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For the last twenty years this book has been cited by every serious writer on early American constitutional development. Any constitutional history of the independent United States must begin with this comprehensive study. Professor Adams combines a European perspective and a thorough knowledge of the antecedents of 1787 to create an insightful analysis of the replacement by the revolutionary generation of one government by another by—they thought—'constitutional' means. Acting for 'the people' in 11 of the 13 rebelling states, various kinds of self-empowered committees, 'congresses,' or 'conventions' created new constitutions and a system in which the states dominated over the weaker Confederation government. This volume contains two new chapters: one demonstrating precedents in the state constitutions for the U.S. Constitution, and another chapter critically testing the 'republicanism over liberalism' thesis against political ideas and institutional arrangements that constitute the first state constitutions. The bibliography has been updated to include the rich body of work written during the last two decades, much of it indebted to this pioneering study.
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Spanning both the history of the modern West and his own five-decade journey as a historian, Gerald Stourzh’s sweeping new essay collection covers the same breadth of topics that has characterized his career—from Benjamin Franklin to Gustav Mahler, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Charles Beard, from the notion of constitution in seventeenth-century England to the concept of neutrality in twentieth-century Austria. This storied career brought him in the 1950s from the University of Vienna to the University of Chicago—of which he draws a brilliant picture—and later took him to Berlin and eventually back to Austria. One of the few prominent scholars equally at home with U.S. history and t...
The adoption of the Bill of Rights was the last step in defining the essential elements of American constitutionalism. The process began with the writing of the Constitution, continued through its ratification by the states, and culminated with the adoption of the Bill of Rights. In 1991 the bicentennial of the adoption of the Bill of Rights provided an occasion for examining the origins of this most important statement of individual rights in American history. Published on this anniversary, The South's Role in the Creation of the Bill of Rights sheds light on the paradoxical part the South played in the process of drafting and adopting this document. In cogent essays from the Chancellor's S...
What is the state of American studies in the twenty-first century?
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. Can we adopt human rights concepts, long used to frame problems of social justice, to define environmental justice? Can existing social institutions provide models and tools for achieving environmental justice? This volume views old models of agency through new lenses and examines how several social institutions, such as law, education and health care, address specific environmental problems. The volume presents arguments for human obligations towards the environment and future generations. Scholars assess the limitations of existing models and others point to recent failures in protecting the interests of indigenous groups or species. And on a hopeful note, examples are given of institutions that promise some success in effecting environmental goals. As this discussion of citizenship suggests, much like environmental justice, a global context both in definition and application is required.
Winner of the 1981 Bancroft Prize. Focusing primarily on the middle class, this study delineates the social, intellectual and psychological transformation of the American family from 1780-1865. Examines the emergence of the privatized middle-class family with its sharp division of male and female roles.
In a major reinterpretation of American political thought in the revolutionary era, Marc Kruman explores the process of constitution making in each of the thirteen original states and shows that the framers created a distinctively American science of poli
A detailed and compelling examination of how the legal theory of originalism ignores and distorts the very constitutional history from which it derives interpretive authority “What are the chances that, in 2024, a new book could fundamentally reorient how we understand America’s founding? Jonathan Gienapp . . . has written such a book. . . . You read it, and you get vertigo. . . . Gienapp’s book comes as a thunderclap.”—Cass Sunstein, Washington Post Constitutional originalism stakes law to history. The theory’s core tenet—that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning—has us decide questions of modern constitutional law by consulting the d...