Ancient American Politics

Author : Gary Gerstle
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 470 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2017-10-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691178219

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Liberty and Coercion by Gary Gerstle Pdf

How the conflict between federal and state power has shaped American history American governance is burdened by a paradox. On the one hand, Americans don't want "big government" meddling in their lives; on the other hand, they have repeatedly enlisted governmental help to impose their views regarding marriage, abortion, religion, and schooling on their neighbors. These contradictory stances on the role of public power have paralyzed policymaking and generated rancorous disputes about government’s legitimate scope. How did we reach this political impasse? Historian Gary Gerstle, looking at two hundred years of U.S. history, argues that the roots of the current crisis lie in two contrasting theories of power that the Framers inscribed in the Constitution. One theory shaped the federal government, setting limits on its power in order to protect personal liberty. Another theory molded the states, authorizing them to go to extraordinary lengths, even to the point of violating individual rights, to advance the "good and welfare of the commonwealth." The Framers believed these theories could coexist comfortably, but conflict between the two has largely defined American history. Gerstle shows how national political leaders improvised brilliantly to stretch the power of the federal government beyond where it was meant to go—but at the cost of giving private interests and state governments too much sway over public policy. The states could be innovative, too. More impressive was their staying power. Only in the 1960s did the federal government, impelled by the Cold War and civil rights movement, definitively assert its primacy. But as the power of the central state expanded, its constitutional authority did not keep pace. Conservatives rebelled, making the battle over government’s proper dominion the defining issue of our time. From the Revolution to the Tea Party, and the Bill of Rights to the national security state, Liberty and Coercion is a revelatory account of the making and unmaking of government in America.

Author : Richard Hofstadter
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2008-06-10
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780307388445

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The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter Pdf

This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.

Author : Sarah B. Barber,Arthur A. Joyce
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2017-09-20
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317440826

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Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas by Sarah B. Barber,Arthur A. Joyce Pdf

This exciting collection explores the interplay of religion and politics in the precolumbian Americas. Each thought-provoking contribution positions religion as a primary factor influencing political innovations in this period, reinterpreting major changes through an examination of how religion both facilitated and constrained transformations in political organization and status relations. Offering unparalleled geographic and temporal coverage of this subject, Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas spans the entire precolumbian period, from Preceramic Peru to the Contact period in eastern North America, with case studies from North, Middle, and South America. Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas considers the ways in which religion itself generated political innovation and thus enabled political centralization to occur. It moves beyond a "Great Tradition" focus on elite religion to understand how local political authority was negotiated, contested, bolstered, and undermined within diverse constituencies, demonstrating how religion has transformed non-Western societies. As well as offering readers fresh perspectives on specific archaeological cases, this book breaks new ground in the archaeological examination of religion and society.

Author : Jon Grinspan
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 403 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2021-04-27
Category : History
ISBN : 9781635574630

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The Age of Acrimony by Jon Grinspan Pdf

A penetrating, character-filled history “in the manner of David McCullough” (WSJ), revealing the deep roots of our tormented present-day politics. Democracy was broken. Or that was what many Americans believed in the decades after the Civil War. Shaken by economic and technological disruption, they sought safety in aggressive, tribal partisanship. The results were the loudest, closest, most violent elections in U.S. history, driven by vibrant campaigns that drew our highest-ever voter turnouts. At the century's end, reformers finally restrained this wild system, trading away participation for civility in the process. They built a calmer, cleaner democracy, but also a more distant one. Americans' voting rates crashed and never fully recovered. This is the origin story of the “normal” politics of the 20th century. Only by exploring where that civility and restraint came from can we understand what is happening to our democracy today. The Age of Acrimony charts the rise and fall of 19th-century America's unruly politics through the lives of a remarkable father-daughter dynasty. The radical congressman William “Pig Iron” Kelley and his fiery, Progressive daughter Florence Kelley led lives packed with drama, intimately tied to their nation's politics. Through their friendships and feuds, campaigns and crusades, Will and Florie trace the narrative of a democracy in crisis. In telling the tale of what it cost to cool our republic, historian Jon Grinspan reveals our divisive political system's enduring capacity to reinvent itself.

