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The US Constitution has 27 amendments that protect the rights of Americans.            Do you know them all?

Ann Schmidt, 01/07/21 

l   The US Constitution was written in 1787 and ratified in 1788.

l   In 1791, the Bill of Rights was also ratified with 10 amendments.

l   Since then, 17 more amendments have been added.

l   The amendments deal with a variety of rights ranging from freedom of speech to the right to vote. 

The Constitution of the United States was written in 1787 by 55 delegates at a Constitutional Convention. Its purpose was to revise the weaker Articles of Confederation that had held the 13 states together after they gained independence from Britain.

Before it could be put into place, it had to be ratified by conventions from each of the 13 states, where the delegates argued both for and against the binding document. One of the main arguments against the ratification of the US Constitution was the lack of specified individual rights and liberties, so James Madison drafted a set of amendments to add to the US Constitution if it was ratified.

By June 1789, Madison submitted 12 amendments, though only 10 were passed and ratified in 1791 as the Bill of Rights.

Since then, 17 more amendments have been passed and ratified by the process laid out in Article 5 of the US Constitution, where an amendment is proposed by either a two-thirds vote in Congress or a national convention of two-thirds of the states.

Those proposals are then ratified by either three-fourths of the state legislatures or by state conventions in three-fourths of the states to become amendments added to the US Constitution.

Here are the 27 amendments to the US Constitution — ranging from personal rights to procedural laws — including their history and the lasting impact they've left on the United States: