Founders

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-52
Author(s):  
Lauren R. Kerby
Keyword(s):  
White Men ◽  
Moral Code ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Jerry Falwell ◽  
Key Sites ◽  
White Evangelicals ◽  
Heritage Industry ◽  
Material Evidence

This chapter explores how white evangelicals come to imagine themselves as heirs to the American founding fathers, and how they find material evidence to support their claims about the nation’s Christian heritage at key sites in Washington, D.C. It discusses Christian tourists’ experiences at the U.S. Capitol, the National Archives, and the Library of Congress, and the stories they tell about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and other famous white men they depict as proto-evangelical Christians. This chapter also introduces the Christian heritage industry, including early proponents such as Jerry Falwell Sr. and more recent advocates such as David Barton. It argues that white evangelicals employ a nostalgic view of the American past to justify their participation in politics and their efforts to impose their moral code on the nation.

1. Words, images, meanings

2015 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
R. B. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Alexander Hamilton ◽  
James Madison ◽  
George Washington ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Continental Congress

The phrase “founding fathers” is central to how Americans talk about politics, and “Words, images, meanings” describes when the phrase was first coined, what it really means, and how artists have depicted the “founding fathers”—those who helped to found the United States as a nation and a political experiment. This group has two subsets. First are the Signers, delegates to the Second Continental Congress, who in July 1776 declared American independence and signed the Declaration of Independence. Second are the Framers, the delegates to the Federal Convention who in 1787 framed the United States Constitution. They include Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.

The Carrigan Committee of 1930-31 and the ‘moral condition of the Saorstát’

2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (128) ◽  
pp. 519-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Finnane
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
The State ◽  
Moral Code ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Moral Condition ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law

The character of modern Ireland after partition has long been the subject of debate, by columnists, poets, novelists and historians. John Whyte’s outstanding study of the process by which what he called the ‘Catholic moral code’ became enshrined in the ‘law of the state’ summarised the ‘remarkable consensus’ achieved in the years 1923-37, a time when there was ‘overwhelming agreement that traditional Catholic values should be maintained, if necessary by legislation’. Based on personal reminiscences and published documents, Whyte’s contribution is of enduring value to those seeking to understand the culture of modern Ireland. His account is even more impressive when read against the background of materials which have more recently become available in the National Archives. These enable some of the detail to be filled in, but they also provoke some new questions about the state of the country and the means by which a peaceable Ireland was to be constructed in the aftermath of a war of independence and a civil war.

Mathematics and Our Founding Fathers

1976 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 301-307
Author(s):  
H. Howard Frisinger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
George Washington ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Founding Fathers

On july 4, 1776, fifty-six men signed the Declaration of Independence. This paper will discuss the contributions to mathematics or the interest in mathematics of four of these men. Two of these four, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, made significant contributions to the early development of mathematics in the United States. In addition to the mathematical contributions of Franklin and Jefferson, we shall briefly consider the mathematical interests of George Washington and John Adams.

George Washington on Religious Liberty

2003 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Phillip Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Government Support ◽  
Establishment Clause ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Free Exercise ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Narrow View ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Sacrifice

Despite the Supreme Court's repeated invocations of America's Founding Fathers for First Amendment religion jurisprudence, George Washington's political thought regarding religious freedom has received almost no scholarly attention. This is unfortunate, for Washington's words and actions speak to contemporary Establishment Clause and Free Exercise issues. Washington, moreover, offers an alternative to Jefferson's and Madison's approach to church-state matters. The scholarly exclusion of Washington thus has led to a narrow view of the Founders' thought on religious liberty. This article sets forth Washington's understanding of the right to religious liberty. It pays particular attention to Washington's disagreement with Madison on the propriety of government support of religion. It also draws attention to the limits Washington placed on an individual's right to religious free exercise by focusing on how Washington dealt with Quaker claims for religious exemptions from military service.Individuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest. The magnitude of the sacrifice must depend as well on situation and circumstance, as on the object to be obtained. It is at all times difficult to draw with precision the line between those rights which must be surrendered, and those which may be reserved. —G. Washington, Letter submitting the proposed constitution to the President of Congress 17 September 1787

Searching for Christian America

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Lauren R. Kerby
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Evangelicals ◽  
Heritage Industry ◽  
Christian Nationalism