Author : Hugh J. Hastings,Hugh Hastings
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 166 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 1881
Category : United States
ISBN : WISC:89073016206

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Ancient American Politics by Hugh J. Hastings,Hugh Hastings Pdf

Author : Samuel P. Huntington
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 1981
Category : History
ISBN : 0674030214

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American Politics by Samuel P. Huntington Pdf

Huntington examines the persistent gap between the promise of American ideals and the performance of American politics. He shows how Americans have always been united by the democratic creed of liberty, equality, and hostility to authority, but how these ideals have been frustrated through institutions and hierarchies needed to govern a democracy.

Author : John Fiske
Publisher : BoD – Books on Demand
Page : 138 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2024-05-21
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9783387336559

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American Political Ideas Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History; Three Lectures by John Fiske Pdf

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : SAGE
Page : 3885 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2024-06-29
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9780872893207

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Encyclopedia of U.S. Political History by Anonim Pdf

Author : Craig Yirush
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2014-05-14
Category : Political science
ISBN : 1139011901

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Settlers, Liberty, and Empire by Craig Yirush Pdf

Settlers, Liberty, and Empire traces the emergence of a revolutionary conception of political authority on the far shores of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Based on the equal natural right of English subjects to leave the realm, claim indigenous territory, and establish new governments by consent, this radical set of ideas culminated in revolution and republicanism. But unlike most scholarship on early American political theory, Craig Yirush does not focus solely on the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century. Instead, he examines how the political ideas of settler elites in British North America emerged in the often-forgotten years between the Glorious Revolution in America and the American Revolution against Britain. By taking seriously an imperial world characterized by constitutional uncertainty, geo-political rivalry, and the ongoing presence of powerful Native American peoples, Yirush provides a long-term explanation for the distinctive ideas of the American Revolution.

Author : Woodrow Wilson
Publisher : DigiCat
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2022-11-13
Category : Political Science
ISBN : EAN:8596547385806

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Congressional Government by Woodrow Wilson Pdf

The object of this book is to point out the most characteristic practical features of the federal system. Taking Congress as the central and predominant power of the system, its object is to illustrate everything Congressional. Everybody has seen, and critics without number have said, that our form of national government is singular, possessing a character altogether its own; but there is abundant evidence that very few have seen just wherein it differs most essentially from the other governments of the world. There have been and are other federal systems quite similar, and scarcely any legislative or administrative principle of our Constitution was young even when that Constitution was framed. Contents: The House of Representatives The House of Representatives. Revenue and Supply The Senate The Executive

Author : Bryan-Paul Frost,Jeffrey Sikkenga
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 963 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2019-01-08
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781498558709

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History of American Political Thought by Bryan-Paul Frost,Jeffrey Sikkenga Pdf

Revised and updated, this long-awaited second edition provides a comprehensive introduction to what the most thoughtful Americans have said about the American experience from the colonial period to the present. The book examines the political thought of the most important American statesmen, activists, and writers across era and ideologies, helping another generation of students, scholars, and citizens to understand more fully the meaning of America. This new second edition of the book includes chapters on several additional historical figures, including Walt Whitman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Ronald Reagan, as well as a new chapter on Barack Obama, who was not prominent in public life when the first edition was published. Significant revisions and additions have also been made to many of the original chapters, most notably on Antonin Scalia, which now updates his full legacy, increasing the breadth and depth of the collection.

