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Author: Michael J. Faber
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700634177
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 504
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Book Description
What would an Anti-Federalist Constitution look like? Because we view the Constitution through the lens of the Federalists who came to control the narrative, we tend to forget those who opposed its ratification. And yet the Anti-Federalist arguments, so critical to an understanding of the Constitution’s origins and meaning, resonate throughout American history. By reconstructing these arguments and tracing their development through the ratification debates, Michael J. Faber presents an alternative perspective on constitutional history. Telling, in a sense, the other side of the story of the Constitution, his book offers key insights into the ideas that helped to form the nation’s founding document and that continue to inform American politics and public life. Faber identifies three distinct strands of political thought that eventually came together in a clear and coherent Anti-Federalism position: (1) the individual and the potential for governmental tyranny; (2) power, specifically the states as defenders of the people; and (3) democratic principles and popular sovereignty. After clarifying and elaborating these separate strands of thought and analyzing a well-known proponent of each, Faber goes on to tell the story of the resistance to the Constitution, focusing on ideas but also following and explaining events and strategies. Finally, he produces a “counterfactual” Anti-Federalist Constitution, summing up the Anti-Federalist position as it might have emerged had the opposition drafted the document. How would such a constitution have worked in practice? A close consideration reveals the legacy of the Anti-Federalists in early American history, in the US Constitution and its role in the nation’s political life.
Author: Michael J. Faber
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700634177
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 504
Get Book Here
Book Description
What would an Anti-Federalist Constitution look like? Because we view the Constitution through the lens of the Federalists who came to control the narrative, we tend to forget those who opposed its ratification. And yet the Anti-Federalist arguments, so critical to an understanding of the Constitution’s origins and meaning, resonate throughout American history. By reconstructing these arguments and tracing their development through the ratification debates, Michael J. Faber presents an alternative perspective on constitutional history. Telling, in a sense, the other side of the story of the Constitution, his book offers key insights into the ideas that helped to form the nation’s founding document and that continue to inform American politics and public life. Faber identifies three distinct strands of political thought that eventually came together in a clear and coherent Anti-Federalism position: (1) the individual and the potential for governmental tyranny; (2) power, specifically the states as defenders of the people; and (3) democratic principles and popular sovereignty. After clarifying and elaborating these separate strands of thought and analyzing a well-known proponent of each, Faber goes on to tell the story of the resistance to the Constitution, focusing on ideas but also following and explaining events and strategies. Finally, he produces a “counterfactual” Anti-Federalist Constitution, summing up the Anti-Federalist position as it might have emerged had the opposition drafted the document. How would such a constitution have worked in practice? A close consideration reveals the legacy of the Anti-Federalists in early American history, in the US Constitution and its role in the nation’s political life.
Author: Saul Cornell
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807839213
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
Fear of centralized authority is deeply rooted in American history. The struggle over the U.S. Constitution in 1788 pitted the Federalists, supporters of a stronger central government, against the Anti-Federalists, the champions of a more localist vision of politics. But, argues Saul Cornell, while the Federalists may have won the battle over ratification, it is the ideas of the Anti-Federalists that continue to define the soul of American politics. While no Anti-Federalist party emerged after ratification, Anti-Federalism continued to help define the limits of legitimate dissent within the American constitutional tradition for decades. Anti-Federalist ideas also exerted an important influence on Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism. Exploring the full range of Anti-Federalist thought, Cornell illustrates its continuing relevance in the politics of the early Republic. A new look at the Anti-Federalists is particularly timely given the recent revival of interest in this once neglected group, notes Cornell. Now widely reprinted, Anti-Federalist writings are increasingly quoted by legal scholars and cited in Supreme Court decisions--clear proof that their authors are now counted among the ranks of America's founders.
