Bringing History to Life
Bringing History to Life: Creating the U.S. Constitution.
Feb. 28, 2019 Idaho State Capitol, Lincoln Auditorium
In 1787, when the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, the country was in trouble. Many of the nation's founders feared that their young republic was coming apart and that they had to act decisively to save it. They asked the most fundamental questions — How do we bring the nation together? How do we empower the majority while preserving the rights of the minority? How do we distribute power between the federal government and the states? — and they struggled mightily to answer them.
In February 2019, Professor David A. Moss put these same questions to us again bringing his wildly popular Harvard course on American democracy to Boise in this one-time public forum inside the Idaho State Capitol's Lincoln Auditorium.
This event, hosted by the University of Idaho McClure Center for Public Policy Research and the University of Idaho College of Law, invited community members, legislators, judges, state agency leaders, educators and high school students from around the state to step into the shoes of our predecessors — face the decisions they faced — and see both the past and the present in a whole new light.
David A. Moss, author of the acclaimed book "Democracy: A Case Study" and the Paul Whiton Cherington Professor at the Harvard Business School, makes history come alive with an audience-driven discussion on how our republic — and democracy as we know it — came about.