ABSTRACT
The Constitution of the United States is little more than two hundred years old. It has survived civil war and the territorial expansion from thirteen largely agricultural former colonies on the eastern seaboard to an industrial nation of fifty states that stretch across the continent to Alaska and to Hawaii. It has overseen the emergence of the most powerful democracy in the world. The American political system has been subjected to severe strains in the twentieth century, including the need to mobilise for two world wars, the depression of the 1930s, the changing role of government since the Second World War, the challenge of the civil rights movement, the impact of the Vietnam War, and the shock of the Watergate affair which resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The major challenge to American society, has, however, developed since the end of the war in Vietnam. That war jolted the faith of Americans in the inevitability of progress, and in the superiority of their system of government. It also brought to an end the era of the ‘melting pot’, the assumption that all Americans, whatever their origin, would assimilate to American values, adopt English as their first language, and necessarily revere the institutions embodied in the Constitution of the United States. In other words, America has had to face the fact that it is a multicultural society.
