Founding Republics: The Near Failure of State Governments During the Critical Period (1776-1787)

1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-62
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Bessette
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Hundredth Anniversary ◽  
The World ◽  
Actual Formation

Eleven years ago America celebrated the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the United States, an event that was announced to the world in the elegant phrases of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776. This year we celebrated the bicentennial of the drafting of the Constitution, a task that engaged the considerable talents of a remarkable group of men who began three and one-half months of deliberation 200 years ago this week. Next year we will celebrate the anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution; the following year, the actual formation and beginning of the new government; and finally in 1991, the ratification of the Bill of Rights-the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

Précis: The Rights Revolution in the Twentieth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 446-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Tushnet
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Warren Court ◽  
Inalienable Rights

The idea of rights has been central to U.S. political and constitutional discourse from the beginning. The Declaration of Independence appealed to “inalienable rights,” and the first amendments to the Constitution were universally described as a bill of rights. Yet, something distinctive appears to have happened to the idea of rights over the course of the twentieth century. By the end of the century, rights-claims were being asserted in locations, such as schools and prisons, where they had not been found at the century's beginning, and they were being asserted on behalf of claimants, such as fetuses and new arrivals to the United States, who were outside the domain of rights earlier. Even the content of rights-claims changed. Much of the Warren Court's work completed a constitutional agenda outlined, albeit unclearly, in the 1940s and early 1950s as part of the New Deal's constitutional vindication. The Warren Court added something new—an emphasis on personal autonomy—to the New Deal's concerns for fairness in the political process.

Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Broadwater
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Early Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Constitutional Thought

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, “Father of the Constitution,” were two of the most important Founders of the United States as well as the closest of political allies. Yet historians have often seen a tension between the idealistic rhetoric of the Declaration and the more pedestrian language of the Constitution. Moreover, to some, the adoption of the Constitution represented a repudiation of the democractic values of the Revolution. In this book, Jeff Broadwater explores the evolution of the constitutional thought of these two seminal American figures, from the beginning of the American Revolution through the adoption of the Bill of Rights. In explaining how the two political compatriots could have produced such seemingly dissimilar documents but then come to a common constitutional ground, Broadwater reveals how their collaboration ---and their disagreements---influenced the full range of constitutional questions during this early period of the American republic.

The “Nation with the Soul of a Church”

1967 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 262-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidney E. Mead
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
The World

The apt phrase, “a nation with the soul of a church” was coined by G. K. Chesterton in answer to his question, “What Is America?” the title of the autobiographical essay in which he relates how he came to appreciate what the United States was all about. Being irked, and then amused by the kinds of questions asked him when he applied for entrance into the United States, he was led to ask what is it that “makes America peculiar?” He concluded that it was the fact thatAmerica is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in The Declaration of Independence… It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, and that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived.

Protestant Clergymen and American Destiny: I. Promise and Judgment, 1781–1800

1963 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 217-231
Author(s):  
James H. Smylie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Common Experience ◽  
Democratic Revolution ◽  
The Common

Americans in “search” of the “goals,” “prospects,” and “purpose” of the United States share an interest in the latter part of the eighteenth century. This was the age of the democratic revolution in Western civilization which produced the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, those primary and permanent legacies paramount to our national existence. Although remote in time this period is the common experience of Americans because our lives are still regulated by the political instruments it produced.

scholarly journals Taxing Consumption and Other Sins

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R Hines
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Open Economy ◽  
Income Tax ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Payroll Taxes ◽  
Consumption Taxation ◽  
The World ◽  
And Control ◽  
Consumption Taxes

Federal and state governments in the United States use income and payroll taxes as their primary tools to collect revenue. Relative to the United States, governments in the rest of the world rely much more heavily on taxing consumption. Heavy American reliance on income rather than consumption taxation has not served the U.S. economy well. The inefficiency associated with taxing the return to capital means that the tax system reduces investment in the United States and distorts intertemporal consumption by Americans. While the economic logic of consumption taxation is compelling even for a closed economy, it is even more powerful for an open economy exposed to the world capital market. Consumption taxes in the form of excises can be designed to help protect the environment and control other externalities. Excise taxes can also serve the function of more closely aligning tax burdens with the benefits that taxpayers receive from certain government services. Understandable concerns arise about the distributional consequences of consumption taxation, but a system that relies heavily on consumption taxes, particularly if accompanied by an income tax, can be as progressive as any income tax the United States would realistically want to adopt.

scholarly journals Agama Sipil di Amerika Serikat: Telaah Terhadap Gagasan dan Peran Robert N. Bellah

Simulacra ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Ahmad Sahidah
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
State Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
Civil Order

