Download or read book America s First Wartime Election written by Donald A. Zinman and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2024-11-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the heir apparent to the presidency in 1808, James Madison had a substantial reputation and an impressive list of credentials, including having cofounded the Democratic-Republican party with Thomas Jefferson and serving as Jefferson’s secretary of state. Despite this, Madison’s presidential victory in 1808 was hardly uncontested as he faced internal opposition from supporters of James Monroe and Vice President George Clinton. In 1812, then, it was by no means a sure thing that Madison would secure a second term, and that uncertainty grew substantially after Madison essentially asked Congress for a declaration of war on June 1, 1812, mere months before the election. America’s First Wartime Election focuses on an overlooked moment in political history. The War of 1812 has generated a significant amount of attention, overshadowing the election that took place in the early stages of the conflict. As the United States and Great Britain clashed on the battlefield, President James Madison was challenged by DeWitt Clinton, the nephew of George Clinton, who was the simultaneous mayor of New York City and the lieutenant governor of his state. Clinton held a base of Democratic-Republican support in New York where many in his party opposed the war. Many New Yorkers also resented Virginia’s domination of the presidency going back to George Washington’s tenure. Other Democratic-Republicans supported the war but faulted Madison for his poor preparations and early battlefield setbacks. United in their opposition to the war, Federalists joined forces with Clinton, but the alliance was tardy, disorganized, and awkward. The story of this election is also a tale of weak political parties. The Federalist party had steadily lost strength since the election of Jefferson in 1800, and the Democratic-Republican party was still a young, disjointed, and fractious coalition. In order to sustain the party that he had helped to start, Madison was under pressure not only to secure his reelection but also to successfully conduct the war. While Madison had vulnerabilities, given America’s poor preparation for the war, the fusionist ticket supporting Clinton was poorly positioned to challenge the incumbent president. Political parties in general were still in their infancy, thus complicating efforts to build a coherent alternative to Madison. For a fusion ticket to succeed in elections, strong political parties are necessary, which was not the case in 1812. Red-hot passions over the divisive War of 1812 overlapped with a presidential election that became a referendum on the conflict itself. Momentum is important in politics—a principle that was just as important over 200 years ago as it is today. Written for scholars, students, and the public alike, Donald A. Zinman’s accessible study of this important but often ignored election is another illuminating entry in the University Press of Kansas’s longstanding American Presidential Elections series.
Download or read book In Time of War written by Adam J. Berinsky and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From World War II to the war in Iraq, periods of international conflict seem like unique moments in U.S. political history—but when it comes to public opinion, they are not. To make this groundbreaking revelation, In Time of War explodes conventional wisdom about American reactions to World War II, as well as the more recent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adam Berinsky argues that public response to these crises has been shaped less by their defining characteristics—such as what they cost in lives and resources—than by the same political interests and group affiliations that influence our ideas about domestic issues. With the help of World War II–era survey data that had gone virtually untouched for the past sixty years, Berinsky begins by disproving the myth of “the good war” that Americans all fell in line to support after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The attack, he reveals, did not significantly alter public opinion but merely punctuated interventionist sentiment that had already risen in response to the ways that political leaders at home had framed the fighting abroad. Weaving his findings into the first general theory of the factors that shape American wartime opinion, Berinsky also sheds new light on our reactions to other crises. He shows, for example, that our attitudes toward restricted civil liberties during Vietnam and after 9/11 stemmed from the same kinds of judgments we make during times of peace. With Iraq and Afghanistan now competing for attention with urgent issues within the United States, In Time of War offers a timely reminder of the full extent to which foreign and domestic politics profoundly influence—and ultimately illuminate—each other.
Download or read book Reelecting Lincoln written by John Waugh and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, from the author of the acclaimed book The Class of 1846, is the dramatic story of what may have been the most critical election campaign in American history. Taking place in the midst of the Civil War, the election of 1864 would determine the very future of the nation. Would the country be unified or permanently divided? Would slavery continue? Weaving rich anecdotal material into a fast-paced narrative, John C. Waugh places this pivotal election in its historical context while evoking its human drama. The men and women who figured in this epic campaign—most notably Lincoln himself—emerge with all their strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies. "It's an inherently dramatic story, and one that has been told before. But never quite so well as by John C. Waugh, [who] brings to his task the keen eye for detail and scene-setting that one would expect from a career reporter," said the Wall Street Journal. Drawing on an extensive array of sources, including published and unpublished reminiscences, memoirs, autobiographies, letters, newspapers, and periodicals, Waugh re-creates that fateful year with all the immediacy of a political reporter covering a national presidential election today.
