We’re in a moment of political change. This change often brings with it a reinterpretation of our democratic values. Those values originate with The U.S. Constitution and its 27 amendments. The words in these documents are the foundations of our democracy and the promises made are powerful, like the right to free speech, the right of the people to keep and bear arms and the promise that a person cannot be tried twice for the same crime. But what do these words really guarantee, especially as they are reinterpreted time and again as the world changes? Throughline, NPR’s history podcast, has been exploring the long, fraught history of America’s constitutional amendments in a series called “We the People” and in this episode they bring us some of the stories they’ve uncovered in their reporting.
This episode was produced by Kim Nederveen Pieterse and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Special thanks to Sarah Wyman and Julie Caine for their help on this episode. It was fact-checked by Kevin Volkl and the engineer was Kwesi Lee.
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