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“Wegman combines in-depth historical analysis and insight into contemporary politics to present a cogent argument that the Electoral College violates America’s ‘core democratic principles’ and should be done away with..." —Publishers Weekly The framers of the Constitution battled over it. Lawmakers have tried to amend or abolish it more than 700 times. To this day, millions of voters, and even members of Congress, misunderstand how it works. It deepens our national divide and distorts the core democratic principles of political equality and majority rule. How can we tolerate the Electoral College when every vote does not count the same, and the candidate who gets the most votes can...
On cover, the word "right" has an x drawn over the letter "r" with the letter "f" above it.
Through forty-five creative and concise essays by an international team of authors, this Cambridge History brings the fifteenth century to life for both specialists and general readers. Combining the best qualities of survey texts and scholarly literature, the book offers authoritative overviews of central composers, genres, and musical institutions as well as new and provocative reassessments of the work concept, the boundaries between improvisation and composition, the practice of listening, humanism, musical borrowing, and other topics. Multidisciplinary studies of music and architecture, feasting, poetry, politics, liturgy, and religious devotion rub shoulders with studies of compositional techniques, musical notation, music manuscripts, and reception history. Generously illustrated with figures and examples, this volume paints a vibrant picture of musical life in a period characterized by extraordinary innovation and artistic achievement.
The solution to youth voter turnout requires focus on helping young people follow through on their political interests and intentions.
An exploration of what self-referential compositions reveal about late medieval musical networks, linking choirboys to canons and performers to theorists.
“Gripping and essential.”—Jesse Wegman, New York Times An authoritative history by the preeminent scholar of the Civil War era, The Second Founding traces the arc of the three foundational Reconstruction amendments from their origins in antebellum activism and adoption amidst intense postwar politics to their virtual nullification by narrow Supreme Court decisions and Jim Crow state laws. Today these amendments remain strong tools for achieving the American ideal of equality, if only we will take them up.
A New Statesman Book of the Year “America’s greatest historian of democracy now offers an extraordinary history of the most bizarre aspect of our representative democracy—the electoral college...A brilliant contribution to a critical current debate.” —Lawrence Lessig, author of They Don’t Represent Us Every four years, millions of Americans wonder why they choose their presidents through an arcane institution that permits the loser of the popular vote to become president and narrows campaigns to swing states. Congress has tried on many occasions to alter or scuttle the Electoral College, and in this master class in American political history, a renowned Harvard professor explains...
In his latest book, Presidential Elections and Majority Rule, Edward Foley asks how the American electoral system can better represent the people. What kind of winner truly reflects the nation's votes: the plurality winners of winner-takes-all elections, as currently used, or the majority-preferred winners of a reformed system? How do third-party candidates affect American presidential elections? What, if anything, would change in a two-candidate run-off? And how can electoral reform be implemented without sowing chaos? Ultimately, Foley outlines a solution in which the Electoral College can be restored to its original majoritarian ideals through state law rather than Constitutional amendment.
This vanguard collection of original and in-depth essays explores the intricate interplay of the aesthetic and psychological domains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and considers the reasons why a common Modernist project took shape when and in the circumstances that it did. These changes occurred precisely when the distinctively modern disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis established their "scientific foundations and achieved the forms in which we largely know them today. This volume examines the dense web of connections joining the aesthetic and psychological realms in the modern era, charting historically the emergence of the ongoing modern discussion surrounding such issues as identity-formation, sexuality, and the unconscious. The contributors form a distinguished and diversified group of scholars, who write about a wide range of cultural fields, including philosophy, the novel and poetry, drama, dance, film and photography, as well as medicine, psychology, and the occult sciences.
Learn why the Roman Republic collapsed -- and how it could have continued to thrive -- with this insightful history from an award-winning author. In Mortal Republic, prize-winning historian Edward J. Watts offers a new history of the fall of the Roman Republic that explains why Rome exchanged freedom for autocracy. For centuries, even as Rome grew into the Mediterranean's premier military and political power, its governing institutions, parliamentary rules, and political customs successfully fostered negotiation and compromise. By the 130s BC, however, Rome's leaders increasingly used these same tools to cynically pursue individual gain and obstruct their opponents. As the center decayed and dysfunction grew, arguments between politicians gave way to political violence in the streets. The stage was set for destructive civil wars -- and ultimately the imperial reign of Augustus. The death of Rome's Republic was not inevitable. In Mortal Republic, Watts shows it died because it was allowed to, from thousands of small wounds inflicted by Romans who assumed that it would last forever.