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The author looks to the origins of equality in Greek thought and the idea's important in the eighteenth century to understand the tenacious attraction it has had for American over more than two hundred years of political, legal, and social controversy.
This book is a study in the history of political communication. Today we take it for granted that the people of a democracy have a right to know how their representatives speak and vote. But in the period of the American Revolution this development was new in both Britain and America. No assembly debates were reported in the colonial press; the constitutional convention of 1787 notoriously met in secret; even the U.S. senate kept its doors closed for its first decade. In Britain parliamentary debates were officially secret until reporting was increasingly but unofficially tolerated due to the pressure of public interest in the same period. Members of Parliament increasingly had their speeches printed for public consumption.In 1803 the Speaker set a gallery aside for the press reporters. J. R. Pole shows that similar forces worked to bring about these profound changes in the concept of political accountability in both the new American republic and the republican aspects of the British mixed monarchy.
In Contract and Consent, the renowned legal historian J. R. Pole posits that legal history has become highly specialized, while mainstream political and social historians frequently ignore cases that figure prominently in the legal literature. Pole makes a start at remedying the situation with a series of essays that reintegrate legal with political and social history. A central theme of the essays is the link between Anglo-American common law and contract law and American political and constitutional principles. Pole also emphasizes the political functions of legal institutions in English and American history, going so far as to suggest that we need to divest ourselves of any notion of the ...
A Companion to the American Revolution is a single guide to the themes, events, and concepts of this major turning point in early American history. Containing coverage before, during, and after the war, as well as the effect of the revolution on a global scale, this major reference to the period is ideal for any student, scholar, or general reader seeking a complete reference to the field. Contains 90 articles in all, including guides to further reading and a detailed chronological table. Explains all aspects of the revolution before, during, and after the war. Discusses the status and experiences of women, Native Americans, and African Americans, and aspects of social and daily life during this period. Describes the effects of the revolution abroad. Provides complete coverage of military history, including the home front. Concludes with a section on concepts to put the morality of early America in today’s context.
In this book seven distinguished historians explain how a national political culture developed in America. A political culture is both the collectivity of a community's values and a mode of behavior--an end as well as a process of obtaining that end which is always changing. Essays by J.G.A. Pocock, Jack Greene, Richard Vernier, Andrew Robertson, Joyce Appleby, Lawrence Goldman, and Rebecca Starr examine issues such as how British institutions and the common law were modified by unique colonial American experiences; how election rituals transformed the American political culture of deference into an expanded, abstract world of electoral opinion knit together by newspapers; how the South developed its own political culture by the end of the eighteenth century that persisted well beyond the Civil War; and more.
How did banking in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts evolve? Lu provides a compelling narrative about the connection between inclusive political systems and open access economies, hypothesizing that entry into banking was firstly made upon partisan grounds before later becoming open access/free entry. Lu investigates state level institutional change and studies the transition to open access from an economic perspective. What was the relationship between banking and political elites? Why were elites, who enjoyed privileges under dominant institutions, willing to dissolve these institutions and eliminate their privileges? The author provides new insights into American economic history, explaining how a society moves from limited access to one of openness.
In Harlots, Hussies, and Poor Unfortunate Women, Edith M. Ziegler recounts the history of British convict women involuntarily transported to Maryland in the eighteenth century. Great Britain’s forced transportation of convicts to colonial Australia is well known. Less widely known is Britain’s earlier program of sending convicts—including women—to North America. Many of these women were assigned as servants in Maryland. Titled using epithets that their colonial masters applied to the convicts, Edith M. Ziegler’s Harlots, Hussies, and Poor Unfortunate Women examines the lives of this intriguing subset of American immigrants. Basing much of her powerful narrative on the experiences o...