New book: Jon Meacham on our founding documents

Meacham writes: "If America is to be America, the foundational documents reprinted here must be not theoretical but tactile, not quaint but vivid, not dead but alive."

The big picture: Editions of the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers and the U.S. Constitution are selling at their fastest pace since at least 2004, AP reported in April.

"For all our faults," Meacham continues, "for all our dreams deferred and our unfulfilled promises, the United States of America is founded not on ethnicity but on an ideal."

• "The Constitution, Abraham Lincoln believed, was forged to give expression to the Declaration. It was a means to an end — and the end was the recognition and the preservation of individual liberty and individual dignity, for without liberty and dignity humankind becomes not vessels of the divine but bodies to be commanded."

What's next: A hardcover edition of the Federalist Papers — also with an introduction by Meacham — is planned for late this year.

• More on the book.