Past We the People Book Club Lists

2022-23 Book List

  • The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together – Heather McGhee
  • When We Cease to Understand the World – Benjamin Labatut
  • This Tender Land – William Kent Krueger
  • Become America – Eric Liu
  • American Nations – Colin Woodard
  • Thank You for Arguing – Jay Heinrichs
  • History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past – Jason Steinhauer
  • A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution – Carol Berkin
  • The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee – David Treuer
  • Just Mercy – Bryan Stevenson
  • How Civil Wars Start – Barbara F. Walter

2021-22 Book List

  • There There – Tommy Orange
  • The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again – Robert D. Putnam
  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents – Isabel Wilkerson
  • Call Us What We Carry – Amanda Gorman
  • The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution – Eric Foner
  • Just Mercy: A True Story of the Fight for Justice – Bryan Stevenson
  • Film Intermission: Just Mercy

2020-21 Book List

  • One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy – Carol Anderson
  • They Called Us Enemy (Graphic Novel) – George Takei
  • The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America –  Richard Rothstein

  • Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants – Robin Wall Kimmerer

2019-20 Book List

  • An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (ReVisioning American History) – Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
  • Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, The Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind – Justin Driver
  • The Crucible – Arthur Miller
  • Film Intermission: Knock Down the House
  • Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration – Emily Bazelon
  • Fascism: A Warning – Madeleine Albright

2018-19 Book List

  • Freedom for the Thought that We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment, by Anthony Lewis
  • Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers, by Carl Rishard
  • The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, by Elaine Weiss
  • Fault Lines in the Constitution, by Cynthia & Sanford Levinson (with supplemental Drake Law Review Article “How the United States Constitution Contributes to the Democratic Deficit in America” by Sanford Levinson)
  • Film Intermission: The Wave
  • On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder
  • The Soul of America: the Battle for Our Better Angels, by Jon Meacham

2017-18 Book List

  • Plain, Honest Men, by Richard Beeman
  • Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women’s Rights, by Marjorie Spruill
  • Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
  • The Crisis of the Middle Class Constitution, by Ganesh Sitaraman
  • Film Intermission: RGB
  • Kafka Comes to America, by Steven Wax

2016-17 Book List

  • Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow
  • Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone, by Scott Shane
  • Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
  • Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices, by Noah Feldman
  • Film Intermission: 13th
  • Just Mercy: Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson

2015-16 Book List

  • Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, by Robert Putnam
  • Shay’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle, by Leonard Richards
  • Democracy Reborn: the 14th Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights, by Garrett Epps
  • The Law of the Land: A grand Tour of our Constitutional Republic, by Akhil Reed Amar
  • The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed his Mind, by Thomas Healy
  • Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, by Gilbert King

2014-15 Book List

  • Truman, by David McCullough
  • Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, by Jill Lepore
  • Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, by Woody Holton
  • Six Amendments: How and Why We should Change the Constitution, by John Paul Stevens
  • So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle over Church and State, by Forrest Church
  • Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History, by Daniel Kanstroom

2013-14 Book List

  • The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States, by Gordon Wood
  • Thomas Jefferson: the Art of Power, by Jon Meacham
  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Life Among the Lowly, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • Bending toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy, by Gary May
  • Peyote vs. the State: Religious Freedom on Trial, by Garrett Epps
  • My Beloved World, by Sonia Sotomayor

2012-13 Book List

  • His Excellency: George Washington, by Joseph Ellis
  • Decision in Philadelphia: The Constitutional Convention of 1787, by Christopher Collier
  • The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, by David Potter
  • Our Patchwork Nation, by Dante Chinni
  • Lincoln’s Constitution, by Daniel Farber
  • A More Perfect Constitution, by Larry Sabato