A synthesis of legal, political, and social history to show how the post-founding generations were forced to rethink and substantially revise the U.S. constitutional vision.
Between 1815 and 1861, American constitutional law and politics underwent a profound transformation. These decades of the Interbellum Constitution were a foundational period of both constitutional crisis and creativity.
“No scholar is better equipped to challenge our understanding of the history of federalism than Alison LaCroix. In this pioneering study, she recovers the spirited, contingent, decades-long argument that shaped an era that most constitutional historians have dismissed as uneventful. Essential reading.”
—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
About Professor Alison LaCroix
Alison LaCroix is the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. She is also an Associate Member of the University of Chicago Department of History. She is a scholar of US legal history specializing in constitutional law, federalism, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal thought.
Professor LaCroix’s latest book, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (Yale University Press, 2024), focuses on US constitutional discourse between 1815 and 1861. In 2018, Professor LaCroix was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. She is also the author of The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Harvard University Press, 2010). In 2021, President Biden appointed her to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Map of Milwaukee from 1872