By Linda R. Monk

“This is the way history should be told,” says PBS filmmaker Ken Burns of this collection of nearly 200 first-person accounts by everyday people. Ordinary Americans tells history as the average American actually lived it, covering 500 years of U.S. history from a bottom-up rather than a top-down perspective. Drawn from letters, diaries, autobiographical accounts, and interviews, these Americans’ stories are funny, moving, exasperating, often inspiring. They’re not just about what happened, but how real people felt about what happened.

Here you will meet former slave Olaudah Equiano, who described the passage from Africa to America; Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe, who prophesied his tribe’s removal from their lands; cobbler George Hewes, who participated in the Boston Tea Party; Iowa bride Catherine Haun, who crossed the Great Plains during the gold rush; African-American seamstress Elizabeth Keckley, who viewed Lincoln’s reactions to his son’s enlistment during the Civil War; Cheyenne tribeswoman Kate Bighead, who witnessed Custer’s last stand; sailor Stephen Bower Young, who was trapped in his ship during the bombing of Pearl Harbor; Japanese-American Mary Tsukamoto, who was interned during World War II; nine-year-old Sheyann Webb, who marched for civil rights at Selma; helicopter pilot Robert Mason, who flew rescue missions in Vietnam; United Farmworker Jessie Lopez de la Cruz, who organized her comrades in the fields; and many, many more.

The newly updated version of this bestseller moves into the twenty-first century with insights on Bosnia, the Starr grand jury, Oklahoma City, and the September 11th attacks through the eyes of people who participated in these historical events.

By Linda R. Monk
The Bill of Rights: A User’s Guide explores our Constitution’s first ten amendments and their resilience through time. This award-winning text includes the historical background of the amendments and the rights granted therein, along with a study of the Fourteenth Amendment. Profiles and legal analyses of the Supreme Court cases that have interpreted and upheld these basic human rights are also featured, along with the stories of the ordinary people behind the cases. The book includes a foreword by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Bill of Rights: A User’s Guide is a winner of the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, its highest honor for law-related media.

Your Annotated Guide To the Constitution

By Linda R. Monk

The Words We Live By is designed to give Americans the balanced and accessible information they need to more fully understand the nation’s charter. It is a distilled overview of the historical background, legal analysis, and current controversies of the Constitution. Using the metaphor of the Constitution as a conversation, The Words We Live By is filled with quotes by Americans of wide-ranging views from all walks of life.

America’s conversation about liberty included women and men of all classes, races, and religions—enslaved and free. The slaves of Massachusetts petitioned for their “unalienable right to freedom” in 1777 with words echoing the Declaration of Independence. White men without property sought the right to vote. The Cherokee Nation, although deprived of its land, believed that American Indians should be protected under the Constitution. Women argued that they, too, were included in “We the People.”

The Words We Live By includes the voices of America’s founders and fanatics, of Supreme Court justices and civil rights workers. Among this cacophony are rock star Ted Nugent, first-grader Ruby Bridges, actor Charlton Heston, gay rights activist Michael Hardwick, ex-con Clarence Earl Gideon, and pro-life protester Norma McCorvey.

These stories prove that the Constitution is not self-enforcing and depends upon citizens for its support. As Judge Learned Hand emphasized during World War II: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”

Buy The Words We Live By at Amazon.com now!

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument this week on one of the more explosive questions before it: Whether public school teachers can lead students in the Pledge of Allegiance to a nation “under God.”

In the Newdow case the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that public school teachers within that circuit (comprising nine Western states) violate the First Amendment when they lead students — even those who are willing — in the pledge. The reason? The court said that teachers are endorsing religion, contrary to the Establishment Clause, when they lead the class in reciting the pledge’s words: “one nation, under God.” In a public school setting, the lower court held, nonbelieving children can be coerced by teachers’ actions in a way that adults are not.

The best solution to this problem — one that respects both the community’s desire to instill patriotism and the conscience of religious dissenters — is to end recitation not just of the words “under God” but of the entire Pledge of Allegiance. In its place would go a much better statement of our national values: the Preamble to the Constitution.

The preamble was written in 1787 by the nation’s founders. The pledge was written in 1892 by a socialist minister to honor Christopher Columbus in a children’s magazine. “Under God” wasn’t even in it — the phrase was added in 1954, after a campaign by the Knights of Columbus.

Why the preamble? Because it affirms the sovereignty of “we the people,” who strive for a “more perfect union” and thus “do ordain and establish this Constitution.” That last part is trickier than it seems. It unites citizens in an ongoing responsibility to uphold constitutional values, not just mouth loyalty oaths.

In the current debate about “under God,” it’s important to remember that the Pledge of Allegiance itself has a mottled history in this country. That’s not surprising in a nation where people take oaths seriously. When World War II was brewing in Europe, Jehovah’s Witnesses were the most disliked religious group in America because they opposed saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.

What could it hurt, argued countless school boards and eight Supreme Court justices in a 1940 ruling, for schoolchildren to learn a lesson in patriotism? Jehovah’s Witnesses responded that swearing an oath to a flag was the equivalent of worshipping a graven image. They also noted the similarity of the flag salute, which at the time involved children pointing their outstretched right arms toward the flag, to the “Heil Hitler” salute of Nazi Germany. The Nazis were at that time persecuting Jehovah’s Witnesses for refusing to give that salute.

After the 1940 court decision on the pledge, Witnesses’ children could be denied the right to attend school, even if they stood respectfully and quietly during the pledge. The court’s ruling unleashed a wave of violence against Witnesses nationwide, with 335 attacks against 1,500 Witnesses in 1940 alone — including a castration in Nebraska.

Out of shame over the wave of religious violence it had triggered, the Supreme Court overturned itself only three years later, the fastest reversal in its history. Wrote Justice Robert Jackson, who was later to serve as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials: “To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.”

As amended in 1954, the Pledge of Allegiance makes a statement about God’s role in the republic that the framers of the Constitution omitted in 1787. True, the signature line of the Constitution does include the standard dating convention “in the year of our Lord,” but that hardly qualifies as an assertion equivalent to “one nation under God.” Despite pleas in the ratification debates to add such divine references to the Constitution, the framers believed these are the words we all can agree on:

“We the people, of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”