Download or read book The Wartime President written by William G. Howell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-08-14 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It is the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers. The balance of power between Congress and the president has been a powerful thread throughout American political thought since the time of the Founding Fathers. And yet, for all that has been written on the topic, we still lack a solid empirical or theoretical justification for Hamilton’s proposition. For the first time, William G. Howell, Saul P. Jackman, and Jon C. Rogowski systematically analyze the question. Congress, they show, is more likely to defer to the president’s policy preferences when political debates center on national rather than local considerations. Thus, World War II and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq significantly augmented presidential power, allowing the president to enact foreign and domestic policies that would have been unattainable in times of peace. But, contrary to popular belief, there are also times when war has little effect on a president’s influence in Congress. The Vietnam and Gulf Wars, for instance, did not nationalize our politics nearly so much, and presidential influence expanded only moderately. Built on groundbreaking research, The Wartime President offers one of the most significant works ever written on the wartime powers presidents wield at home.
Download or read book The Right to Vote written by Alexander Keyssar and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 2000, The Right to Vote was widely hailed as a magisterial account of the evolution of suffrage from the American Revolution to the end of the twentieth century. In this revised and updated edition, Keyssar carries the story forward, from the disputed presidential contest of 2000 through the 2008 campaign and the election of Barack Obama. The Right to Vote is a sweeping reinterpretation of American political history as well as a meditation on the meaning of democracy in contemporary American life.
Download or read book The Leadership of Abraham Lincoln written by Don Edward Fehrenbacher and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1970 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A selection of writings by many leading Lincoln scholars ... who have directly confronted the problem of evaluating Lincoln's presidential leadership."--
Download or read book Emancipation the Union Army and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln written by Jonathan W. White and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2014-06-09 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Union army's overwhelming vote for Abraham Lincoln's reelection in 1864 has led many Civil War scholars to conclude that the soldiers supported the Republican Party and its effort to abolish slavery. In Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln Jonathan W. White challenges this reigning paradigm in Civil War historiography, arguing instead that the soldier vote in the presidential election of 1864 is not a reliable index of the army's ideological motivation or political sentiment. Although 78 percent of the soldiers' votes were cast for Lincoln, White contends that this was not wholly due to a political or social conversion to the Republican Party. Rather, he argues, historians have ignored mitigating factors such as voter turnout, intimidation at the polls, and how soldiers voted in nonpresidential elections in 1864. While recognizing that many soldiers changed their views on slavery and emancipation during the war, White suggests that a considerable number still rejected the Republican platform, and that many who voted for Lincoln disagreed with his views on slavery. He likewise explains that many northerners considered a vote for the Democratic ticket as treasonous and an admission of defeat. Using previously untapped court-martial records from the National Archives, as well as manuscript collections from across the country, White convincingly revises many commonly held assumptions about the Civil War era and provides a deeper understanding of the Union Army.
Download or read book The Gettysburg Address written by Abraham Lincoln and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2022-11-29 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complete text of one of the most important speeches in American history, delivered by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln arrived at the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to remember not only the grim bloodshed that had just occurred there, but also to remember the American ideals that were being put to the ultimate test by the Civil War. A rousing appeal to the nation’s better angels, The Gettysburg Address remains an inspiring vision of the United States as a country “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Download or read book Fraud of the Century written by Roy Jr. Morris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr, tells the extraordinary story of how, in America’s centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and Black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South. The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincoln’s in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing the White House, the election was in some ways the last battle of the Civil War, as the two parties fought to preserve or overturn what had been decided by armies just eleven years earlier. Riding a wave of popular revulsion at the numerous scandals of the Grant administration and a sluggish economy, Tilden received some 260,000 more votes than his opponent. But contested returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina ultimately led to Hayes’s being declared the winner by a specially created, Republican-dominated Electoral Commission after four tense months of political intrigue and threats of violence. President Grant took the threats seriously: he ordered armed federal troops into the streets of Washington to keep the peace. Morris brings to life all the colorful personalities and high drama of this most remarkable—and largely forgotten—election. He presents vivid portraits of the bachelor lawyer Tilden, a wealthy New York sophisticate whose passion for clean government propelled him to the very brink of the presidency, and of Hayes, a family man whose Midwestern simplicity masked a cunning political mind. We travel to Philadelphia, where the Centennial Exhibition celebrated America’s industrial might and democratic ideals, and to the nation’s heartland, where Republicans waged a cynical but effective “bloody shirt” campaign to tar the Democrats, once again, as the party of disunion and rebellion. Morris dramatically recreates the suspenseful events of election night, when both candidates went to bed believing Tilden had won, and a one-legged former Union army general, “Devil Dan” Sickles, stumped into Republican headquarters and hastily improvised a devious plan to subvert the election in the three disputed southern states. We watch Hayes outmaneuver the curiously passive Tilden and his supporters in the days following the election, and witness the late-night backroom maneuvering of party leaders in the nation's capital, where democracy itself was ultimately subverted and the will of the people thwarted. Fraud of the Century presents compelling evidence that fraud by Republican vote-counters in the three southern states, and especially in Louisiana, robbed Tilden of the presidency. It is at once a masterful example of political reporting and an absorbing read.
Download or read book FDR Dewey and the Election of 1944 written by David M. Jordan and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-02 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " With its insider tales and accounts of party politics, and campaigning for votes in the shadow of war and an uncertain future, FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944 makes for a fascinating chapter in American political history.
