Author: William C. Dowling
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570032431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Book Description
The Port Folio magazine, America's first major journal of literary and political opinion, was edited by Joseph Dennie between 1801 and 1811. This new study argues that as The Port Folio mounted a last spirited defense of classical republican values against "American jacobinism," the struggle between its Federalist writers and the forces of Jeffersonian ideology gave rise to an important tradition in American writing.
Author: Stanley Elkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199770565
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 938
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Book Description
When Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office for the presidency in 1801, America had just passed through twelve critical years, years dominated by some of the towering figures of our history and by the challenge of having to do everything for the first time. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, and Jefferson himself each had a share in shaping that remarkable era--an era that is brilliantly captured in The Age of Federalism. Written by esteemed historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism gives us a reflective, deeply informed analytical survey of this extraordinary period. Ranging over the widest variety of concerns--political, cultural, economic, diplomatic, and military--the authors provide a sweeping historical account, keeping always in view not only the problems the new nation faced but also the particular individuals who tried to solve them. As they move through the Federalist era, they draw subtly perceptive character sketches not only of the great figures--Washington and Jefferson, Talleyrand and Napoleon Bonaparte--but also of lesser ones, such as George Hammond, Britain's frustrated minister to the United States, James McHenry, Adams's hapless Secretary of War, the pre-Chief Justice version of John Marshall, and others. They weave these lively profiles into an analysis of the central controversies of the day, turning such intricate issues as the public debt into fascinating depictions of opposing political strategies and contending economic philosophies. Each dispute bears in some way on the broader story of the emerging nation. The authors show, for instance, the consequences the fight over Hamilton's financial system had for the locating of the nation's permanent capital, and how it widened an ideological gulf between Hamilton and the Virginians, Madison and Jefferson, that became unbridgeable. The statesmen of the founding generation, the authors believe, did "a surprising number of things right." But Elkins and McKitrick also describe some things that went resoundingly wrong: the hopelessly underfinanced effort to construct a capital city on the Potomac (New York, they argue, would have been a far more logical choice than Washington), and prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts which turned into a comic nightmare. No detail is left out, or left uninteresting, as their account continues through the Adams presidency, the XYZ affair, the naval Quasi-War with France, and the desperate Federalist maneuvers in 1800, first to prevent the reelection of Adams and then to nullify the election of Jefferson. The Age of Federalism is the fruit of many years of discussion and thought, in which deep scholarship is matched only by the lucid distinction of its prose. With it, Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick have produced the definitive study, long awaited by historians, of the early national era.
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: Stanley M. Elkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195093810
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 952
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Book Description
A history of the Federalist period combines biographical insights with analysis and reflection to capture the sweeping issues, remarkable personalities, and intricate controversies of the time in a swiftly moving narrative.
Author: Alison L. LaCroix
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674062035
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Federalism is regarded as one of the signal American contributions to modern politics. Its origins are typically traced to the drafting of the Constitution, but the story began decades before the delegates met in Philadelphia. In this groundbreaking book, Alison LaCroix traces the history of American federal thought from its colonial beginnings in scattered provincial responses to British assertions of authority, to its emergence in the late eighteenth century as a normative theory of multilayered government. The core of this new federal ideology was a belief that multiple independent levels of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement was not a defect but a virtue. This belief became a foundational principle and aspiration of the American political enterprise. LaCroix thus challenges the traditional account of republican ideology as the single dominant framework for eighteenth-century American political thought. Understanding the emerging federal ideology returns constitutional thought to the central place that it occupied for the founders. Federalism was not a necessary adaptation to make an already designed system work; it was the system. Connecting the colonial, revolutionary, founding, and early national periods in one story reveals the fundamental reconfigurations of legal and political power that accompanied the formation of the United States. The emergence of American federalism should be understood as a critical ideological development of the period, and this book is essential reading for everyone interested in the American story.
