This book provides a comprehensive guide to the United States Constitution. It examines constitutional developments based on a periodization scheme that partly reflects important changes in constitutional governance, from the Jacksonian Era to the beginning of the 1980s. The book’s general historical institutionalist orientation blurs precise distinctions between political science and law, with particular reference to the role of political parties, interest groups, and bureaucrats in operating a constitution designed to prevent the rise of parties, interest-group politics, and an entrenched bureaucracy. The book also considers exertions of power by the Supreme Court, along with the national executive and Congress. There are chapters on federalism as well as liberty, property, religion, free expression and free press, criminal procedure, habeas corpus, and the right to bear arms. In addition, the book discusses Native Americans, race, gender, and citizenship to illustrate contemporary constitutional struggles for equality; the constitutional status of international law, constitutionalism, and constitutional authority; and how, at a time of increasing globalization, people living in the United States can continue to be governed by a constitution meant for a society greatly separated from the rest of the “civilized world.”