Three-Fifths Clause

The Electoral College was created to help white Southerners maintain their disproportionate influence in national governance.

It was motivated in part by white Southerners' concerns about taxes, but ended up being all about maintaining their political power.

Despite Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, a Colorado state judge stretches the word “officer,” permitting him to remain on the state’s ballot.

“Colorblindness,” an ideology that denies race as an organizing principle of the nation’s structural order, reaches back to the drafting of the US Constitution.

Did the Confederacy have a constitutional right to secede? And did Lincoln violate the Constitution in forcing them back into the Union and freeing the slaves?

On Akhil Reed Amar’s “The Words That Made Us,” a new history of America’s constitutional conversation.

The document counted my great-great-grandfather as 3/5 of a free person. But the Framers don’t own the version we live by today. We do.

From the Framers on, Americans have understood our fundamental law to oppose ownership of persons.

The Georgia governor’s election was the latest example of how James Madison’s words continue to shape our views on race.

The fight over the 150-year old language in the Constitution is a battle for the very heart of the American republic.

The nation's first "colorblind" tax set the stage for over two centuries of systematic consolidation of white racial interests.

To mark the culmination of Census 2010, we explore the fascinating story of how Americans have counted themselves.

Historian Robin Blackburn has completed a trilogy of books that provide a comprehensive Marxist account of slavery in the New World.

The untold story of the Wide Awakes, the young Americans who took up the torch for their antislavery cause and stirred the nation.

Who is counted by the census, how, and for what purpose, has changed a lot since 1790.

Newly digitized journals reveal the life of Gouverneur Morris, the Constitution preamble writer, vocal opponent of slavery and disabled congressman.

James Oakes’s deeply researched book argues that two very different readings of the 1787 charter put the United States on a course of all but inevitable conflict.

The filmmaker’s new documentary on Benjamin Franklin tells an old and misleading story.

Historian Robin Einhorn reflects on Americans’ complicated relationship to taxes, from the colonial period through the Civil War to the tax revolts of the 1980s.

As the country grew, each census required greater effort than the last. That problem led to the invention of the punched card – and the birth of an industry.