The Transatlantic Constitution

The Transatlantic Constitution PDF Author: Mary Sarah Bilder
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674020948
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Departing from traditional approaches to colonial legal history, Mary Sarah Bilder argues that American law and legal culture developed within the framework of an evolving, unwritten transatlantic constitution that lawyers, legislators, and litigants on both sides of the Atlantic understood. The central tenet of this constitution—that colonial laws and customs could not be repugnant to the laws of England but could diverge for local circumstances—shaped the legal development of the colonial world. Focusing on practices rather than doctrines, Bilder describes how the pragmatic and flexible conversation about this constitution shaped colonial law: the development of the legal profession; the place of English law in the colonies; the existence of equity courts and legislative equitable relief; property rights for women and inheritance laws; commercial law and currency reform; and laws governing religious establishment. Using as a case study the corporate colony of Rhode Island, which had the largest number of appeals of any mainland colony to the English Privy Council, she reconstructs a largely unknown world of pre-Constitutional legal culture.

The Transatlantic Constitution

The Transatlantic Constitution PDF Author: Mary Sarah Bilder
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674020948
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Departing from traditional approaches to colonial legal history, Mary Sarah Bilder argues that American law and legal culture developed within the framework of an evolving, unwritten transatlantic constitution that lawyers, legislators, and litigants on both sides of the Atlantic understood. The central tenet of this constitution—that colonial laws and customs could not be repugnant to the laws of England but could diverge for local circumstances—shaped the legal development of the colonial world. Focusing on practices rather than doctrines, Bilder describes how the pragmatic and flexible conversation about this constitution shaped colonial law: the development of the legal profession; the place of English law in the colonies; the existence of equity courts and legislative equitable relief; property rights for women and inheritance laws; commercial law and currency reform; and laws governing religious establishment. Using as a case study the corporate colony of Rhode Island, which had the largest number of appeals of any mainland colony to the English Privy Council, she reconstructs a largely unknown world of pre-Constitutional legal culture.

Madison’s Hand

Madison’s Hand PDF Author: Mary Sarah Bilder
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674055276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Winner of the Bancroft Prize Winner of the James Bradford Best Biography Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Finalist, Literary Award for Nonfiction, Library of Virginia Finalist, George Washington Prize James Madison’s Notes on the 1787 Constitutional Convention have acquired nearly unquestioned authority as the description of the U.S. Constitution’s creation. No document provides a more complete record of the deliberations in Philadelphia or depicts the Convention’s charismatic figures, crushing disappointments, and miraculous triumphs with such narrative force. But how reliable is this account? “[A] superb study of the Constitutional Convention as selectively reflected in Madison’s voluminous notes on it...Scholars have been aware that Madison made revisions in the Notes but have not intensively explored them. Bilder has looked closely indeed at the Notes and at his revisions, and the result is this lucid, subtle book. It will be impossible to view Madison’s role at the convention and read his Notes in the same uncomplicated way again...An accessible and brilliant rethinking of a crucial moment in American history.” —Robert K. Landers, Wall Street Journal

Transatlantic Revolutionary Cultures, 1789-1861

Transatlantic Revolutionary Cultures, 1789-1861 PDF Author: Charlotte A. Lerg
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004351566
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Transatlantic Revolutionary Cultures, 1789-1861 argues that the revolutionary era constituted a coherent chapter in transatlantic history and that individual revolutions were connected to a broader, transatlantic and transnational frame. As a composite, the essays place instances of political upheaval during the long nineteenth century in Europe and the Americas in a common narrative and offer a new interpretation on their seeming asynchrony. In the age of revolutions the formation of political communities and cultural interactions were closely connected over time and space. Reciprocal connections arose from discussions on the nature of history, deliberations about constitutional models, as well as the reception of revolutions in popular culture. These various levels of cultural and intellectual interchange we term “transatlantic revolutionary cultures.” Contributors are: Ulrike Bock, Anne Bruch, Peter Fischer, Mischa Honeck, Raphael Hörmann, Charlotte A. Lerg, Marc H. Lerner, Michael L. Miller, Timothy Mason Roberts, and Heléna Tóth.

Tom Paine's America

Tom Paine's America PDF Author: Seth Cotlar
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813931061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Tom Paine’s America explores the vibrant, transatlantic traffic in people, ideas, and texts that profoundly shaped American political debate in the 1790s. In 1789, when the Federal Constitution was ratified, "democracy" was a controversial term that very few Americans used to describe their new political system. That changed when the French Revolution—and the wave of democratic radicalism that it touched off around the Atlantic World—inspired a growing number of Americans to imagine and advocate for a wide range of political and social reforms that they proudly called "democratic." One of the figureheads of this new international movement was Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense. Although Paine spent the 1790s in Europe, his increasingly radical political writings from that decade were wildly popular in America. A cohort of democratic printers, newspaper editors, and booksellers stoked the fires of American politics by importing a flood of information and ideas from revolutionary Europe. Inspired by what they were learning from their contemporaries around the world, the evolving democratic opposition in America pushed their fellow citizens to consider a wide range of radical ideas regarding racial equality, economic justice, cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, and the construction of more literally democratic polities. In Europe such ideas quickly fell victim to a counter-Revolutionary backlash that defined Painite democracy as dangerous Jacobinism, and the story was much the same in America’s late 1790s. The Democratic Party that won the national election of 1800 was, ironically, the beneficiary of this backlash; for they were able to position themselves as the advocates of a more moderate, safe vision of democracy that differentiated itself from the supposedly aristocratic Federalists to their right and the dangerously democratic Painite Jacobins to their left.

