Download or read book The Grandees of Government written by Brent Tarter and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the formation of the first institutions of representative government and the use of slavery in the seventeenth century through the American Revolution, the Civil War, the civil rights movement, and into the twenty-first century, Virginia’s history has been marked by obstacles to democratic change. In The Grandees of Government, Brent Tarter offers an extended commentary based in primary sources on how these undemocratic institutions and ideas arose, and how they were both perpetuated and challenged. Although much literature on American republicanism focuses on the writings of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, among others, Tarter reveals how their writings were in reality an expression of federalism, not of republican government. Within Virginia, Jefferson, Madison, and others such as John Taylor of Caroline and their contemporaries governed in ways that directly contradicted their statements about representative—and limited— government. Even the democratic rhetoric of the American Revolution worked surprisingly little immediate change in the political practices, institutions, and culture of Virginia. The counterrevolution of the 1880s culminated in the Constitution of 1902 that disfranchised the remainder of African Americans. Virginians who could vote reversed the democratic reforms embodied in the constitutions of 1851, 1864, and 1869, so that the antidemocratic Byrd organization could dominate Virginia’s public life for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Offering a thorough reevaluation of the interrelationship between the words and actions of Virginia’s political leaders, The Grandees of Government provides an entirely new interpretation of Virginia’s political history.
Download or read book Daydreams and Nightmares written by Brent Tarter and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2015-04-29 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The decision of the eventual Confederate states to secede from the Union set in motion perhaps the most dramatic chapter in American history, and one that has typically been told on a grand scale. In Daydreams and Nightmares, however, historian Brent Tarter shares the story of one Virginia family who found themselves in the middle of the secession debate and saw their world torn apart as the states chose sides and went to war. George Berlin was elected to serve as a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1861 as an opponent of secession, but he ultimately changed his vote. Later, when defending his decision in a speech in his hometown of Buckhannon, Upshur County, he had to flee for his safety as Union soldiers arrived. Berlin and his wife, Susan Holt Berlin, were separated for extended periods--both during the convention and, later, during the early years of the Civil War. The letters they exchanged tell a harrowing story of uncertainty and bring to life for the modern reader an extended family that encompassed both Confederate and Union sympathizers. This is in part a love story. It is also a story about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. Although unique in its vividly evoked details, the Berlins’ story is representative of the drama endured by millions of Americans. Composed during the nightmare of civil war, the Berlins’ remarkably articulate letters express the dreams of reunion and a secure future felt throughout the entire, severed nation. In this intimate, evocative, and often heartbreaking family story, we see up close the personal costs of our larger national history. A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War
Download or read book Gerrymanders written by Brent Tarter and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many are aware that gerrymandering exists and suspect it plays a role in our elections, but its history goes far deeper, and its impacts are far greater, than most realize. In his latest book, Brent Tarter focuses on Virginia’s long history of gerrymandering to uncover its immense influence on the state’s politics and to provide perspective on how the practice impacts politics nationally. Offering the first in-depth historical study of gerrymanders in Virginia, Tarter exposes practices going back to nineteenth century and colonial times and explains how they protected land owners’ and slave owners’ interests. The consequences of redistricting and reapportionment in modern Virginia—in effect giving a partisan minority the upper hand in all public policy decisions—become much clearer in light of this history. Where the discussion of gerrymandering has typically emphasized political parties’ control of Congress, Tarter focuses on the state legislatures that determine congressional district lines and, in most states, even those of their own districts. On the eve of the 2021 session of the General Assembly, which will redraw district lines for Virginia’s state Senate and House of Delegates, as well as for the U.S. House of Representatives, Tarter’s book provides an eye-opening investigation of gerrymandering and its pervasive effect on our local, state, and national politics and government.
Download or read book The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America written by Lee Ward and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-26 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study locates the philosophical origins of the Anglo-American political and constitutional tradition in the philosophical, theological, and political controversies in seventeenth-century England. By examining the quarrel it identifies the source of modern liberal, republican and conservative ideas about natural rights and government in the seminal works of the Exclusion Whigs Locke, Sidney, and Tyrrell and their philosophical forebears Hobbes, Grotius, Spinoza, and Pufendorf. This study illuminates how these first Whigs and their diverse eighteenth-century intellectual heirs such as Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, Hume, Blackstone, Otis, Jefferson, Burke, and Paine contributed to the formation of Anglo-American political and constitutional theory in the crucial period from the Glorious Revolution through to the American Revolution and the creation of a distinctly American understanding of rights and government in the first state constitutions.
Download or read book 1619 written by James Horn and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essential history of the extraordinary year in which American democracy and American slavery emerged hand in hand in colonial Virginia. Along the banks of the James River, Virginia, during an oppressively hot spell in the middle of summer 1619, two events occurred within a few weeks of each other that would profoundly shape the course of history. In the newly built church at Jamestown, the General Assembly -- the first gathering of a representative governing body in America -- came together. A few weeks later, a battered privateer entered the Chesapeake Bay carrying the first African slaves to land on mainland English America. In 1619, historian James Horn sheds new light on the year that gave birth to the great paradox of our nation: slavery in the midst of freedom. This portentous year marked both the origin of the most important political development in American history, the rise of democracy, and the emergence of what would in time become one of the nation's greatest challenges: the corrosive legacy of racial inequality that has afflicted America since its beginning.
