Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar opens his course on the U.S. Constitution by laying out how he will teach it: straight through the text in the order it was written, starting with the Preamble and moving through Articles I through VII, then the amendments in historical sequence from the Bill of Rights to Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, and the 1960s onward. He previews three themes he will track across the full document, how democratic it was for its time, how deeply it was compromised by slavery, and how much of it was shaped by national security concerns. Amar also introduces his companion book, America's Constitution: A Biography, points to the course image drawn from the National Constitution Center, and assigns the class its first task, to read the text and reread the Preamble closely.