In the spring of 1814, twenty-five years after the ratification of America’s Constitution, a group of 112 Norwegian men—civil servants, lawyers, military officials, business leaders, theologians, and even a sailor—gathered in Eidsvoll, a rural village forty miles north of Oslo. For five weeks, while meeting at the manor home of the businessman Carsten Anker, the men debated and drafted what is today the world’s second oldest written constitution.