<p><em>This article will unravel the emergence of civil religion in the United States that cannot be separated from America’s long history, since the civil war, the declaration of independence and the influence of enlightenment and Christian values (especially Protestantism) that are deeply embedded in the American people. He was born as a recognition of the highest values, not one of the denominations of Christianity itself. At the same time, as a criticism of the use of religious symbols in official state practice. With the hermeneutic reading of Bellah’s works, it can be concluded that civil religion is inevitable, because each group has a religious dimension. To say that there is no civil religion, is to say that the civitas, the civil order itself does not exist, it should not appear. Each group produces communal symbols and rituals that give instructions and tie them together. Thus, civil religion does not only belong to America, it can belong to other nations in the world.</em></p>

The Personal Diplomacy of Colonel House

1927 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 706-715
Author(s):  
Lester H. Woolsey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Interesting Comment ◽  
The World ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Times ◽  
Personal Diplomacy ◽  
International Events

The Intimate Papers of Colonel House1 is one of the most interesting collections of memoirs that has appeared in the post-war period. The contacts of Colonel House, as personal representative of President Wilson, with diplomats and statesmen in the stirring years of the war was probably broader than that of almost any other person, and certainly broader than that of any other American. His papers are so full of interesting comment on men and events that they furnish source material for many essays on different aspects of the times. The purpose of this article is merely to sketch Colonel House’s connection with the main international events of the Wilson Administration up to the entrance of the United States into the war. For some reason, his narrative ends with the period of American neutrality and the entrance of the United States into the war. Colonel House’s activities in connection with the war program of the United States and the Peace Conference at Paris are not related, and the world must hold its patience for a third volume on this critical period.

Divided between Heart and Mind: the Critical Period for Protestant Thought in America

1987 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
Church History ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The World ◽  
Heart And Mind

In 1854, Philip Schaff, professor of church history at Mercersburg Theological Seminary and minister of the German Reformed Church, reported to his denomination on the state of Christianity in America. Although the American Church had many shortcomings, according to Schaff the United States was ‘by far the most religious and Christian country in the world’. Many Protestant leaders, however, took a dimmer view of Christianity's prospects. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a nagging sense prevailed that traditional theology was no longer capable of integrating religion and culture, or piety and intelligence. Bela Bates Edwards, a conservative New England divine, complained of the prevalent opinion ‘that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect’. Edwards was not merely lamenting the unpopularity of Calvinism. A Unitarian writer also noted a burgeoning ‘clerical skepticism’. Intelligent and well-trained men who wished to defend and preach the Gospel, he wrote, ‘find themselves struggling within the fetters of a creed by which they have pledged themselves’. An 1853 Memorial to the Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church summed up the doubts of Protestant clergymen when it asked whether the Church's traditional theology and ministry were ‘competent to the work of preaching and dispensing the Gospel to all sorts and conditions of men, and so adequate to do the work of the Lord in this land and in this age’.

Levinasian Responsibility in Le Fils

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-68
Author(s):  
Edward Lamberti
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
American People ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The World ◽  
New Type ◽  
Film Style

Chapter 2 considers the Dardennes’ 2002 film Le Fils, a dramatic story of Levinasian responsibility for the Other based around a teacher and his pupil and a key exemplification of the Dardennes’ film style. It assesses the film in the light of Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘originary performativity’, as seen, for example, in his 1976 analysis of the American Declaration of Independence. Derrida argues that originary performativity occurs when a work performs its own creation – such as happened when the founding fathers of the United States signed a document that already spoke of an American people, a people who were brought into being by the very document that spoke of them. It is the power of an artwork to create a rupture in the order of the world, to originate a new type of world. This chapter reads the Dardennes’ use of style in Le Fils as a filmic type of originary performativity, both presenting the world as it is and showing a world as it could be. Through this, the film powerfully evokes a Levinasian responsibility for the Other as embodied in its protagonist, Olivier (Olivier Gourmet).

Statement on the Proclamation of Independence of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau

1973 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 30-33
Author(s):  
Charles C. Diggs
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
World Community ◽  
Republic Of Guinea ◽  
200Th Anniversary ◽  
The World ◽  
The Republic

In 1976 we will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the formal birth of our country. In our protracted war for independence, the freedom loving people of the United States were engaged in a bitter struggle against the greatest world power of that time. The war was not over at the time of independence. But that declaration symbolized both the beginning of the end of colonialism in America and the coming into the world community of a new state, the United States of America. The British neither recognized our right to self-determination, nor the declaration of independence, nor did they voluntarily hand over power to us. We seized it because it was our inalienable right.

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