americans had to figure out what it actually meant. They did not agree.

Host Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey talks with Dr. Jonathan Gienapp, professor of history and law at Stanford University and author of The Second Creation and Against Constitutional Originalism. They look at what the word "constitution" meant in 1787, why Madison saw the Articles of Confederation as a treaty rather than a true constitution, and how the First Federal Congress wrestled with questions the document left open: who can remove executive officers, a question the Supreme Court took up again in 2026, and whether Congress could charter a national bank.

They also take on the "James Madison problem." Did Madison flip-flop in the 1790s, or did he refine his views through experience? And Gienapp offers advice for anyone who looks to the founders for answers today: assume less, not more.