'What are the rights of the people?' (The Bill of Rights)

For more than a decade, Americans have been reliving the birth of the United States through bicentennials: those of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and now, finally, the Bill of Rights. But this past is also kept alive by the almost daily eruption of new disputes over the very things that most agitated our forebears: rights. Does Madonna have a First Amendment right to have her steamy rock video aired on television? Is thhere a right to life? A right to aborition? Do the homeless have a right to shelter? Here, historian James H. Hutson recalls the equally difficult time Americans had sorting through rights before framing the Bill of Rights; legal scholar Gary McDowell casts a critical eye on the proliferation of rights in 20th-century America.