THE TEXT AND TIMES: A Civic Essay Series

On June 23, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that a New York gun law could stand only if the state could show it matched the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation. Four days later, on June 27, 2022, the same Court ruled that a public-school prayer had to be judged the same way, not by a decades-old legal test, but by whether the founding generation would have recognized it as an establishment of religion. Two amendments. One method. Four days apart. Neither ruling mentions the other. In The Text and the Times, Gerard Tod follows that method past the cases that made headlines: to the Militia Act of 1792, which armed a citizen militia the founders never called a private arsenal; to the 1873 massacre that tested whether the amendment protected freedmen at all; to a cell phone tracked for months without a warrant, where the same historical method reached the opposite conclusion; to a company town from 1946 now standing in for a handful of social media platforms; and to a coin minted in 1864 that a modern court now calls tradition. This is not a book that argues whether history should decide these questions. It is a book that asks whether the history being cited is the history that actually happened, and whose history it was to begin with. The newest volume in the series turns from prayer and power to the method now deciding nearly everything else. Four days is not very long to decide what two centuries meant.