Download or read book COMMITTEE ON WOMAN SUFFRAGE written by and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wartime Dissent in America written by R. Mann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the speeches, essays and interviews of some of the most compelling individuals in American history who stood against the key conflicts of their lifetimes, this book gives remarkable insight into wartime dissent in the U.S. from the revolutionary war to the war on terror.
Download or read book Wartime America written by John W. Jeffries and published by Ivan R. Dee. This book was released on 1998-02-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As John Jeffries observes in his new and cogent history of America during World War II, our view of the war has been shaped by two widely accepted perspectives: as a watershed in American history, as a “Good War” of national unity, virtue, and success. Searching for the reality behind these catchphrases, Mr. Jeffries finds a richer and more varied portrait of America at war, one that defies easy interpretation. If great changes came to American life, thy were not necessarily brought by the war; if the struggle seemed one of moral unity, not all Americans were equally wedded to the cause. In considering the nation's political economy and the effects of mobilization; the social and cultural mobility of wartime; the experiences of minority groups; the strains of domestic politics; and the influence of propaganda, Mr. Jeffries paints a picture of a people emerging from the Great Depression and eager for a better life, yet often reluctant to abandon the touchstones of their past. His succinct, informative history is a welcome contribution to our understanding of this crucial moment in the American experience.
Download or read book Politics as Usual written by Michael Davis and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The presidential election of 1944, which unfolded against the backdrop of the World War II, was the first since 1864—and one of only a few in all of US history—to take place while the nation was at war. After a brief primary season, the Republican Party settled upon New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, the former district attorney and popular special prosecutor of Legs Diamond and Lucky Luciano, as its nominee for president of the United States. The Democratic nominee for president, meanwhile, was the three-term incumbent, sixty-two year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Sensitive to the wartime setting of the election, both Roosevelt and Dewey briefly adopted dignified and low-key electoral strategies early in their campaigns. Within a few months however, "politics as usual" returned as the campaign degenerated into a vigorously fought, chaotic, unpredictable, and highly competitive contest. While Politics as Usual is a comprehensive study of the campaign, Davis focuses attention on the loser, Dewey, and shows how he emerged as a central figure for the Republican Party. Davis examines the political landscape in the United States in the early 1940s, including the state of the two parties, and the rhetoric and strategies employed by both the Dewey and Roosevelt campaigns. He details the survival of partisanship in World War II America and the often overlooked role of Dewey—who sought to rebuild the Republican Party "to be worthy of national trust"—as party leader at such a critical time. Although Dewey fell short of victory, Dewey kept his party unified, helped steer it away from isolationist influences, and rebuilt it to fit into (and to be a relevant alternative within) the post-World War II, New Deal order.
Download or read book Jefferson s Second Revolution written by Susan Dunn and published by HMH. This book was released on 2004-09-09 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “excellent” history of the tumultuous early years of American government, and a constitutional crisis sparked by the Electoral College (Booklist). In the election of 1800, Federalist incumbent John Adams, and the elitism he represented, faced Republican Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson defeated Adams but, through a quirk in Electoral College balloting, tied with his own running mate, Aaron Burr. A constitutional crisis ensued. Congress was supposed to resolve the tie, but would the Federalists hand over power peacefully to their political enemies, to Jefferson and his Republicans? For weeks on end, nothing was certain. The Federalists delayed and plotted, while Republicans threatened to take up arms. In a way no previous historian has done, Susan Dunn illuminates this watershed moment in American history. She captures its great drama, gives us fresh, finely drawn portraits of the founding fathers, and brilliantly parses the enduring significance of the crisis. The year 1800 marked the end of Federalist elitism, pointed the way to peaceful power shifts, cleared a place for states’ rights in the political landscape—and set the stage for the Civil War. “Dunn, a scholar of eighteenth-century American history, has provided a valuable reminder of an election in which the stakes were truly enormous and the political vituperation was far more poisonous than the relatively moderate attacks heard today. . . . An excellent work that effectively explains this critical contest that shaped the history of the new republic.” —Booklist “Dunn does a superb job of recounting the campaign, its cast of characters, and the election’s bizarre conclusion in Congress. That tense standoff could have plunged the country into a disastrous armed conflict, Dunn explains, but instead cemented the legitimacy of peaceful, if not smooth, transfers of power.” —Publishers Weekly “Dunn simultaneously teaches and enthralls with her eloquent, five-sensed descriptions of the people and places that shaped our democracy.” —Entertainment Weekly
Download or read book Political Debates Between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A Douglas in the Celebrated Campaign of 1858 in Illinois written by Abraham Lincoln and published by . This book was released on 1895 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Absentee and Early Voting written by John C. Fortier and published by A E I Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises, and Perils, John Fortier documents the dramatic increase in absentee voting and, more recently, the meteoric rise in early voting. He examines the legal and historical reasons for changes in the voting system and the many differe...
