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 Contested Ground written by Dan A. Farber and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Presidential power is hotly disputed these days - as it has been many times in recent decades. Yet the same rules must apply to all presidents, those whose abuses of power we fear as well as those whose exercises of power we applaud. This book is about what constitutional law tells us about presidential power and its limits. It is very difficult to strike the right balance between limiting abuse of power and authorizing its exercise when needed. This book advocates a balanced, pragmatic approach to these issues, rooted in history and Supreme Court rulings"--

Download or read book Ballot Battles written by Edward B. Foley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-26 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2000 presidential race resulted in the highest-profile ballot battle in over a century. But it is far from the only American election determined by a handful of votes and marred by claims of fraud. Since the founding of the nation, violence frequently erupted as the votes were being counted, and more than a few elections produced manifestly unfair results. Despite America's claim to be the world's greatest democracy, its adherence to the basic tenets of democratic elections-the ability to count ballots accurately and fairly even when the stakes are high-has always been shaky. A rigged gubernatorial election in New York in 1792 nearly ended in calls for another revolution, and an 1899 gubernatorial race even resulted in an assassination. Though acts of violence have decreased in frequency over the past century, fairness and accuracy in ballot counting nonetheless remains a basic problem in American political life. In Ballot Battles, Edward Foley presents a sweeping history of election controversies in the United States, tracing how their evolution generated legal precedents that ultimately transformed how we determine who wins and who loses. While weaving a narrative spanning over two centuries, Foley repeatedly returns to an originating event: because the Founding Fathers despised parties and never envisioned the emergence of a party system, they wrote a constitution that did not provide clear solutions for high-stakes and highly-contested elections in which two parties could pool resources against one another. Moreover, in the American political system that actually developed, politicians are beholden to the parties which they represent - and elected officials have typically had an outsized say in determining the outcomes of extremely close elections that involve recounts. This underlying structural problem, more than anything else, explains why intense ballot battles that leave one side feeling aggrieved will continue to occur for the foreseeable future. American democracy has improved dramatically over the last two centuries. But the same cannot be said for the ways in which we determine who wins the very close races. From the founding until today, there has been little progress toward fixing the problem. Indeed, supporters of John Jay in 1792 and opponents of Lyndon Johnson in the 1948 Texas Senate race would find it easy to commiserate with Al Gore after the 2000 election. Ballot Battles is not only the first full chronicle of contested elections in the US. It also provides a powerful explanation of why the American election system has been-and remains-so ineffective at deciding the tightest races in a way that all sides will agree is fair.

Download or read book America Afire written by Bernard A. Weisberger and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-07-19 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America Afire is the powerful story of the election of 1800, arguably the most important election in America's history and certainly one of the most hotly disputed. Former allies Adams and Jefferson, president versus vice president, Federalist versus Republican, squared off in a vicious contest that resulted in broken friendships, scandals, riots, slander, and jailings in the fourth presidential election under the Constitution.

Download or read book Contested Truths written by Daniel T. Rodgers and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The language of argument uses particular words with particular, sometimes shifting meanings, though time. It is true that politicians may act as though they are part of no particular ideological tradition, but history shows that they mainly use an understood meaning to enhance their actions.

Download or read book Contested Commemoration in U S History written by Klara Stephanie Szlezák and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-25 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the backdrop of two recent socio-political developments—the shift from the Obama to the Trump administration and the surge in nationalist and populist sentiment that ushered in the current administration—Contested Commemoration in U.S. History presents eleven essays focused on practices of remembering contested events in America’s national history. This edited volume contains fresh interpretations of public history and collective memory that explore the evolving relationship between the U.S. and its past. The individual chapters investigate efforts to memorialize events or interrogate instances of historical sanitization at the expense of less partial representations that would include other perspectives. The primary source material and geography covered is extensive; contributors use historic sites and monuments, photographs, memoirs, textbooks, periodicals, music, and film to discuss the periods from colonial America, through the Revolutionary and Civil Wars up until the Vietnam War, Civil Rights movement, and Cold War, to explore how the commemoration of those eras resonates in the twenty-first century. Through a range of commemoration media and primary sources, the authors illuminate themes and arguments that are indispensable to students, scholars, and practitioners interested in Public History and American Studies more broadly.