This chapter introduces how white evangelicals imagine and reimagine the American past and how their dynamic relationship to the nation informs their political behavior. It draws on ethnographic research on Christian heritage tourism in Washington, D.C.; the history of the Christian Right; narrative theories of identity; and the material culture of the nation’s capital. Together, these sources show that white evangelicals imagine themselves in four different roles in the American story—founders, exiles, victims, and saviors—and that they see history as the key to America’s salvation. In their view, the nation is in decline, but if they can restore their nostalgic, imagined past, it will prosper once more. This jeremiad is central to white Christian nationalism, and it is perpetuated by the Christian heritage industry, including Christian heritage tours that capitalize on the ambient Christianity of D.C. Attention to this lived history is essential for understanding how religion and politics entwine in the United States today.

The Success and Failure of the Religious Right, 1970s–2010

2019 ◽  
pp. 198-227
Author(s):  
Gillis J. Harp
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Tea Party Movement ◽  
Evangelical Protestantism ◽  
Limited Government ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Jerry Falwell ◽  
Francis Schaeffer ◽  
White Evangelicals

Chapter 7 explores the successes and failures of what came to be called the Religious Right during the last third of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. Evangelical Protestantism contributed significantly to the moralism of the movement while lending apparent biblical sanction to already well-established conservative political positions such as limited government and free market economics. Participants in the Religious Right drew selectively from theologians such as Rousas John Rushdoony and Francis Schaeffer, but a nontheological pragmatism ultimately came to characterize the movement under television evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the emergence of the Tea Party movement confirmed how conventional conservative concerns about deficits and creeping socialism had successfully displaced ethical issues. This nontheological pragmatism can help explain the high levels of support for Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy by white evangelicals.

George Washington and the Problem of Slavery

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-301
Author(s):  
KENNETH MORGAN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Agricultural Practice ◽  
United States Census ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The North

Slavery was not the most important issue for which George Washington is remembered; nor were his views on the institution as revealing as those of some of his fellow Founding Fathers. But Washington was a slaveowner for all of his adult life and he lived in Virginia, which was dominated by tobacco plantations based on slave labour. Slavery was central to the socio-economic life of the Old Dominion: after 1750 40 per cent of the North American slave population lived there and the first United States census of 1790 showed 300,000 slaves in Virginia. The tobacco they produced was the most valuable staple crop grown in North America. At his home Mount Vernon, situated on the upper Potomac river overlooking the Maryland shore, Washington created an estate, based on the latest agricultural practice, that was also a set of plantation farms centred around the work of enslaved Africans. Slavery, then, was clearly a persistent part of Washington's life and career. Because of this and his pre-eminent position in American public life, Washington's use of slave labour and his views on an important paradox of American history in the revolutionary era – the coexistence of slavery and liberty – deserve close attention. One man's dilemma in dealing with the morality of his own slaveholding was mirrored in the broader context of what the United States could or would do about the problem of slavery.

Macedonia and Thrace: Iron Age to post-Roman urban centres

2014 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
Zosia Archibald
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Development Work ◽  
Mountain Regions ◽  
Northern Greece ◽  
National Highway ◽  
New Material ◽  
Administrative Area ◽  
Key Sites ◽  
Material Evidence

Macedonia continues to offer a great deal of new material evidence, including much systematic information, as well as major, occasionally sensational discoveries (see Catherine Morgan's “View from Greece”, above), whether in those areas that are considered to be the historical “heartlands” of the Argead kingdom, Pieria and Emathia, the mountain regions of the northern and western Pindus or in eastern Macedonia, which comprises areas with a rather different historical and cultural profile. The administrative area of Thrace has, by contrast, played a more modest role in recent field research, except for a limited number of key sites and occasional finds resulting from development work along the route of the new Egnatia Odos. The “remarkable decade” preceding and following the Athens Olympics of 2004 has played out differently in northern Greece, where the proliferation of archaeological investigations has been driven largely by development work in and around Thessaloniki (and, to a lesser extent, Edessa and Veroia), particularly along routes connected to the national highway and the network of underground shafts and tunnels associated with the construction of Thessaloniki's metro line and stations along its axis.

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