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Today the public square is alive with politically charged debates about our Constitution: Does the Establishment Clause mandate the separation of church and state? What do the impeachment clauses really mean? And what would the founders think about presidential power today?

This virtual lecture by university professor and author Andrew Porwancher rescues the Constitution from its frozen amber and places it back in its historical moment to help us understanding it’s meaning. By returning to the founding generation, we find that many hidden truths are buried within the Constitution and that many enduring myths continue to shroud our understanding of its text. We’ll follow the evidence where it leads and uncover the real origins of our constitutional democracy.

About the presenter: Andrew Porwancher is a professor of history at Arizona State University. His fifth book is “American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews” (Princeton University Press, 2025). Porwancher previously served as the May Fellow at Harvard, the Horne Fellow at Oxford, and the Garwood Fellow at Princeton. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.