Diana Schaub co-authors this anthology that uses the power of story, speech, and song to help Americans realize more deeply who they are as citizens of the United States by featuring dozens of selections on American identity, character, and civic life by our country's greatest writers and leaders.

Click here to buy the book.

Designing a Polity: America's Constitution in Theory and Practice shows how America's founders sought to build into American life the principles of liberty, limited government, and political moderation, especially in the public appeals made in pursuit of the presidency. This book expands our understanding of founding to include not only the formal institutional arrangements sketched in the Constitution but also the ideas and intellectual instruments that support constitutional government. The most important of those ideas are a doctrine of natural rights (a foundation) and the kind of political science needed to analyze and evaluate political life. The founders were as much concerned with establishing these intellectual elements of the polity as they were with creating the legal framework of the government, as the institutions are supported over the long term by those ideas. Following this notion of design, the book goes on to confront some of the major contemporary challenges to these ideas, including theoretical criticisms of the foundation of natural rights and efforts to replace the founders' version of political science with a new form of positivist social science.