Author : Byron E. Shafer
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : History
ISBN : UOM:39015056809349

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The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics by Byron E. Shafer Pdf

Where did the Era of Divided Government come from? What sustains split partisan control of the institutions of American national government year after year? Why can it shift so easily from Democratic or Republican presidencies, coupled with Republican or Democratic Congresses? How can the vast array of issues and personalities that have surfaced in American politics over the last forty years fit so neatly within-indeed, reinforce-the sustaining political pattern of our time? These big questions constitute the puzzle of modern American politics. The old answer—a majority and a minority party, plus dominant and recessive public issues—will not work in the Era of Divided Government. Byron Shafer, a political scientist who is regarded as one of the most comprehensive and original thinkers on American politics, provides a convincing new answer that has three major elements. These elements in combination, not "divided government" as a catch phrase, are the real story of politics in our time. The first element is comprised of two great sets of public preferences that manifest themselves at the ballot box as two majorities. The old cluster of economic and welfare issues has not so much been displaced as simply joined by a second cluster of cultural and national concerns. The second element can be seen in the behavior of political parties and party activists, whose own preferences don't match those of the general public. That public remains reliably left of the active Republican Party on economic and welfare issues and reliably right of the active Democratic Party on cultural and national concerns. The third crucial element is found in an institutional arrangement—the distinctively American matrix of governmental institutions, which converts those first two elements into a framework for policymaking, year in and year out. In the first half of the book, Shafer examines how dominant features of the Reagan, first Bush, Clinton, and second Bush administrations reflect the interplay of these three elements. Recent policy conflicts and institutional combatants, in Shafer's analysis, illuminate this new pattern of American politics. In the second half, he ranges across time and nations to put these modern elements and their composite pattern into a much larger historical and institutional framework. In this light, modern American politics appears not so much as new and different, but as a distinctive recombination of familiar elements of a political style, a political process, and a political conflict that has been running for a much, much longer time.

Author : Bernard Bailyn
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2011-06-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9780307798510

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The Origins of American Politics by Bernard Bailyn Pdf

"An astonishing range of reading in contemporary tracts and modern authorities is manifest, and many aspects of British and colonial affairs are illuminated. As a political analysis this very important contribution will be hard to refute...." —Frederick B. Tolles, Political Science Quarterly "He produces historical analysis which is as revealing to the political scientist or sociologist as to the historian, of the significance of social and cultural forces on political changes in eighteenth-century America." —John D. Lees, Cambridge University Press "...these well-argued essays represent the first sustained and systematic attempt to provide a comprehensive and integrated analysis of all elements of American political life during the late colonial period...the author has once again put all students concerned with colonial America heavily in his intellectual debt." —Jack P. Greene, The New York Historical Society Quarterly "...Mr. Bailyn brings to his effort a splendid gift for pertinent curiosity. What he has found, and what patterns he has made of his findings, light our way through his longitudes and latitudes of scholarly precision." —Charles Poore, The New York Times

Author : James Roger Sharp
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 378 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 1993-10-27
Category : History
ISBN : 0300157371

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American Politics in the Early Republic by James Roger Sharp Pdf

During the years from 1789 to 1801, the republican political institutions forged by the American Constitution were put to the test. A new nation--born in revolution, divided over the nature of republicanism, undermined by deep-seated sectional allegiances, and mired in foreign policy entanglements--faced the challenge of creating a stable, enduring national authority and union. In this engagingly written book, James Roger Sharp offers a penetrating new assessment disputing the conventional wisdom that the birth of the country was a relatively painless and unexceptional one. Instead, he tells the dramatic story of how the euphoria surrounding the inauguration of George Washington as the country's first president quickly soured. Soon, the Federalist defenders of the administration and their Republican critics regarded each other as bitter political enemies. The intense partisanship prevented the acceptance of the idea that an opposition could both oppose and be loyal to the government. As a result, the nation teetered on the brink of disintegration as fear, insurrection, and threats of secession abounded. Many even envisioned armed civil conflict as a possible outcome. Despite the polarization, the nation did manage to survive its first trial. The election of Thomas Jefferson in 1801 and the nonviolent transfer of power from one political group to another ended the immediate crisis. But sectionally based politics continued to plague the nation and eventually led to the Civil War.

Author : Fiske
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 166 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : United States
ISBN : UBBE:UBBE-00125850

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American Political Ideas Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History by Fiske Pdf