Info Brief: An Overview of the 27 Amendments to the United States Constitution

With the Constitution, the Founding generation created the greatest charter of freedom in the history of the world. However, the founders also left future generations a procedure for continuing to improve it—the Article V amendment process.

Over time, the American people have used this amendment process to transform the Constitution by adding a Bill of Rights, abolishing slavery, promising freedom and equality, and extending the right to vote to women and African Americans.
All told, we have ratified 27 constitutional amendments across American history. We can divide these amendments into four different periods of constitutional reform:

This period gave us our first 12 amendments, including the Bill of Rights.

This period gave us three transformational amendments that many scholars refer to as our nation’s “Second Founding.” These are the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

(There is a 60-year gap between the 12th and 13th Amendments—a reminder that constitutional amendments often come in waves.)

This period gave us the 16th through the 19th Amendments. (Again, there is a 40-plus-year gap between the 15th and 16th Amendments.)

This period added the remaining eight amendments, little by little, between 1933 and 1992.

And now it’s been over three decades since our last constitutional amendment.