Author: Wendell Bird
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674976134
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561
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Book Description
In the first complete account of prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts, dozens of previously unknown cases come to light, revealing the lengths to which the John Adams administration went in order to criminalize dissent. The campaign to prosecute dissenting Americans under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 ignited the first battle over the Bill of Rights. Fearing destructive criticism and “domestic treachery” by Republicans, the administration of John Adams led a determined effort to safeguard the young republic by suppressing the opposition. The acts gave the president unlimited discretion to deport noncitizens and made it a crime to criticize the president, Congress, or the federal government. In this definitive account, Wendell Bird goes back to the original federal court records and the papers of Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and finds that the administration’s zeal was far greater than historians have recognized. Indeed, there were twice as many prosecutions and planned deportations as previously believed. The government went after local politicians, raisers of liberty poles, and even tavern drunks but most often targeted Republican newspaper editors, including Benjamin Franklin’s grandson. Those found guilty were sent to prison or fined and sometimes forced to sell their property to survive. The Federalists’ support of laws to prosecute political opponents and opposition newspapers ultimately contributed to the collapse of the party and left a large stain on their record. The Alien and Sedition Acts launched a foundational debate on press freedom, freedom of speech, and the legitimacy of opposition politics. The result was widespread revulsion over the government’s attempt to deprive Americans of their hard-won liberties. Criminal Dissent is a potent reminder of just how fundamental those rights are to a stable democracy.
Author: Linda K. Kerber
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731505
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
The Federalists of Jefferson's time have been described by historians as complainers and obstructionists. A very different picture evolves from this book, which the author calls "a reconsideration of American political conversation in the early national reriod." Mrs. Kerber shows that the rift between Federalists and Jeffersonians was caused by differences in ideology. The Federalists, according to the author, feared that an ordered world was disintegrating and that the sources of stability were being undermined by Jeffersonian concepts of science and education, of law and democracy, and by social arrangements founded on slavery. The book demonstrates how the rolitical differences of the two groups were reflected in all cultural forms and issues. By a skillful use of quotations from varied sources—newspapers, letters, literary works, congressional debates—Mrs. Kerber lets her rrotagonists speak for themselves. The work has current significance because Federalist beliefs emphasized the rrecariousness of popular democracy and the difficulty of maintaining a stable social order-both widesrread concerns of Americans today.
Author: Nathaniel C. Green
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700629955
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
Donald Trump’s election has forced the United States to reckon with not only the political power of the presidency, but also how he and his supporters have used the office to advance their shared vision of America: one that is avowedly nationalist, and unrepentantly rooted in nativism and white supremacy. It might be easy to attribute this dark vision, and the presidency’s immense power to reflect and reinforce it, to the singular character of one particular president—but to do so, this book tells us, would be to ignore the critical role the American public played in making the president “the man of the people” in the nation’s earliest decades. Beginning with the public debate over whether to ratify the Constitution in 1787 and concluding with Andrew Jackson’s own contentious presidency, Nathaniel C. Green traces the origins of our conception of the president as the ultimate American: the exemplar of our collective national values, morals, and “character.” The public divisiveness over the presidency in these earliest years, he contends, forged the office into an incomparable symbol of an emerging American nationalism that cast white Americans as dissenters—lovers of liberty who were willing to mobilize against tyranny in all its forms, from foreign governments to black “enemies” and Indian “savages”—even as it fomented partisan division that belied the promise of unity the presidency symbolized. With testimony from private letters, diaries, newspapers, and bills, Green documents the shaping of the disturbingly nationalistic vision that has given the presidency its symbolic power. This argument is about a different time than our own. And yet it shows how this time, so often revered as a mythic “founding era” from which America has precipitously declined, was in fact the birthplace of the president-centered nationalism that still defines the contours of politics to this day. The lessons of The Man of the People contextualize the political turmoil surrounding the presidency today. Never in modern US history have those lessons been more badly needed.
Author: Mark Tushnet
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807000366
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
For the first time, a collection of dissents from the most famous Supreme Court cases If American history can truly be traced through the majority decisions in landmark Supreme Court cases, then what about the dissenting opinions? In issues of race, gender, privacy, workers' rights, and more, would advances have been impeded or failures rectified if the dissenting opinions were in fact the majority opinions? In offering thirteen famous dissents-from Marbury v. Madison and Brown v. Board of Education to Griswold v. Connecticut and Lawrence v. Texas, each edited with the judges' eloquence preserved-renowned Supreme Court scholar Mark Tushnet reminds us that court decisions are not pronouncements issued by the utterly objective, they are in fact political statements from highly intelligent but partisan people. Tushnet introduces readers to the very concept of dissent in the courts and then provides useful context for each case, filling in gaps in the Court's history and providing an overview of the issues at stake. After each case, he considers the impact the dissenting opinion would have had, if it had been the majority decision. Lively and accessible, I Dissent offers a radically fresh view of the judiciary in a collection that is essential reading for anyone interested in American history.
