Congress as a Handler of Challenges: The Historical Record

2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Mayhew
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
American System ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The U.S

Can the U.S. Congress address major challenges? Can Congress govern? Questions like these keep getting asked. This article addresses them by consulting the record since 1789. Given the separation-of-powers structure of the American system, such questions cannot be addressed directly. They need to be deconstructed. The presidency needs to enter the discussion, too. Also, what is a major challenge? To identify such challenges, and to supply a way of seeing how and in what respects Congress, as well as in a background frame the U.S. system more broadly, has performed, I draw on comparative analysis. How has the United States participated in thirteen major “impulses” that have invested a comparable set of nations at various times since the late eighteenth century? These challenges range from launching a new nation through building a welfare state through dealing with climate change and debt/deficit problems today.

The Origins of Western Dermatology

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 255-266
Author(s):  
J. Barrie Ross
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Eastern United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Defining Moments ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Objective: On the premise that historical background makes the present more understandable, this review covers the origins of Western dermatology from its Greek and Roman origins through the Middle Ages to the defining moments in the late eighteenth century. Background and Conclusion: The development of major European centers at this time became the background for future centers in the eastern United States in the midnineteenth century and, finally, to the West Coast of the United States and Canada by the midtwentieth century.

The Center Holds

2020 ◽  
pp. 90-123
Author(s):  
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Authority ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The U.S

Over the course of the mid-nineteenth-century wars, the dominant powers (Britain, the U.S., Russia, and Qing China) came to espouse a surprisingly similar orientation toward legitimate statehood. While the liberation wars of the late-eighteenth century witnessed the creation of many new republics, by midcentury those republics and the empires that had survived pursued greater central authority. Although sometimes at odds with liberal rhetoric of the age (especially among reforming Republicans in the U.S.), these actors recognized the importance of coercion of violence to maintaining their states. The victory of centralized authority, whether it took the form of empires or republics, reinforced the power of established states and of organized, aggressive defense of that order.

The Closing of the Constitution

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (03) ◽  
pp. 861-866
Author(s):  
Kevin Arlyck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Text Structure ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Federalist Papers ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Anyone who picks up a recent volume of the United States Reports or a prominent legal journal will be sure to find judges and lawyers debating, in agonizing detail, the meaning of a particular word or phrase in the Constitution. Marshaling late-eighteenth century dictionaries and legal treatises, records of debates from the drafting and ratifying conventions, and well-thumbed copies of the Federalist Papers, modern constitutional interlocutors will scrutinize text, structure, and history to discern an inherent logic. Above all, although disputants will endlessly contest what a particular provision means, they largely agree on what the Constitution itself is: as Jonathan Gienapp puts it in The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era, “an artifact circumscribed in time and space,” the “fixed Constitution” that we have been collectively dissecting since the late 1780s (10).

In and Beyond the Field: Researching Black Lives Matter from France

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Celestine and Nicolas Martin-Breteau
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Academic World ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
Public Discussion ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
French People

To talk publicly about race remains taboo in France. Since its origins in the late eighteenth century, the French Republic has grounded its political identity on the theoretical equality of all its citizens, regardless of their origins. In practice, this “universalist” ideology tends to deny and neglect blatant racial inequalities among French citizens. Unlike in the United States in recent years, there has been no public discussion about whether France has turned “post-racial” since most white French people consider that their country never entered any sort of “racial era” to begin with. In fact, the French academic world is one of the few arenas in which debates over the issue of race have been accepted and sometimes encouraged.

Republicanism: Religious Studies and Church History meet Political History

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 621-624
Author(s):  
Dana W. Logan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Personal Morality ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
The Individual

Republicanism, both of these authors teach us, by the mid-nineteenth century became indistinguishable from the aims of religion in the United States. A broad array of protestants agreed that the aims of religion cohered with the political principle of republicanism—or the principle that men could only achieve freedom through self-rule. Noll usefully shows that this concept of republicanism underwent a series of changes from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Beginning in the late eighteenth century republicanism referenced liberty from tyranny, man as citizen, and virtue as a kind of constraint on individual interests. Noll, however, argues that two versions of republicanism competed in this earlier period: communitarian republicanism, based in “the reciprocity of personal morality and social-well being,” and liberal republicanism, which valued the independence of the individual. Noll and Modern argue that by the mid-nineteenth century, the liberal version won out. Citizens imagined their freedom to be enabled by a market-based society more than by a community of virtue. For political historians these definitions are not new or controversial, but for historians of American religious history republicanism is an unlikely category of analysis because we see it as “political theory” rather than theology. But as both Noll and Modern argue, republicanism became the very substance of theology in the United States.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Stow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The U.S

This introductory chapter explores the transformation in Jewish life that failed to occur in late eighteenth-century Rome. The French Revolution and the U.S. Constitution had established that Jews were citizens with full and equal legal rights. But in Rome, the capital of the then Papal State, no such proclamation occurred. Although Rome's Jews possessed rights in civil law, the discrimination determined by canon law was great. Roman Jews were forced to live in the ghetto decreed by Pope Paul IV in 1555, as part of a vigorous conversionary drive. People were taken to an institution known as the House of Converts, where they were held for periods of time, and most eventually converted. However, some did not, most notably Anna del Monte, who not only remained a Jew but also left a diary recounting her thirteen days in the Catecumeni, as Rome's Jews called the place.

scholarly journals A Two-Phase or Tiered Caddo Mound at The Camp Joy Site (41UR144), Lake 0' the Pines

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Turner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Annual Report ◽  
Smithsonian Institution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Report ◽  
Two Phase ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
Late Eighteenth

As the United States expanded in the late eighteenth century and through most of the nineteenth century, much interest and question was raised over the increasing numbers of earthen mounds and earthen constructions encountered by the settlers moving westward across the southeastern woodlands. Mounds? Mound builders? Enough questions were raised about their origins that in 1881, the Division of Mound Exploration of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, was established to address and resolve these issues. The work of the Division of Mound Exploration can be considered the first "modern archeology" done in the United States. Their mound research covered the Dakotas to Texas and all points east. The final research report by Division Head, Cyrus Thomas, was published as the Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. In this report, Thomas mentions in the Gulf District that: some two or three mounds of peculiar form have been discovered in Mississippi and the Arkansas district that have not been observed elsewhere in the mound area. These may be described as earthen platforms surmounted by a conical mound or a conical mound surrounded by a terrace. Sometimes the conical mound is small in proportion to the platform and is not central...A double mound of this type, or mound with two apices, has been observed in western Mississippi. The primary purpose of this report is to make known the occurrence of a two-phase Caddoan earthen mound in Upshur County. Furthermore, this report seeks to add this site to the inventory of known archeological resources of the Cypress Creek basin. Available data relevant to the Cypress Basin and the immediate area of the site has also been summarized and reported here to suggest chronological associations for the two-phase mound.

The Imprint of Congress

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Mayhew
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Policy History ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Legislative Body ◽  
Governing System ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Constitutional System ◽  
The U.S

What kind of job has America's routinely disparaged legislative body actually done? This book provides an insightful historical analysis of the U.S. Congress's performance from the late eighteenth century to today, exploring what its lasting imprint has been on American politics and society. The book offers a unique perspective on the evaluation of the American constitutional system. It suggests that Congress has balanced the presidency in a surprising variety of ways, and in doing so, it has contributed to the legitimacy of a governing system faced by an often fractious public. The book will be of interest for anyone interested in American political and policy history.

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