Rural Politics and the Collapse of Pennsylvania Federalism

Rural Politics and the Collapse of Pennsylvania Federalism PDF Author: Kenneth W. Keller
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
ISBN: 9780871697264
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Rural Politics and the Collapse of Pennsylvania Federalism

Rural Politics and the Collapse of Pennsylvania Federalism PDF Author: Kenneth W. Keller
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
ISBN: 9780871697264
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description


To Organize the Sovereign People

To Organize the Sovereign People PDF Author: David W. Houpt
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813950511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This book explores the struggle to define self-government in the critical years following the Declaration of Independence, when Americans throughout the country looked to the Keystone State of Pennsylvania for guidance on political mobilization and the best ways to create a stable arrangement that could balance liberty with order. In 1776 radicals mobilized the people to overthrow the Colonial Assembly and adopt a new constitution, one that asserted average citizens’ rights to exercise their sovereignty directly not only through elections but also through town meeting, petitions, speeches, parades, and even political violence. Although highly democratic, this system proved unwieldy and chaotic. David Houpt finds that over the course of the 1780s, a relatively small group of middling and elite Pennsylvanians learned to harness these various forms of "popular" mobilization to establish themselves as the legitimate spokesmen of the entire citizenry. In examining this process, he provides a granular account of how the meaning of democracy changed, solidifying around party politics and elections, and how a small group of white men succeeded in setting the framework for what self-government means in the United States to this day.

The First Reconstruction

The First Reconstruction PDF Author: Van Gosse
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660113
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 759

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Book Description
It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In this meticulously-researched book, Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the Constitution’s ratification through Abraham Lincoln’s election, chronicling the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states. Full of untold stories and thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black political activism following emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford, Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define citizenship.

Rural Politics and the Collamerican Philosophical Societye of Pennsylvania Federalism

Rural Politics and the Collamerican Philosophical Societye of Pennsylvania Federalism PDF Author: Kenneth W Keller
Publisher: American Philosophical Society Press
ISBN: 9781422374757
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Rethinking America

Rethinking America PDF Author: John M. Murrin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190870540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
For five decades John M. Murrin has been the consummate historian's historian. This volume brings together his seminal essays on the American Revolution, the United States Constitution, and the early American Republic. Collectively, they rethink fundamental questions regarding American identity, the decision to declare independence in 1776, and the impact the American Revolution had on the nation it produced. By digging deeply into questions that have shaped the field for several generations, Rethinking America argues that high politics and the study of constitutional and ideological questions--broadly the history of elites--must be considered in close conjunction with issues of economic inequality, class conflict, and racial division. Bringing together different schools of history and a variety of perspectives on both Britain and the North American colonies, it explains why what began as a constitutional argument, that virtually all expected would remain contained within the British Empire, exploded into a truly subversive and radical revolution that destroyed monarchy and aristocracy and replaced them with a rapidly transforming and chaotic republic. This volume examines the period of the early American Republic and discusses why the Founders' assumptions about what their Revolution would produce were profoundly different than the society that emerged from the American Revolution. In many ways, Rethinking America suggests that the outcome of the American Revolution put the new United States on a path to a violent and bloody civil war. With an introduction by Andrew Shankman, this long-awaited work by one of the most important scholars of the Revolutionary era offers a coherent interpretation of the complex period that saw the breakdown of colonial British North America and the founding of the United States.

Proceedings, American Philosophical Society (vol. 127, No. 1, 1983)

Proceedings, American Philosophical Society (vol. 127, No. 1, 1983) PDF Author:
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
ISBN: 9781422370568
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Proceedings, American Philosophical Society (vol. 127, No. 2, 1983)

Proceedings, American Philosophical Society (vol. 127, No. 2, 1983) PDF Author:
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
ISBN: 9781422370575
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Proceedings, American Philosophical Society (vol. 127, No. 6, 1983)

Proceedings, American Philosophical Society (vol. 127, No. 6, 1983) PDF Author:
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
ISBN: 9781422370612
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Proceedings, American Philosophical Society (vol. 127, No. 4, 1983)

Proceedings, American Philosophical Society (vol. 127, No. 4, 1983) PDF Author: American Philosophical Society
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
ISBN: 9781422370599
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Fries's Rebellion

Fries's Rebellion PDF Author: Paul Douglas Newman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In 1798, the federal government levied its first direct tax on American citizens, one that seemed to favor land speculators over farmers. In eastern Pennsylvania, the tax assessors were largely Quakers and Moravians who had abstained from Revolutionary participation and were recruited by the administration of John Adams to levy taxes against their patriot German Reformed and Lutheran neighbors. Led by local Revolutionary hero John Fries, the farmers drew on the rituals of crowd action and stopped the assessment. Following the Shays and Whiskey rebellions, Fries's Rebellion was the last in a trilogy of popular uprisings against federal authority in the early republic. But in contrast to the previous armed insurrections, the Fries rebels used nonviolent methods while simultaneously exercising their rights to petition Congress for the repeal of the tax law as well as the Alien and Sedition Acts. In doing so, they sought to manifest the principle of popular sovereignty and to expand the role of local people within the emerging national political system rather than attacking it from without. After some resisters were liberated from the custody of a federal marshal, the Adams administration used military force to suppress the insurrection. The resisters were charged with sedition and treason. Fries himself was sentenced to death but was pardoned at the eleventh hour by President Adams. The pardon fractured the presidential cabinet and splintered the party, just before Thomas Jefferson's and the Republican Party's "Revolution of 1800." The first book-length treatment of this significant eighteenth-century uprising, Fries's Rebellion shows us that the participants of the rebellion reengaged Revolutionary ideals in an enduring struggle to further democratize their country.