The Oklahoma State Constitution

Author(s):  
Danny M. Adkison ◽  
Lisa McNair Palmer

In 1907, William Jennings Bryan described the proposed constitution for Oklahoma as “the best constitution in the United States today.” An enduring characteristic of Oklahoma’s constitution has been its faith in direct democracy and its root in Progressive Era politics. This book traces the historical formation and constitutional development of the state of Oklahoma. It provides commentary and analysis on the intent, politics, social and economic pressures, and the legal decisions that shaped and enhanced the Oklahoma constitution since it was adopted in 1907. The text gives a broad understanding of state constitutional law within the context of Oklahoma’s constitutional evolution.

Author(s):  
Danny M. Adkison ◽  
Lisa McNair Palmer

“The best constitution in the United States today.” That is how William Jennings Bryan described the proposed constitution for Oklahoma in 1907. Bryan was clearly engaging in hyperbole, but he was signifying that the drafters of Oklahoma’s constitution were guided in the main by many of the concerns which were highlighted during what historians came to dub the Progressive Era....


Contention ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
AK Thompson

George Floyd’s murder by police on 26 May 2020 set off a cycle of struggle that was notable for its size, intensity, and rate of diffusion. Starting in Minneapolis, the uprising quickly spread to dozens of other major cities and brought with it a repertoire that included riots, arson, and looting. In many places, these tactics coexisted with more familiar actions like public assemblies and mass marches; however, the inflection these tactics gave to the cycle of contention is not easily reconciled with the protest repertoire most frequently mobilized during movement campaigns in the United States today. This discrepancy has led to extensive commentary by scholars and movement participants, who have often weighed in by considering the moral and strategic efficacy of the chosen tactics. Such considerations should not be discounted. Nevertheless, I argue that both the dynamics of contention witnessed during the uprising and their ambivalent relationship to the established protest repertoire must first be understood in historical terms. By considering the relationship between violence, social movements, and Black freedom struggles in this way, I argue that scholars can develop a better understanding of current events while anticipating how the dynamics of contention are likely to develop going forward. Being attentive to these dynamics should in turn inform our research agendas, and it is with this aim in mind that I offer the following ten theses.


NASPA Journal ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary H. Knock

In the introduction of this book, Arthur Cohen states that The Shaping of American Higher Education is less a history than a synthesis. While accurate, this depiction in no way detracts from the value of the book. This work synthesizes the first three centuries of development of high-er education in the United States. A number of books detail the early history of the American collegiate system; however, this book also pro-vides an up-to-date account of developments and context for under-standing the transformation of American higher education in the last quarter century. A broad understanding of the book’s subtitle, Emergence and Growth of the Contemporary System, is truly realized by the reader.


2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-200
Author(s):  
Stephen Gageler

James Bryce was a contemporary of Albert Venn Dicey. Bryce published in 1888 The American Commonwealth. Its detailed description of the practical operation of the United States Constitution was influential in the framing of the Australian Constitution in the 1890s. The project of this article is to shed light on that influence. The article compares and contrasts the views of Bryce and of Dicey; Bryce's views, unlike those of Dicey, having been largely unexplored in contemporary analyses of our constitutional development. It examines the importance of Bryce's views on two particular constitutional mechanisms – responsible government and judicial review – to the development of our constitutional structure. The ongoing theoretical implications of The American Commonwealth for Australian constitutional law remain to be pondered.


Author(s):  
Ellen Carol DuBois

The United States was a pioneer in the development of women’s rights ideas and activism. Far-seeing women, determined to find an active and equal place in the nation’s political affairs, pushed long and hard to realize America’s democratic promise. Over three-quarters of a century, women’s rights and suffrage leaders steadily agitated their cause through a shifting American political landscape, from the careful innovations of the early national period, through the expansive involvements of antebellum politics, into the dramatic shifts of revolution and reaction in the post–Civil War years, up to the modernization of the Progressive Era. The meaning and content of “womanhood,” the sign under which these campaigns were conducted, also shifted. Labor, class, and especially race inclusions and exclusions were contentious dimensions of the American women’s rights movement, as they were of American liberal democracy in general.


2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-44
Author(s):  
Alyson Cole

Until the l970s, ‘survivor’ referred predominantly to individuals who outlived others in the aftermath of disaster, or stood to inherit the remains of an estate; it was not imbued with evaluative connotations. In the United States today, however, survivorship abounds with positive meanings. This transvaluation rests on three intersecting trajectories that together transformed survivorship from denoting that one sustained or was spared a hardship to signifying a superior social status. The first trajectory follows the aftermath of the Shoah, when survivors acquired moral authority as victims of and public witnesses to a new violation, ‘crimes against humanity’. The second tracks the stigmatization of the term ‘victim’ in American public discourse. A consequence of struggles over the welfare state and other progressive policies, victimhood is now associated less with specific harms or injuries, and more with the supposed negative attributes of the victim herself. The third traces how survivorship became integral to the recuperative strategies of new therapeutic disciplines addressing the traumatized – from war veterans and rape victims to cancer patients. These three processes coalesced to create and legitimize a hierarchical opposition between ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’, transforming these terms into political categories and emblems of personal and group identity. In this essay, I argue that the victim/survivor binary constitutes one juncture where neoliberalism converges with Trump-era populism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 1064-1083 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marshall I. Steinbaum ◽  
Bernard A. Weisberger

Thomas Leonard's 2016 book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era argues that exclusionary views on eugenics, race, immigration, and gender taint the intellectual legacy of progressive economics and economists. This review essay reconsiders that legacy and places it in the context within which it developed. While the early generations of scholars who founded the economics profession in the United States and trained in its departments did indeed hold and express retrograde views on those subjects, those views were common to a broad swath of the intellectual elite of that era, including the progressives' staunchest opponents inside and outside academia. Moreover, Leonard anachronistically intermingles a contemporary critique of early-twentieth-century progressive economics and the progressive movement writ large, serving to decontextualize those disputes—a flaw that is amplified by the book's unsystematic approach to reconstructing the views and writing it attacks. Notwithstanding the history Leonard presents, economists working now nonetheless owe their progressive forebears for contributions that have become newly relevant: the “credibility revolution,” the influence of economic research on policy and program design, the prestige of economists working in and providing advice to government agencies and policy makers, and the academic freedom economists enjoy in modern research-oriented universities are all a part of that legacy. (JEL A11, B15, D82, J15, N31, N32)


Horizons ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-154
Author(s):  
John P. Slattery

This contribution will examine several theological methods used to understand morally egregious examples of historical dissent in the Catholic Church. From the 1600s to the late 1800s, large numbers of Catholics in the young United States dissented from the Holy See in one particularly egregious manner: their support for and defense of chattel slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. While chattel slavery is universally declared horrific and immoral, its vestiges have not been erased from church history, nor has its influence been eradicated in the modern experience of Christians in the United States today. After naming the contemporary problem caused by this historical example of dissent and analyzing theological approaches to ameliorate this problem, I will propose a theological-historical approach that may offer better solutions in the future.


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