Epilogue

Author(s):  
David J. Bodenhamer

The United States does not operate today under the Constitution ratified in 1788 or the Constitution as completed by the Bill of Rights in 1791 or even the one revised by the Reconstruction amendments. Nor is it the same nation. The United States, then a plural noun and now a collective one, has grown from thirteen states hugging the Atlantic seaboard to fifty states spread across a continent and beyond. It has experienced a civil war that ended one social and political regime and ultimately ushered in another far different from anything most people could have imagined in 1776 or even in 1865. From its beginnings as a second-rate country with a tiny navy and army, it has grown to become a global economic and military superpower. It is a democratic republic in which democracy weighs far more heavily in its constitutional and societal calculus than the framers would have endorsed. Its citizens vest government with the responsibility for safeguarding their prosperity, health, safety, and welfare in ways alien to the experiences of the founding generation....

Author(s):  
Peggy Cooper Davis

In chapter 6, Peggy Cooper Davis notes that in a democratic republic, the people are sovereign and must be free and educated to exercise that sovereignty. She contends that the history of chattel slavery’s denial of human sovereignty in the United States, slavery’s overthrow in the Civil War, and the Constitution’s reconstruction to restore human sovereignty provide a basis for recognizing that the personal rights protected by the United States Constitution, as amended on the demise of slavery, include a fundamental right to education that is adequate to enable every person to participate meaningfully as one among equal and sovereign people.


2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Clelia Martínez Maza

Resumen: Resulta innegable la trascendencia del mundo clásico en Estados Unidos durante el periodo anterior a la Guerra de Secesión. La literatura del principado de Augusto tuvo una especial influencia y proporcionó referentes ideológicos que legitimaban tanto la estructura socioeconómica como el modelo político que se proponía para el nuevo estado: una sociedad de base agrícola inspirada en la que cantaban poetas augusteos como Virgilio y una democracia de pequeños propietarios. Sin embargo, el poder ilimitado del emperador y su carácter vitalicio fueron algunos de los motivos por los que la figura de Augusto recibió numerosas críticas y fue rechazada como paradigma de buen gobierno.Palabras clave: Padres fundadores, Augusto, Virgilio, Horacio, Estados Unidos, Imperio romano.Abstract: It is clear the ongoing importance of the classics before the Civil War in the United States and their formative influence upon the Founders. The literature of the Augustan Principate provided one of their principal sets of ideological tools: an agricultural lifestyle, a lifestyle deified by Augustan poets, a society of Virgilian farmers and a democratic republic supported by free landholders. However, Augustus became a code word for tyrant. The Founding Fathers perceived him as an antimodel and he was rejected as a political canon because of the unlimited power and lifetime term of the Roman Emperors.Key words: Founding Fathers, Augustus, Virgil, Horace, United States, Roman Empire.


Author(s):  
Joshua L. Rosenbloom

The United States economy underwent major transformations between American independence and the Civil War through rapid population growth, the development of manufacturing, the onset of modern economic growth, increasing urbanization, the rapid spread of settlement into the trans-Appalachian west, and the rise of European immigration. These decades were also characterized by an increasing sectional conflict between free and slave states that culminated in 1861 in Southern secession from the Union and a bloody and destructive Civil War. Labor markets were central to each of these developments, directing the reallocation of labor between sectors and regions, channeling a growing population into productive employment, and shaping the growing North–South division within the country. Put differently, labor markets influenced the pace and character of economic development in the antebellum United States. On the one hand, the responsiveness of labor markets to economic shocks helped promote economic growth; on the other, imperfections in labor market responses to these shocks significantly affected the character and development of the national economy.


1909 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 869-884 ◽  
Author(s):  
Everett P. Wheeler

When the thirteen colonies became a nation and formed the Constitution of the United States of America, their population was chiefly on the Atlantic seaboard. Their ships sailed to every port of the civilized world. They were alive to the importance of foreign commerce. The wars of the Napoleonic epoch and the controversies to which they gave rise, led the American people to feel that it was for their interest, not only to abstain from entangling alliances with the powers of continental Europe, but to limit their activities as far as possible to their own territory. The acquisition of Louisiana from the French in 1803 gave to the United States a fertile and almost boundless domain and afforded an opening for national growth, which of itself tended to withdraw the thought and enterprise of our people from foreign business. Undoubtedly our foreign commerce did increase down to the time of the Civil War, but it did not keep pace with the development of ^he country or with the growth of interstate commerce. Since the Civil War, however, the current has turned. The wealth of the United States has enormously increased. Its capital is found invested in foreign countries, and it has acquired territorial possessions not only in the Atlantic, but in the Pacific, which have changed entirely the attitude of the American people. It must inevitably be the case that in the future the number of American citizens who go to foreign countries and take up a residence there will far exceed that of any other period of our history. A few of these no doubt will become citizens of the countries to which they go, but experience shows that the great majority both of English and American citizens who reside in foreign countries still retain their citizenship. The relation borne by the home government to these citizens domiciled abroad is, therefore, a matter of great and increasing importance.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 193-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ashworth

Abstract This paper introduces arguments from Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic1 to suggest that the Civil War arose ultimately because of class-conflict between on the one hand, Southern slaves and their masters and, on the other, Northern workers and their employers. It does not, however, suggest that either in the North or the South these conflicts were on the point of erupting into revolution. On the contrary, they were relatively easily containable. However, harmony within each section (North and South) could be secured only at the cost of intersectional conflict, conflict which would finally erupt into civil war. The Civil War was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ not only because it destroyed slavery, an essentially precapitalist system of production, in the United States but also because it resulted in the enthronement of Northern values, with the normalisation of wage-labour at their core.


Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
David Yagüe González

The behaviors and actions that an individual carries out in their daily life and how they are translated by their society overdetermine the gender one might have—or not—according to social norms. However, do the postulates enounced by feminist and queer Western thinkers still maintain their validity when the context changes? Can the performances of gender carry out their validity when the landscape is other than the one in Europe or the United States? And how can the context of drag complicate these matters? These are the questions that this article will try to answer by analyzing the 2015 movie Viva by Irish director Paddy Breathnach.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Holslag

The chapter argues that India has a strong interest to balance China and that the two Asian giants will not be able grow together without conflict. However, India will not be able to balance China’s rise. The chapter argues that India remains stuck between nonalignment and nonperformance. On the one hand, it resists the prospect of a new coalition that balances China from the maritime fringes of Eurasia, especially if that coalition is led by the United States. On the other hand, it has failed to strengthen its own capabilities. Its military power lags behind China’s, its efforts to reach out to both East and Central Asia have ended in disappointment, and its economic reforms have gone nowhere. As a result of that economic underachievement, India finds itself also torn between emotional nationalism and paralyzing political fragmentation, which, in turn, will further complicate its role as a regional power.


This chapter reviews the books Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina (2014), by Raanan Rein, translated by Marsha Grenzeback, and Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the Americas (2014), edited by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin. Rein’s book deals with the “making” of Argentina through football (soccer), while Muscling in on New Worlds focuses on the “making” of the Americas (mainly the one America, called the United States) through sports. Muscling in on New Worlds is a collection of essays that seeks to advance the common theme of sport as “an avenue by which Jews threaded the needle of asserting a Jewish identity.” Topics include Jews as boxers, Jews and football, Jews and yoga, Orthodox Jewish athletes, and American Jews and baseball. There are also essays about the cinematic and literary representations of Jews in sports.


Author(s):  
Mark Byers

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.


Author(s):  
June Howard

The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.


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