Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America

Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America PDF Author: Edmund S. Morgan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393306232
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Traces the origins of democratic government in England and the U.S. compares their approaches, and discusses elections and the philosophical background of political representation.

Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America

Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America PDF Author: Edmund S. Morgan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393306232
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Traces the origins of democratic government in England and the U.S. compares their approaches, and discusses elections and the philosophical background of political representation.

Inventing the People

Inventing the People PDF Author: Edmund Sears Morgan
Publisher: New York : Norton
ISBN: 9780393025057
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
Morgan argues, in effect, that representative democracy is a tool to bolster rule by the powerful few over the many; the majority are thus led to believe they control their own destiny. In this quietly subversive rereading of our history, American colonists perfected the fiction of popular rule by involving voters in extravagant electoral campaigns and by insisting that elected representatives derived their power from their constituents. Meanwhile, elitist colonial rulers who owned considerable property pulled strings to get their way. --from vendor description

King and Congress

King and Congress PDF Author: Jerrilyn Greene Marston
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400858755
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 478

Get Book Here

Book Description
A persuasive reassessment of the nature of the institution that was in the forefront of the American revolutionary struggle with Great Britain--the Continental Congress. Providing a completely new perspective on the history of the First and Second Continental Congresses before independence, the author argues that American expectations regarding the proper functions of a legitimate central government were formed under the British monarchy, and that these functions were primarily executive. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America

Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America PDF Author: Edmund S. Morgan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393347494
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The best explanation that I have seen for our distinctive combination of faith, hope and naiveté concerning the governmental process." —Michael Kamman, Washington Post This book makes the provocative case here that America has remained politically stable because the Founding Fathers invented the idea of the American people and used it to impose a government on the new nation. His landmark analysis shows how the notion of popular sovereignty—the unexpected offspring of an older, equally fictional notion, the "divine right of kings"—has worked in our history and remains a political force today.

Ruling America

Ruling America PDF Author: Steve Fraser
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674017474
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ruling America offers a panoramic history of our country's ruling elites from the time of the American Revolution to the present. At its heart is the greatest of American paradoxes: How have tiny minorities of the rich and privileged consistently exercised so much power in a nation built on the notion of rule by the people? In a series of thought-provoking essays, leading scholars of American history examine every epoch in which ruling economic elites have shaped our national experience. They explore how elites came into existence, how they established their dominance over public affairs, and how their rule came to an end. The contributors analyze the elite coalition that led the Revolution and then examine the antebellum planters of the South and the merchant patricians of the North. Later chapters vividly portray the Gilded Age "robber barons," the great finance capitalists in the age of J. P. Morgan, and the foreign-policy "Establishment" of the post-World War II years. The book concludes with a dissection of the corporate-led counter-revolution against the New Deal characteristic of the Reagan and Bush era. Rarely in the last half-century has one book afforded such a comprehensive look at the ways elite wealth and power have influenced the American experiment with democracy. At a time when the distribution of wealth and power has never been more unequal, Ruling America is of urgent contemporary relevance.

Roots of the Republic

Roots of the Republic PDF Author: Stephen L. Schechter
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461642795
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 473

Get Book Here

Book Description
Roots of the Republic shows how the Constitution was a product, not simply of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, but of a legal and philosophical tradition almost two centuries old. The editors have selected eighteen key documents in the development of that tradition and reproduced them with essays that explain what they mean, why they were written, and why they are important today. Each key document is accompanied by an interpretive essay written by a contemporary scholar. These essays focus on the importance of each frame of government and include commentaries on why they are meaningful today. Intended to help readers learn how to read and understand these documents, the book is also a handy reference and a strong introduction to the development of political thought and the debates surrounding the formation of the state governments and the federal union.

Religious Pluralism in America

Religious Pluralism in America PDF Author: William R. Hutchison
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300129572
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
Religious toleration is enshrined as an ideal in our Constitution, but religious diversity has had a complicated history in the United States. Although Americans have taken justifiable pride in the rich array of religious faiths that help define our nation, for two centuries we have been grappling with the question of how we can coexist. In this ambitious reappraisal of American religious history, William Hutchison chronicles the country’s struggle to fulfill the promise of its founding ideals. In 1800 the United States was an overwhelmingly Protestant nation. Over the next two centuries, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and others would emerge to challenge the Protestant mainstream. Although their demands were often met with resistance, Hutchison demonstrates that as a result of these conflicts we have expanded our understanding of what it means to be a religiously diverse country. No longer satisfied with mere legal toleration, we now expect that all religious groups will share in creating our national agenda. This book offers a groundbreaking and timely history of our efforts to become one nation under multiple gods.

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin PDF Author: Edmund Sears Morgan
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300101621
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
Draws on Franklin's extensive writings to provide a portrait of the statesman, inventor, and Founding Father.

American Slavery, American Freedom

American Slavery, American Freedom PDF Author: Edmund S. Morgan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393347516
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 467

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Thoughtful, suggestive and highly readable."—New York Times Book Review In the American Revolution, Virginians were the most eloquent spokesmen for freedom and quality. George Washington led the Americans in battle against British oppression. Thomas Jefferson led them in declaring independence. Virginians drafted not only the Declaration but also the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; they were elected to the presidency of the United States under that Constitution for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years of its existence. They were all slaveholders. In the new preface Edmund S. Morgan writes: "Human relations among us still suffer from the former enslavement of a large portion of our predecessors. The freedom of the free, the growth of freedom experienced in the American Revolution depended more than we like to admit on the enslavement of more than 20 percent of us at that time. How republican freedom came to be supported, at least in large part, by its opposite, slavery, is the subject of this book. American Slavery, American Freedom is a study of the tragic contradiction at the core of America. Morgan finds the keys to this central paradox, "the marriage of slavery and freedom," in the people and the politics of the state that was both the birthplace of the Revolution and the largest slaveholding state in the country.

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution PDF Author: Edward James Kolla
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107179548
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book argues that the introduction of popular sovereignty as the basis for government in France facilitated a dramatic transformation in international law in the eighteenth century.