Languages of Democracy in America from the Revolution to the Election of 1800

2013 ◽  
pp. 13-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Cotlar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The United States ◽  
Negative Weight ◽  
Newspaper Editors ◽  
Democracy In America ◽  
The French Revolution

Before and during the American Revolution, ‘democracy’ was relatively rarely invoked in American political discourse, and when it was, usually had negative weight. By contrast, in 1800, candidates who called themselves Democrats won control of the Federal Government. This chapter charts the emergence of the first advocates of democracy in the United States. During the Constitution debates, attacks on aristocracy were much more common than positive accounts of democracy. After 1790, a group of radical newspaper editors sympathetic to the French Revolution promoted the term as a political slogan. Its entry into mainstream political discourse thereafter was however accompanied by the shearing away of some of its more radical associations.

The "Religious Secularism" of Lebanon and the United States: A Discussion between Lebanon's Secular Debate and Madison's "Principles of Pluralism"

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 31-57
Author(s):  
David D. Grafton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The United States ◽  
Minority Communities ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
American Rhetoric ◽  
Muslim Scholars ◽  
The French Revolution

Within the current discussions of Jslam and democracy, the issue of secularism has now become one of the most important themes. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the main premise put forward by Jslamic scholars in various forms has been that secularism is atheistic and, therefore, incompatible with £slam. This article investigates one Islamic debate on the issue of secularism in order to find the root elements of the Muslim argu­ment. In looking at the 1976-77 secularism debate in Lebanon we argue that, like Lebanon, most Muslim scholars use the French Revolution and its Jacobist views as the standard for understand­ing secularism. Rather, the Lebanese context is better suited to the eighteenth-century American context and its development of a "religious secularism." The conclusion here is that Lebanon would be better off using eighteenth-century American rhetoric in its social political discourse for a vision of its own future, and that Musi im minority communities (primarily in the United States) can recover the issues involved in the American secular debates that saw secularism as "freedom for religion" in multi­communal states rather than the enemy of religion.

Innovative Recent Perspectives

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Robert Chazan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter considers Salo Baron's writings on Jewish history. Recent historians have come to reject the supernaturally grounded assumption of unending Jewish suffering during the supposed third exile; many of them have also distanced themselves from the modern and naturalistic continuations of this sense of interminable Jewish suffering. The first major challenge to the received wisdom came in 1928 from Salo Baron, newly arrived in the United States from his native Europe. In an essay titled “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revisit the Traditional View?” he undertook a fairly limited assault on traditional Jewish thinking about exilic pain. Focusing on the French Revolution and the beginnings of the process of emancipation of Western Jewry, Baron examined the centuries immediately preceding the revolution and the immediate post-Emancipation period. He argued that the former was nowhere near so horrific as usually projected and that the latter was nowhere near so idyllic.

THE APPEARANCE OF AMERICAN GIRLS, AS VIEWED BY MOREAU DE SAINT-MÉRY ABOUT 1795

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-167
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Young Girls ◽  
The North ◽  
North Side ◽  
The World ◽  
The French Revolution

The French jurist, Méderic Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819), was driven into exile during the French Revolution by Robespierre's accession to power. From 1794 to 1798 Moreau lived in the United States. In the journal he kept during these years, he described American young girls as follows: American girls are pretty, and their eyes are alive with expression; but their complexions are wan, bad teeth spoil the appearance of their mouths, and there is also something disagreeable about the length of their legs. In general, however, they are of good height, are graceful, and, in enumerating their charms, one must not forget the shapeliness of their breasts. Philadelphia has thousands of beauties between fourteen and eighteen. To offer but a single proof: on the north side of Market Street, between Third and Fifth Street, on a single winter's day I saw four hundred young maidens promenading, each one of whom would surely have been followed in Paris, a seductive tribute that could be offered by perhaps no other city in the world. But these girls soon became pale, and an indisposition which is reckoned among the most unfavorable for the maintenance of the freshness of youth is very common among them. They have thin hair and bad teeth, and are given to nervous illnesses. The elements which embellish beauty, or rather which compose and order it, are not often bestowed by the graces. Finally, they are charming, adorable at fifteen, dried up at twenty-three, old at thirty-five, decrepit at forty or fifty.

The Organization, The Goals, and Some Activities of The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

1973 ◽  
Vol 66 (5) ◽  
pp. 476-480
Author(s):  
H. Vernon Price
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Council ◽  
The World ◽  
The French Revolution

The great watchword of the French Revolution was Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Although a great oversimplification, it has been said that France exemplifies liberty, Great Britain equality, and the United States fraternity. Without attempting to apportion these virtues among the nations of the world, I should like to dwell for a few moments on fraternity as it applies in the United States to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, I believe it is in this domain that we have developed into the largest mathematical organization in the world and—we should like to think—one of the most influential.

America: Democracy Native and Imported

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Indigenous Movements ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter first discusses the impact of the French Revolution on the United States. The development was twofold. On the one hand, there was an acceleration of indigenous movements. On the other, there was an influence that was unquestionably foreign. The latter presented itself especially with the war that began in Europe in 1792, and with the clash of armed ideologies that the war brought with it. The warring powers in Europe, which for Americans meant the governments of France and Great Britain, attempted to make use of the United States for their own advantage. Different groups of Americans, for their own domestic purposes, were likewise eager to exploit the power and prestige of either England or France. The chapter then turns to the impact of the Revolution on the “other” Americas.

The Strange History of the Right to Bear Arms in the French Revolution

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-479
Author(s):  
Noah Shusterman
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Social Domination ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract French Revolutionaries shared many of the same beliefs as their American counterparts about the relationship between citizenship and bearing arms. Both nations’ leaders viewed standing armies as a threat to freedom, and both nations required militia participation from a portion of the citizenry. Yet the right to bear arms is a legacy only of the American Revolution. The right to bear arms came up several times in debates in France’s National Assembly. The deputies never approved that right, but they never denied it either. During the first years of the Revolution, the leading politicians were wary of arming poor citizens, a concern that was in tension with the egalitarian language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Moreover, militias thrived during the early years of the French Revolution and became instruments—albeit unstable ones—for maintaining a social domination that played out along class lines. In response to the contradictions in their positions, French revolutionary leaders remained silent on the issue. In France as in the United States, the question of whether or not there was a right to bear arms was less important than the question of who had the right to bear arms.

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