The book is careful and thorough—chock-full of historical evidence—but Gienapp’s argument is ultimately straightforward. Founding-era Americans didn’t think of the Constitution as the kind of thing that had a fixed meaning. Therefore, it wouldn’t have made sense to look for unchanging original meanings that were fixed for all time in the Constitution’s text. So if one would like to be an originalist, that original history says not to be an originalist. “When we recover Founding-era constitutionalism,” Gienapp writes, “we discover how deeply at odds originalism is with the history it claims to recover.” His book reveals “how un-originalist originalism turns out to be.”

-Andrew Lanham in The New Republic