U.S. historians have something of a fraught relationship with the Supreme Court. Many of us are active Court watchers (perhaps some of us more obsessively than others); as decisions are released, we celebrate those we agree with and worry about the effects of those we don’t. Yet even when cases have outcomes we like, those opinions often come with a side of bad history. This is not a new problem. Despite historians’ long track record of submitting amicus briefs in cases with historical import, members of the Court have never been particularly concerned about grounding their decisions in accurate historical context or analysis. (As Eric Foner has pointed out, even in the twenty-first century, justices have continued to rely on Dunning-era Reconstruction scholarship in cases involving race.1) The Court’s general lack of interest in academic history has been compounded by the growth of “originalism”—a theory that has evolved in recent years to mean a reliance on the “original public meaning” of the Constitution’s text. Both on the Supreme Court and the federal courts more generally, an increasing number of judges subscribes to originalist thinking. Originalism may sound on its face like a call to history, but its proponents have no use for historical methodology; as Jonathan Gienapp has argued, originalists actually challenge the very essence of the historical discipline.2 So historians may follow the courts, but the courts do not follow us back. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that in the past several decades, historians have been less inclined to write constitutional histories. Scholarship exploring constitutional origins and interpretation—especially by the courts—has found a more comfortable home in political science departments and law schools. While never completely ignoring top-down constitutional development, political and legal historians have instead focused their efforts on bottomup stories of people who typically operated outside the power structures of federal governance. The resulting scholarship has been nothing short of

中文翻译：

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挑战宪法：宪法政治，过去和现在

美国历史学家与最高法院的关系有些紧张。我们中的许多人都是活跃的法庭观察者（也许我们中的一些人比其他人更痴迷）；随着决定的发布，我们会庆祝那些我们同意的人，并担心那些我们不同意的人的影响。然而，即使案件有我们喜欢的结果，这些意见也往往带有坏历史的一面。这不是一个新问题。尽管历史学家在具有历史意义的案件中提交了法庭之友摘要的长期记录，但法院成员从未特别关注将他们的决定建立在准确的历史背景或分析中。（正如 Eric Foner 所指出的，即使在 21 世纪，在涉及种族的案件中，法官们仍然继续依赖邓宁时代的重建奖学金。1) 法院普遍对学术史缺乏兴趣，而“原创主义”的增长加剧了这种情况——一种近年来发展起来的理论，意味着依赖宪法文本的“原始公共意义”。无论是在最高法院还是在更普遍的联邦法院，越来越多的法官都认同原创主义思想。从表面上看，原创主义听起来像是对历史的呼唤，但它的支持者对历史方法论毫无用处；正如乔纳森·吉纳普 (Jonathan Gienapp) 所说，原创主义者实际上挑战了历史学科的本质。2 因此，历史学家可能会追随法院，但法院不会追随我们。因此，在过去的几十年里，历史学家不太愿意写宪法历史也就不足为奇了。探索宪法起源和解释的奖学金——尤其是法院——在政治科学系和法学院找到了一个更舒适的家。虽然从未完全忽视自上而下的宪法发展，但政治和法律历史学家反而将精力集中在通常在联邦治理的权力结构之外运作的人的自下而上的故事上。由此产生的奖学金简直就是