Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment
 | Basic Books, 2008, Kindle Edition Customer Rating: 12 reviews Recommend |
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More than any other people on earth, Americans are free to say and write what they think. The media can air the secrets of the White House, the boardroom, or the bedroom with little fear of punishment or penalty. The reason for this extraordinary freedom is not a superior culture of tolerance, but just fourteen words in our most fundamental legal document: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution. In Lewis’s telling, the story of how the right of free expression evolved along with our nation makes a compelling case for the adaptability of our constitution. Although Americans have gleefully and sometimes outrageously exercised their right to free speech since before the nation’s founding, the Supreme Court did not begin to recognize this right until 1919. Freedom of speech and the press as we know it today is surprisingly recent. Anthony Lewis tells us how these rights were created, revealing a story of hard choices, heroic (and some less heroic) judges, and fascinating and eccentric defendants who forced the legal system to come face-to-face with one of America’s great founding ideas.
Title: Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment
Sales Rank: 10554 in Books
Author: Anthony Lewis
Publisher: Basic Books, 2008-01-07, Kindle Edition, 240 pages
- Outstanding
- This book is an outstanding read. Concise, to the point and loaded with facts pertaining to the issue at hand make this a refresher course to bring the layman up to speed on his First Amendment knowledge and what it does and does not cover. More reviews
- Freedom? You Want Some of This..
- Read this book(!) if you care about the freedoms we enjoy in America or wonder about the limits that have been placed on them. It is history.., but the book reads like a set of short stories. It is enlightening, insightful, surprising, engaging, and down right scary in parts (the whos and whys of many court decisions) . Whether your interests are in freedoms related… More reviews
- Great perspective: Understanding how tenuous the right can be makes us more likely to protect it
- One of my favorite things about reading history is getting a perspective on how new some ideas are even when they feel like they've been around forever. This book absolutely has that effect... and it's a really healthy thing.
Lewis does a nice job of laying out the history of free speech. He starts before the founding of the United… More reviews
- Let Every American Read This
- Unless a person goes to law school, it is unlikely that he or she will learn the 200 year old history of the First Amendment...yet is is a fascinating and necessary history to learn. The thesis of the book is that our common notion of what "freedom of speech and press" means in America is not self evident law. In fact, the author explains, our right to criticise the… More reviews
- The "Right" that we all take for granted!
- Thank you Mr. Lewis for taking the time to write this book. I cannot stop talking to friends, colleagues, and strangers about how it has brought to my attention just how recent our "freedom of speech" really is. Although our founding fathers might have written the text over 200 years ago, men and women were still being… More reviews
