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Author: Jeremy J. Tewell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781606352250
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
A Self-Evident Lie explores and underscores the fear and complex meaning of "slavery" to northerners before the Civil War. Many northerners asked: If slavery was the beneficent and paternalistic institution that southerners claimed, could it not be applied with equal morality to whites as well as blacks? Republicans repeatedly expressed concern that proslavery arguments were not inherently racial. Irrespective of race, anyone could fall victim to the argument that they were "inferior," that they would be better off enslaved, that their enslavement served the interests of society, or that their subjugation was justified by history and religion. In trenchant and graceful prose, Jeremy Tewell argues that some Republicans, most notably Abraham Lincoln, held that the only effective safeguard of individual liberty was universal liberty, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. As long as Americans believed that "all men" were endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, everyone's liberty would be self-evident, regardless of circumstance. Conversely, the justifications meant to exclude a segment of society from the rights of man worked to destroy the self-evidence of those very rights. Therefore, by failing to repudiate slavery--thus rejecting the universality of human liberty--northerners made themselves vulnerable to proslavery rationales, especially when they happened to occupy a position of political, social, or economic weakness. Black skin had been stigmatized as a badge of servitude, but there was nothing to guarantee that white skin would always serve as an unimpeachable badge of freedom. This was a major theme in Lincoln's campaign against Stephen A. Douglas and was a key argument against the use of popular sovereignty as the method for determining slavery's status in the territories. According to Tewell, Lincoln's greatest challenge was to convince northern audiences that simple indifference to slavery was itself inimical to the liberty of whites. A Self-Evident Lie will intrigue anyone interested in issues related to Lincoln, slavery and antislavery, the Civil War, and American intellectual history.
Author: Jeremy J. Tewell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781606352250
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
A Self-Evident Lie explores and underscores the fear and complex meaning of "slavery" to northerners before the Civil War. Many northerners asked: If slavery was the beneficent and paternalistic institution that southerners claimed, could it not be applied with equal morality to whites as well as blacks? Republicans repeatedly expressed concern that proslavery arguments were not inherently racial. Irrespective of race, anyone could fall victim to the argument that they were "inferior," that they would be better off enslaved, that their enslavement served the interests of society, or that their subjugation was justified by history and religion. In trenchant and graceful prose, Jeremy Tewell argues that some Republicans, most notably Abraham Lincoln, held that the only effective safeguard of individual liberty was universal liberty, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. As long as Americans believed that "all men" were endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, everyone's liberty would be self-evident, regardless of circumstance. Conversely, the justifications meant to exclude a segment of society from the rights of man worked to destroy the self-evidence of those very rights. Therefore, by failing to repudiate slavery--thus rejecting the universality of human liberty--northerners made themselves vulnerable to proslavery rationales, especially when they happened to occupy a position of political, social, or economic weakness. Black skin had been stigmatized as a badge of servitude, but there was nothing to guarantee that white skin would always serve as an unimpeachable badge of freedom. This was a major theme in Lincoln's campaign against Stephen A. Douglas and was a key argument against the use of popular sovereignty as the method for determining slavery's status in the territories. According to Tewell, Lincoln's greatest challenge was to convince northern audiences that simple indifference to slavery was itself inimical to the liberty of whites. A Self-Evident Lie will intrigue anyone interested in issues related to Lincoln, slavery and antislavery, the Civil War, and American intellectual history.
Author: David Livingstone Smith
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312310400
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Readers of Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker will find much to intrigue them in this fascinating book, which declares that our extraordinary ability to deceive others - and even our selves - 'lies' at the heart of our humanity.
Author: Sophia Rosenfeld
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812250842
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
"Fake news," wild conspiracy theories, misleading claims, doctored photos, lies peddled as facts, facts dismissed as lies—citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way. The problem may be novel in some of its details—including the role of today's political leaders, along with broadcast and digital media, in intensifying the epistemic anarchy—but the challenge of determining truth in a democratic world has a backstory. In this lively and illuminating book, historian Sophia Rosenfeld explores a longstanding and largely unspoken tension at the heart of democracy between the supposed wisdom of the crowd and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite made up of trusted experts. What we are witnessing now is the unraveling of the détente between these competing aspects of democratic culture. In four bracing chapters, Rosenfeld substantiates her claim by tracing the history of the vexed relationship between democracy and truth. She begins with an examination of the period prior to the eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions, where she uncovers the political and epistemological foundations of our democratic world. Subsequent chapters move from the Enlightenment to the rise of both populist and technocratic notions of democracy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the troubling trends—including the collapse of social trust—that have led to the rise of our "post-truth" public life. Rosenfeld concludes by offering suggestions for how to defend the idea of truth against the forces that would undermine it.