Author: Edward A. Purcell
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300122039
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
In this lively historical examination of American federalism, a leading scholar in the field refutes the widely accepted notion that the founding fathers carefully crafted a constitutional balance of power between the states and the federal government. Edward A. Purcell Jr. bases his argument on close analysis of the Constitution’s original structure and the ways that structure both induced and accommodated changes over the centuries. There was no clear agreement among the founding fathers regarding the "true" nature of American federalism, Purcell contends, nor was there a consensus on "correct" lines dividing state and national authority. Furthermore, even had there been some true "original" understanding, the elastic and dynamic nature of the constitutional structure would have made it impossible for subsequent generations to maintain any "original" or permanent balance. The author traces the evolution of federalism through the centuries, focusing particularly on shifting interpretations founded on political interests. He concludes with insights into current issues of federal power and a discussion of the grounds on which legitimate decisions about federal and state power should rest.
Author: Trish Loughran
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023151123X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 569
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Book Description
"In the beginning, all the world was America." John Locke In the beginning, everything was America, but where did America begin? In many narratives of American nationalism (both popular and academic), the United States begins in print-with the production, dissemination, and consumption of major printed texts like Common Sense , the Declaration of Independence, newspaper debates over ratification, and the Constitution itself. In these narratives, print plays a central role in the emergence of American nationalism, as Americans become Americans through acts of reading that connect them to other like-minded nationals. In The Republic in Print, however, Trish Loughran overturns this master narrative of American origins and offers a radically new history of the early republic and its antebellum aftermath. Combining a materialist history of American nation building with an intellectual history of American federalism, Loughran challenges the idea that print culture created a sense of national connection among different parts of the early American union and instead reveals the early republic as a series of local and regional reading publics with distinct political and geographical identities. Focusing on the years between 1770 and 1870, Loughran develops two richly detailed and provocative arguments. First, she suggests that it was the relative lack of a national infrastructure (rather than the existence of a tightly connected print network) that actually enabled the nation to be imagined in 1776 and ratification to be secured in 1787-88. She then describes how the increasingly connected book market of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s unexpectedly exposed cracks in the evolving nation, especially in regards to slavery, exacerbating regional differences in ways that ultimately contributed to secession and civil war. Drawing on a range of literary, historical, and archival materials-from essays, pamphlets, novels, and plays, to engravings, paintings, statues, laws, and maps The Republic in Print provides a refreshingly original cultural history of the American nation-state over the course of its first century.
Author: Daniel Ziblatt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691121673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
This study explores the following puzzle: Upon national unification, why was Germany formed as a federal state and Italy a unitary state? Ziblatt's answer to this question will be of interest to scholars of international relations, comparative politics, political development, and political and economic history.
Author: Paul Nolette
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700620893
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
“It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system,” Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1932, “that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” It is one of the features of federalism in our day, Paul Nolette counters, that these “laboratories of democracy,” under the guidance of state attorneys general, are more apt to be dictating national policy than conducting contained experiments. In Federalism on Trial, Nolette presents the first broadscale examination of the increasingly nationalized political activism of state attorneys general. Focusing on coordinated state litigation as a form of national policymaking, his book challenges common assumptions about the contemporary nature of American federalism. In the tobacco litigation of the 1990s, a number of state attorneys general managed to reshape one of America’s largest industries—all without the involvement of Congress or the executive branch. This instance of prosecution as a form of regulation is just one case among many in the larger story of American state development. Federalism on Trial shows how new social policy regimes of the 1960s and 1970s—adopting national objectives such as cleaner air, wider access to health care, and greater consumer protections—promoted both “adversarial legalism” and new forms of “cooperative federalism” that enhanced the powers and possibilities open to state attorneys general. Nolette traces this trend—as AGs took advantage of these new circumstances and opportunities—through case studies involving drug pricing, environmental policy, and health care reform. The result is the first full account—far-reaching and finely detailed—of how, rather than checking national power or creating productive dialogue between federal and state policymakers, the federalism exercised by state attorneys general frequently complicates national regulatory regimes and seeks both greater policy centralization and a more extensive reach of the American regulatory state.
Author: Eric L. McKitrick
Publisher: Chicago U.P
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
Re-evaluation of Andrew Johnson's role as President, and history of the political scene, from 1865 to 1868.
