' THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT ' : BOOK REVIEW SNIPPET

'' The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution : A Thousand-Year History. By Mark Peterson, Princeton University.

' The trouble with the American experiment ' : Chances are, the Battle of Hastings in 1066 is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the. U.S. Constitution.

Indeed, as America celebrates its 250th birthday, this year, William 1 and the Norman Conquest of England nearly 1,000 years ago may seem utterly irrelevant.

Not so for the Yale historian Mark Peterson, who begins his stunning revisionist history, '' The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution, '' in the medieval village of. Groton, amid the sheep and meadows of Williams newly acquired realm.

For Peterson, Groton is a good example of the 15,000 places surveyed, assessed and recorded in the massive Domesday Book, a detailed record of England's land, people, resources and power structures that holds the unexpected key to understanding the trajectory of American society.

Peterson is adept at complicating familiar stories from early American history. His magisterial '' The City-State of Boston '' argues that the formation of the United States was terrible for Bostonians, because it yoked a once thriving merchant economy to tyrannical Southern slave interests.

In '' The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution, '' he shifts his attention away from the Massachusetts Bay Puritans to other unexpected tragedies of the country's birth.

The U.S. Constitution Peterson shows was forged in a crisis. The conflict that started in Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts was not so much a revolution as a civil war brought about by mounting resentment towards the way the British Empire interpreted its constitution.

A legal framework scattered across scores of conventions, judicial decisions and treaties that was designed to manage scarcity on a few tiny islands and was ill suited to managing abundance on a continental scale.

!WOW! thanks Claire Rydell Arcenas.