Author: Danielle Allen
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871408139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
“A tour de force.... No one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one.” —Gordon Wood, New York Review of Books Winner of the Zócalo Book Prize Winner of the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize Winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize (Nonfiction) Finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Hurston Wright Legacy Award Shortlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice Selection Featured on the front page of the New York Times, Our Declaration is already regarded as a seminal work that reinterprets the promise of American democracy through our founding text. Combining a personal account of teaching the Declaration with a vivid evocation of the colonial world between 1774 and 1777, Allen, a political philosopher renowned for her work on justice and citizenship reveals our nation’s founding text to be an animating force that not only changed the world more than two-hundred years ago, but also still can. Challenging conventional wisdom, she boldly makes the case that the Declaration is a document as much about political equality as about individual liberty. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Our Declaration is an “uncommonly elegant, incisive, and often poetic primer on America’s cardinal text” (David M. Kennedy).
Author: Al Franken
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101219440
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
The #1 New York Times bestseller by Senator Al Franken, author of Giant of the Senate Al Franken, one of our “savviest satirists” (People), has been studying the rhetoric of the Right. He has listened to their cries of “slander,” “bias,” and even “treason.” He has examined the GOP's policies of squandering our surplus, ravaging the environment, and alienating the rest of the world. He’s even watched Fox News. A lot. And, in this fair and balanced report, Al bravely and candidly exposes them all for what they are: liars. Lying, lying liars. Al destroys the liberal media bias myth by doing what his targets seem incapable of: getting his facts straight. Using the Right’s own words against them, he takes on the pundits, the politicians, and the issues, in the most talked about book of the year. Timely, provocative, unfailingly honest, and always funny, Lies sticks it to the most right-wing administration in memory, and to the right-wing media hacks who do its bidding.
Author: Daniel Goleman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684831074
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
A penetrating analysis of the dark corners of human deception, enlivened by intriguing case histories and experiments.
Author: Joseph J. Ellis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375727469
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 463
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Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER Following Thomas Jefferson from the drafting of the Declaration of Independence to his retirement in Monticello, Joseph J. Ellis unravels the contradictions of the Jeffersonian character. He gives us the slaveholding libertarian who was capable of decrying mescegenation while maintaing an intimate relationship with his slave, Sally Hemmings; the enemy of government power who exercisdd it audaciously as president; the visionarty who remained curiously blind to the inconsistencies in his nature. American Sphinx is a marvel of scholarship, a delight to read, and an essential gloss on the Jeffersonian legacy.
Author: Conor Cruise O'Brien
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226616568
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
As controversial and explosive as it is elegant and learned, this examination of Thomas Jefferson, as man and icon, through the critical lens of the French Revolution, offers a provocative analysis of the supreme symbol of American history and political culture and challenges the traditional perceptions of both Jeffersonian history and the Jeffersonian legacy. 15 illustrations.
Author: Kenneth N. Addison
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761843310
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 529
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Book Description
'We hold these truths to be self evident_' An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Roots of Racism and Slavery in America delves into the philosophical, historical, socio/cultural and political evolution of racism and slavery in America. The premise of this work is that racism and slavery in America are the result of an unintentional historical intertwining of various Western philosophical, religious, cultural, social, economic, and political strands of thought that date back to the Classical Era. These strands have become tangled in a Gordian knot, which can only be unraveled through the bold application of a variety of multidisciplinary tools. By doing so, this book is intended help the reader understand how the United States, a nation that claims 'all men are created equal,' could be responsible for slavery and the intractable threads of racism and inequality that have become woven into its cultural the fabric.
Author: David Barton
Publisher: Thomas Nelson Inc
ISBN: 1595554599
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Noted historian Barton sets the record straight on the lies and misunderstandings that have tarnished the legacy of Thomas Jefferson.
