Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar argues that American constitutional culture includes a set of iconic texts beyond the written Constitution itself, what he calls the symbolic constitution. He walks through a canon that recurs across political and regional lines: the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Northwest Ordinance, the Gettysburg Address, Brown v. Board of Education, and King's 'I Have a Dream' speech. Amar traces how these documents form an interconnected network, with nearly all of them linked back to Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, and explains how the rise of the two-party system helped elevate them into shared national touchstones. The lecture closes by connecting this symbolic canon back to the actual written Constitution. Part of Amar's Yale course on the unwritten constitution, the talk mixes audience exercises with close textual argument.