Download or read book A Saga of the New South written by Brent Tarter and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the lead-up to the Civil War, Virginia, like other southern states, amassed a large public debt while striving to improve transportation infrastructure and stimulate economic development. A Saga of the New South delves into the largely untold story of the decades-long postwar controversies over the repayment of that debt. The result is a major reinterpretation of late-nineteenth-century Virginia political history. The post–Civil War public debt controversy in Virginia reshaped the state’s political landscape twice. First it created the conditions under which the Readjuster Party, a biracial coalition of radical reformers, seized control of the state government in 1879 and successfully refinanced the debt; then it gave rise to a counterrevolution that led the elitist Democratic Party to eighty years of dominance in the state's politics. Despite the Readjusters’ victory in refinancing the debt and their increased spending for the popular new system of free public schools, the debt controversy generated a long train of legal disputes—at least eighty-five cases reached the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, and twenty-nine reached the Supreme Court of the United States. Through an in-depth look at these political and legal contests, A Saga of the New South sheds new light on the many obstacles that reformers faced in Virginia and the South after the Civil War.
Download or read book The Dream Is Lost written by Julian Maxwell Hayter and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2017-06-02 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once the capital of the Confederacy and the industrial hub of slave-based tobacco production, Richmond, Virginia has been largely overlooked in the context of twentieth century urban and political history. By the early 1960s, the city served as an important center for integrated politics, as African Americans fought for fair representation and mobilized voters in order to overcome discriminatory policies. Richmond's African Americans struggled to serve their growing communities in the face of unyielding discrimination. Yet, due to their dedication to strengthening the Voting Rights Act of 1965, African American politicians held a city council majority by the late 1970s. In The Dream Is Lost, Julian Maxwell Hayter describes more than three decades of national and local racial politics in Richmond and illuminates the unintended consequences of civil rights legislation. He uses the city's experience to explain the political abuses that often accompany American electoral reforms and explores the arc of mid-twentieth-century urban history. In so doing, Hayter not only reexamines the civil rights movement's origins, but also seeks to explain the political, economic, and social implications of the freedom struggle following the major legislation of the 1960s. Hayter concludes his study in the 1980s and follows black voter mobilization to its rational conclusion -- black empowerment and governance. However, he also outlines how Richmond's black majority council struggled to the meet the challenges of economic forces beyond the realm of politics. The Dream Is Lost vividly illustrates the limits of political power, offering an important view of an underexplored aspect of the post--civil rights era.
Download or read book An Essay Upon Civil Government written by Ramsay (Chevalier, Andrew Michael) and published by . This book was released on 1722 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Plato Redivivus Or a Dialogue Concerning Government Wherein by Observations Drawn from Other Kingdoms and States Both Ancient and Modern an Endeavour is Used to Discover the Present Politic Distemper of Our Own with the Causes and Remedies written by Henry Neville and published by . This book was released on 1763 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Political Register for written by and published by . This book was released on 1768 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Political History of Europe Since 1814 written by Charles Seignobos and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy written by Katherine Ludwig Jansen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval Italian communes are known for their violence, feuds, and vendettas, yet beneath this tumult was a society preoccupied with peace. Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy is the first book to examine how civic peacemaking in the age of Dante was forged in the crucible of penitential religious practice. Focusing on Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an era known for violence and civil discord, Katherine Ludwig Jansen brilliantly illuminates how religious and political leaders used peace agreements for everything from bringing an end to neighborhood quarrels to restoring full citizenship to judicial exiles. She brings to light a treasure trove of unpublished evidence from notarial archives and supports it with sermons, hagiography, political treatises, and chronicle accounts. She paints a vivid picture of life in an Italian commune, a socially and politically unstable world that strove to achieve peace. Jansen also assembles a wealth of visual material from the period, illustrating for the first time how the kiss of peace—a ritual gesture borrowed from the Catholic Mass—was incorporated into the settlement of secular disputes. Breaking new ground in the study of peacemaking in the Middle Ages, Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy adds an entirely new dimension to our understanding of Italian culture in this turbulent age by showing how peace was conceived, memorialized, and occasionally achieved.
Download or read book A Political History of Contemporary Europe Since 1814 written by Charles Seignobos and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 932 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The English Civil War written by John Adamson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-12-16 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Adamson provides a new synthesis of current research on the political crisis that engulfed England in the 1640s. Drawing on new archival findings and challenging current orthodoxies, these essays by leading historians offer a variety of original perspectives, locating English events firmly within a 'three kingdoms' context.
Download or read book An Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Oeconomy written by Sir James Steuart and published by . This book was released on 1767 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Royal Favouritism and the Governing Elite of the Spanish Monarchy 1640 1665 written by Alistair Malcolm and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Royal Favouritism and the Governing Elite of the Spanish Monarchy, 1640-1665 presents a study of the later years of the reign of Philip IV from the perspective of his favourite (valido), don Luis Méndez de Haro, and of the other ministers who helped govern the Spanish Habsburg Monarchy. It offers a positive vision of a period that is often seen as one of failure and decline. Unlike his predecessors, Haro exercised the favour that he enjoyed in a discreet way, acting as a perfect courtier and honest broker between the king and his aristocratic subjects. Nevertheless, Alistair Malcolm also argues that the presence of a royal favourite at the head of the government of Spain amounted to a major problem. The king's delegation of his authority to a single nobleman was considered by many to have been incompatible with good kingship, and Philip IV was himself very uneasy about failing in his responsibilities as a ruler. Haro was thus in a highly insecure situation, and sought to justify his regime by organizing the management of a prestigious and expensive foreign policy. In this context, the eventual conclusion of the very honourable peace with France in 1659 is shown to have been as much the result of the independent actions of other ministers as it was of a royal favourite very reluctantly brought to the negotiating table at the Pyrenees. By conclusion, the quite sudden collapse of Spanish European hegemony after Haro's death in 1661 is represented as a delayed reaction to the repercussions of a flawed system of government.
Download or read book The History of France from the Foundation of the Monarchy to the Death of Louis XVI written by William Grimshaw and published by . This book was released on 1829 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