Author: Michael Avery
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 082650339X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 503
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Book Description
Over the last thirty years, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies has grown from a small group of disaffected conservative law students into an organization with extraordinary influence over American law and politics. Although the organization is unknown to the average citizen, this group of intellectuals has managed to monopolize the selection of federal judges, take over the Department of Justice, and control legal policy in the White House. Today the Society claims that 45,000 conservative lawyers and law students are involved in its activities. Four Supreme Court Justices--Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito--are current or former members. Every single federal judge appointed in the two Bush presidencies was either a Society member or approved by members. During the Bush years, young Federalist Society lawyers dominated the legal staffs of the Justice Department and other important government agencies. The Society has lawyer chapters in every major city in the United States and student chapters in every accredited law school. Its membership includes economic conservatives, social conservatives, Christian conservatives, and libertarians, who differ with each other on significant issues, but who cooperate in advancing a broad conservative agenda. How did this happen? How did this group of conservatives succeed in moving their theories into the mainstream of legal thought? What is the range of positions of those associated with the Federalist Society in areas of legal and political controversy? The authors survey these stances in separate chapters on • regulation of business and private property • race and gender discrimination and affirmative action • personal sexual autonomy, including abortion and gay rights • American exceptionalism and international law
Author: Sanford Levinson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300216459
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
In An Argument Open to All, renowned legal scholar Sanford Levinson takes a novel approach to what is perhaps America’s most famous political tract. Rather than concern himself with the authors as historical figures, or how The Federalist helps us understand the original intent of the framers of the Constitution, Levinson examines each essay for the political wisdom it can offer us today. In eighty-five short essays, each keyed to a different essay in The Federalist, he considers such questions as whether present generations can rethink their constitutional arrangements; how much effort we should exert to preserve America’s traditional culture; and whether The Federalist’s arguments even suggest the desirability of world government.
Author: Bernard Bailyn
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598535870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 536
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Book Description
Return to the nation's founding to rediscover the dramatic original debates--on presidential power, religious liberty, foreign corruption, and more--that still shape our world today When the Constitutional Convention adjourned on September 17, 1787, few Americans anticipated the document that emerged from its secret proceedings. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other framers had fashioned something radically new, a strong national government with broad powers. A fierce storm of argument soon broke out in advance of the state ratifying conventions that would decide the new plan's fate as Federalist supporters, Antifederalist opponents, and seekers of a middle ground praised, condemned, challenged, and analyzed the new Constitution. Here, in chronological order, are more than sixty newspaper articles, pamphlets, speeches, and private letters written or delivered during this ratification debate. Along with familiar figures such as Madison, Hamilton, and Patrick Henry, are dozens of lesser-known but equally engaged and passionate participants. The most famous writings of the period--especially the key Federalist essays--are placed in context alongside the arguments of insightful Antifederalists such as "Brutus" and the "Federal Farmer." Crucial issues quickly take center stage--the need for a Bill of Rights, the controversial compromises over slavery and the slave trade, whether religious tests should be imposed--and on questions that continue to engage and divide Americans: the relationship between the national government and the states, the dangers of unchecked presidential power and the remedy of impeachment, the proper role of the Supreme Court, fears of foreign and domestic corruption, and the persistent challenge of making representative government work in a large and diverse nation.
Author: Geoffrey R. Stone
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393058802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 758
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Book Description
Geoffrey Stone's Perilous Times incisively investigates how the First Amendment and other civil liberties have been compromised in America during wartime. Stone delineates the consistent suppression of free speech in six historical periods from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the Vietnam War, and ends with a coda that examines the state of civil liberties in the Bush era. Full of fresh legal and historical insight, Perilous Times magisterially presents a dramatic cast of characters who influenced the course of history over a two-hundred-year period: from the presidents—Adams, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Nixon—to the Supreme Court justices—Taney, Holmes, Brandeis, Black, and Warren—to the resisters—Clement Vallandingham, Emma Goldman, Fred Korematsu, and David Dellinger. Filled with dozens of rare photographs, posters, and historical illustrations, Perilous Times is resonant in its call for a new approach in our response to grave crises.