Ratification

Ratification PDF Author: Pauline Maier
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684868555
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
The dramatic story of the debate over the ratification of the Constitution, the first new account of this seminal moment in American history in years.

Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World

Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World PDF Author: Ken MacMillan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521870097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
How did English notions of sovereignty, empire and law impact their methods of settlement in the Americas?

Female Genius

Female Genius PDF Author: Mary Sarah Bilder
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813947204
Category : Women
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"A biography of Eliza Harriot Barons O'Connor, an educator whose 1787 Philadelphia public lecture attended by George Washington might have inspired the gender-neutral language of the Constitution. Explores women's public roles and political power following the American Revolution through the early nineteenth century, tracing the story of white and Black women's struggles for education and suffrage at a transformative moment"--

The Words That Made Us

The Words That Made Us PDF Author: Akhil Reed Amar
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465096360
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 816

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Book Description
A history of the American Constitution's formative decades from a preeminent legal scholar When the US Constitution won popular approval in 1788, it was the culmination of thirty years of passionate argument over the nature of government. But ratification hardly ended the conversation. For the next half century, ordinary Americans and statesmen alike continued to wrestle with weighty questions in the halls of government and in the pages of newspapers. Should the nation's borders be expanded? Should America allow slavery to spread westward? What rights should Indian nations hold? What was the proper role of the judicial branch? In The Words that Made Us, Akhil Reed Amar unites history and law in a vivid narrative of the biggest constitutional questions early Americans confronted, and he expertly assesses the answers they offered. His account of the document's origins and consolidation is a guide for anyone seeking to properly understand America's Constitution today.

Twice-Divided Nation

Twice-Divided Nation PDF Author: Samuel Graber
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 081394239X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
The first thoroughly interdisciplinary study to examine how the transatlantic relationship between the United States and Britain helped shape the conflicts between North and South in the decade before the American Civil War, Twice-Divided Nation addresses that influence primarily as a problem of national memory. Samuel Graber argues that the nation was twice divided: first, by the sectionalism that resulted from disagreements concerning slavery; and second, by Unionists’ increasing sense of alienation from British definitions of nationalism. The key factor in these diverging national concepts of memory was the emergence of a fiercely independent press in the U.S. and its connections to Britain and British news. Failing to recognize this shifting transatlantic dynamic during the Civil War era, scholars have overlooked the degree to which the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy was regarded at home and abroad as a referendum not merely on Lincoln’s election or the Constitution or even slavery, but on the nationalist claim to an independent past. Graber shows how this movement toward cultural independence was reflected in a distinctively American literature, manifested in the writings of such diverse figures as journalist Horace Greeley and poet Walt Whitman.

Antipodean America

Antipodean America PDF Author: Paul Giles
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199301573
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
Although North America and Australasia occupy opposite ends of the earth, they have never been that far from each other conceptually. The United States and Australia both began as British colonies and mutual entanglements continue today, when contemporary cultures of globalization have brought them more closely into juxtaposition. Taking this transpacific kinship as his focus, Paul Giles presents a sweeping study that spans two continents and over three hundred years of literary history to consider the impact of Australia and New Zealand on the formation of U.S. literature. Early American writers such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Joel Barlow and Charles Brockden Brown found the idea of antipodes to be a creative resource, but also an alarming reminder of Great Britain's increasing sway in the Pacific. The southern seas served as inspiration for narratives by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. For African Americans such as Harriet Jacobs, Australia represented a haven from slavery during the gold rush era, while for E.D.E.N. Southworth its convict legacy offered an alternative perspective on the British class system. In the 1890s, Henry Adams and Mark Twain both came to Australasia to address questions of imperial rivalry and aesthetic topsy-turvyness. The second half of this study considers how Australia's political unification through Federation in 1901 significantly altered its relationship to the United States. New modes of transport and communication drew American visitors, including novelist Jack London. At the same time, Americans associated Australia and New Zealand with various kinds of utopian social reform, particularly in relation to gender politics, a theme Giles explores in William Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Miles Franklin. He also considers how American modernism in New York was inflected by the Australasian perspectives of Lola Ridge and Christina Stead, and how Australian modernism was in turn shaped by American styles of iconoclasm. After World War II, Giles examines how the poetry of Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, Yusef Komunyakaa, and others was influenced by their direct experience of Australia. He then shifts to post-1945 fiction, where the focus extends from Irish-American cultural politics (Raymond Chandler, Thomas Keneally) to the paradoxes of exile (Shirley Hazzard, Peter Carey) and the structural inversions of postmodernism and posthumanism (Salman Rushdie, Donna Haraway). Ranging from figures like John Ledyard to John Ashbery, from Emily Dickinson to Patricia Piccinini and J. M. Coetzee, Antipodean America is a truly epic work of transnational literary history.