You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book traces the importance of the United States for German colonialism from the late eighteenth century to 1945, focusing on American westward expansion and racial politics. Jens-Uwe Guettel argues that from the late eighteenth century onward, ideas of colonial expansion played a very important role in liberal, enlightened and progressive circles in Germany, which, in turn, looked across the Atlantic to the liberal-democratic United States for inspiration and concrete examples. Yet following a pre-1914 peak of liberal political influence on the administration and governance of Germany's colonies, the expansionist ideas embraced by Germany's far-right after the country's defeat in the First World War had little or no connection with the German Empire's liberal imperialist tradition - for example, Nazi plans for the settlement of conquered Eastern European territories were not directly linked to pre-1914 transatlantic exchanges concerning race and expansionism.
This volume considers the problem of legal universals at the level of the rule of law and human rights, which have fundamentally different pedigrees, and attempts to come to terms with the new unease arising from the universal application of human rights. Given the juridicization of human rights, rule of law and human rights expectations have become significantly intertwined: human rights are enforced with the instruments of the rule of law and are thus limited by the restricted reach thereof. The first section of this volume considers the difficulties of universalistic claims and offers a number of possible solutions for adapting universal expectations to specific contexts. The second secti...
Winner of the 2010 Book Award from the New England Historical Association American constitutionalism represents this country’s greatest gift to human freedom, yet its story remains largely untold. For over two hundred years, its ideals, ideas, and institutions influenced different peoples in different lands at different times. American constitutionalism and the revolutionary republican documents on which it is based affected countless countries by helping them develop their own constitutional democracies. Western constitutionalism—of which America was a part along with Britain and France—reached a major turning point in global history in 1989, when the forces of democracy exceeded the ...
Outlaws of the Atlantic turns maritime history upside down, exploring the dramatic world of seafaring adventure, not from the perspective of admirals, merchants and other builders of empire, but rather from the point-of-view of common people whose labors made that world possible-sailors, slaves, indentured servants, pirates and other outlaws, whose formative experiences at sea are brought together for the first time. Against long-dominant national histories, this book shows that important historical processes transpired on the vast, nationless commons called the sea: the rise of capitalism, the formation of race and class, and the creation, from below, of oppositional cultures that promised more just and democratic ways of life.
Written in clear, lively prose, The End of Kings traces the history of republican governments and the key figures that are united by the simple republican maxim: No man shall rule alone. Breathtaking in its scope, Everdell's book moves from the Hebrew Bible, Solon's Athens and Brutus's Rome to the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson and the Watergate proceedings during which Nixon resigned. Along the way, he carefully builds a definition of "republic" which distinguishes democratic republics from aristocratic ones for both history and political science. In a new foreword, Everdell addresses the impeachment trial of President Clinton and argues that impeachment was never meant to punish priva...
In the history of the development of Polish law and administration, the short period of the constitutional Duchy of Warsaw, and next of the Kingdom of Poland, was a special time. This is because it was the only moment in the 19th century when the Polish elites gained an opportunity to concentrate their efforts on the organization of the modern state machinery. This book presents the process of restructuring the administrative structures following the collapse of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw and before the establishment of the Kingdom of Poland in 1815. The author focuses on the approach of the Polish elites to the nascent modern state, increasing importance of administration within it and to the young Polish bureaucrats.
The foundings of constitutional democracies are commonly traced to singular moments. In turn, these moments of national origin are characterized as radical political innovations, notable for their civic unity, perfect legitimacy and binding authority. This common view is attractive as it suggests original founding events, actors, and ideals that can be evoked to legitimize state authority and unify citizens. Angélica Maria Bernal challenges this view of foundings, however, explaining that it is ultimately dangerous, misguided, and unsustainable. Beyond Origins argues that the ascription of a universal authority to original founding events is problematic because it limits our understanding o...
The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.
The Democratic Dilemma seeks to explain Vermonters' extraordinary faith and idealism.
"God grant that not only the love of liberty, but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man, may prevail in all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say, This is my country." With this quotation from Benjamin Franklin, historian Richard Morris, Columbia University, opened the fourth Library of Congress Symposium on the American Revolution, held May 8 and 9, 1975, in the Librarys Coolidge Auditorium. For Americans, the Revolution brought independence, nationhood, a constitution clearly defining the relations of the state to the people, and reforms in social and economic equality. But what did it mean to the rest of the late 18th century ...