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The Citizenship Revolution
Most Americans believe that the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 marked the settlement of post-Revolutionary disputes over the meanings of rights, democracy, and sovereignty in the new nation. In The Citizenship Revolution, Douglas Bradburn undercuts this view by showing that the Union, not the Nation, was the most important product of independence.
In 1774, everyone in British North America was a subject of King George and Parliament. In 1776 a number of newly independent \"states,\" composed of \"American citizens\" began cobbling together a Union to fight their former fellow countrymen. But who was an American? What did it mean to be a \"citizen\" and not a \"subject\"? And why did it matter?
Bradburn's stunning reinterpretation requires us to rethink the traditional chronologies and stories of the American Revolutionary experience. He places battles over the meaning of \"citizenship\" in law and in politics at the center of the narrative. He shows that the new political community ultimately discovered that it was not really a \"Nation,\" but a \"Union of States\"-and that it was the states that set the boundaries of belonging and the very character of rights, for citizens and everyone else. To those inclined to believe that the ratification of the Constitution assured the importance of national authority and law in the lives of American people, the emphasis on the significance and power of the states as the arbiter of American rights and the character of nationhood may seem strange. But, as Bradburn argues, state control of the ultimate meaning of American citizenship represented the first stable outcome of the crisis of authority, allegiance, and identity that had exploded in the American Revolution-a political settlement delicately reached in the first years of the nineteenth century. So ended the first great phase of the American citizenship revolution: a continuing struggle to reconcile the promise of revolutionary equality with the pressing and sometimes competing demands of law, order, and the pursuit of happiness.
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Union and States' Rights
The third book in the &LAW series addresses the perpetual issue of state sovereignty in the federal union-'states' rights.' From the 1770s, through the Confederate states' secession, and continuing until now, a central issue of governance is state power to object to, cancel, or be immune from federal law. The issue is fervently debated in the political arena by Tea Party efforts to limit federal intervention in education and health care; and the nullification movement efforts to prevent federal gun control and marijuana regulations. And it is a linchpin of the Supreme Court's ruling on the Voting Rights Act. This volume provides an intelligent voice in the debate about states' rights-interposition, nullification, secession, constitutional amendment-150 years after Fort Sumter.
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A Political Nation
This impressive collection joins the recent outpouring of exciting new work on American politics and political actors in the mid-nineteenth century. For several generations, much of the scholarship on the political history of the period from 1840 to 1877 has carried a theme of failure; after all, politicians in the antebellum years failed to prevent war, and those of the Civil War and Reconstruction failed to take advantage of opportunities to remake the nation. Moving beyond these older debates, the essays in this volume ask new questions about mid-nineteenth-century American politics and politicians.
InA Political Nation,the contributors address the dynamics of political parties and factions, illuminate the presence of consensus and conflict in American political life, and analyze elections, voters, and issues. In addition to examining the structures of the United States Congress, state and local governments, and other political organizations, this collection emphasizes political leaders-those who made policy, ran for office, influenced elections, and helped to shape American life from the early years of the Second Party System to the turbulent period of Reconstruction.
The book moves chronologically, beginning with an antebellum focus on how political actors behaved within their cultural surroundings. The authors then use the critical role of language, rhetoric, and ideology in mid-nineteenth-century political culture as a lens through which to reevaluate the secession crisis. The collection closes with an examination of cultural and institutional influences on politicians in the Civil War and Reconstruction years. Stressing the role of federalism in understanding American political behavior,A Political Nationunderscores the vitality of scholarship on mid-nineteenth-century American politics.
Contributors:Erik B. Alexander, University of Tennessee, Knoxville · Jean Harvey Baker, Goucher College · William J. Cooper, Louisiana State University · Daniel W. Crofts, The College of New Jersey · William W. Freehling, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities · Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia · Sean Nalty, University of Virginia · Mark E. Neely Jr., Pennsylvania State University · Rachel A. Shelden, Georgia College and State University · Brooks D. Simpson, Arizona State University · J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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The other founders : Anti-Federalism and the dissenting tradition in America, 1788-1828
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.
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Securing the West
A close look at westward expansion, federal lands, and American destiny in the early republic. Few issues defined the period between American independence and the Mexican War more sharply than westward settlement and the role of the federal government in that expansion. In Securing the West, John R. Van Atta examines the visions of the founding generation and the increasing influence of ideological differences in the years after the peace of 1815. Americans expected the country to grow westward, but on the details of that growth they held strongly different opinions. What part should Congress play in this development? How much should public land cost? What of the families and businesses left behind, and how would society's institutions be established in the West? What of the premature settlers, the \"squatters\" who challenged the rule of law while epitomizing democratic daring? Taking a broad approach, Van Atta addresses three interrelated queries: First, how did competing economic beliefs and divergent cultural mandates influence the various outcomes of this broad debate over the means, timing, and purposes of settling the trans-Appalachian West? Second, what alternative visions of western society lay behind the battles among policy makers within the government and the interested parties who would sway them? Third, why did settlement of the West take such a different course in the end from that which the earliest leaders of the republic intended? This story explores dimensions of the federal lands question that other historians have minimized or left out entirely. Van Atta draws upon a range of sources known to have influenced the public discourse, including congressional debates, committee reports, and correspondence; editorial writings by the famous and unknown; and news coverage in various widely circulated newspapers and magazines of the period. Much of the attention focuses on Congress—the elected leaders who advocated divergent plans about western lands. In Congress, more than any other place, public leaders articulated basic concerns about the character, structure, direction, and destiny of society in the early United States. By 1830, many other important national concerns had become critically entangled with land disposition, creating points of ideological tension among rival regions, parties, and interests in the early years of the republic—particularly in Jacksonian America.
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Big Enough to Be Inconsistent
This book focuses on the most controversial aspect of Lincoln's thought and politics - his attitudes and actions regarding slavery and race. Drawing attention to the limitations of Lincoln's judgment and policies without denying his magnitude, the book provides the most comprehensive and even-handed account available of Lincoln's contradictory treatment of black Americans in matters of slavery in the South and basic civil rights in the North.
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