Download or read book Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College written by Alexander Keyssar and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-31 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 its confounding persistence. After tracing the tangled origins of the Electoral College back to the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Keyssar outlines the constant stream of efforts since then to abolish or reform it. Why have they all failed? The complexity of the design and partisan one-upmanship have a lot to do with it, as do the difficulty of passing constitutional amendments and the South’s long history of restrictive voting laws. By revealing the reasons for past failures and showing how close we’ve come to abolishing the Electoral College, Keyssar offers encouragement to those hoping for change. “Conclusively demonstrates the absurdity of preserving an institution that has been so contentious throughout U.S. history and has not infrequently produced results that defied the popular will.” —Michael Kazin, The Nation “Rigorous and highly readable...shows how the electoral college has endured despite being reviled by statesmen from James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson to Edward Kennedy, Bob Dole, and Gerald Ford.” —Lawrence Douglas, Times Literary Supplement

Download or read book Contested Democracy written by Manisha Sinha and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With essays on U.S. history ranging from the American Revolution to the dawn of the twenty-first century, Contested Democracy illuminates struggles waged over freedom and citizenship throughout the American past. Guided by a commitment to democratic citizenship and responsible scholarship, the contributors to this volume insist that rigorous engagement with history is essential to a vital democracy, particularly amid the current erosion of human rights and civil liberties within the United States and abroad. Emphasizing the contradictory ways in which freedom has developed within the United States and in the exercise of American power abroad, these essays probe challenges to American democracy through conflicts shaped by race, slavery, gender, citizenship, political economy, immigration, law, empire, and the idea of the nation state. In this volume, writers demonstrate how opposition to the expansion of democracy has shaped the American tradition as much as movements for social and political change. By foregrounding those who have been marginalized in U.S society as well as the powerful, these historians and scholars argue for an alternative vision of American freedom that confronts the limitations, failings, and contradictions of U.S. power. Their work provides crucial insight into the role of the United States in this latest age of American empire and the importance of different and oppositional visions of American democracy and freedom. At a time of intense disillusionment with U.S. politics and of increasing awareness of the costs of empire, these contributors argue that responsible historical scholarship can challenge the blatant manipulation of discourses on freedom. They call for careful and conscientious scholarship not only to illuminate contemporary problems but also to act as a bulwark against mythmaking in the service of cynical political ends.

Download or read book The United States Contested written by Sergio Fabbrini and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why and how is America contested by Europe? This new book answers this question and contributes to a better understanding of contemporary transatlantic tensions. Adopting different theoretical perspectives, the leading contributors to this volume assess the European discontent with America and relate this to the unilateral turn of US foreign policy in the twenty-first century. American unilateralism is interpreted by all the authors as the expression of a new conservative nationalism which has been growing in the country since the 1970s and became culturally hegemonic after 9/11. They explore the following key areas: the rise of American conservative nationalism US foreign policy transatlantic relations anti-Americanism the Iraq War the future of American political and cultural hegemony. This book will be vital reading for students of international relations, foreign policy analysis, American and European politics.

Download or read book Contested Waters written by Jeff Wiltse and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-11-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From nineteenth-century public baths to today's private backyard havens, swimming pools have long been a provocative symbol of American life. In this social and cultural history of swimming pools in the United States, Jeff Wiltse relates how, over the years, pools have served as asylums for the urban poor, leisure resorts for the masses, and private clubs for middle-class suburbanites. As sites of race riots, shrinking swimsuits, and conspicuous leisure, swimming pools reflect many of the tensions and transformations that have given rise to modern America.

Download or read book Contentious Elections written by Pippa Norris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe the world has witnessed a rising tide of contentious elections ending in heated partisan debates, court challenges, street protests, and legitimacy challenges. In some cases, disputes have been settled peacefully through legal appeals and electoral reforms. In the worst cases, however, disputes have triggered bloodshed or government downfalls and military coups. Contentious elections are characterized by major challenges, with different degrees of severity, to the legitimacy of electoral actors, procedures, or outcomes. Despite growing concern, until recently little research has studied this phenomenon. The theory unfolded in this volume suggests that problems of electoral malpractice erode confidence in electoral authorities, spur peaceful protests demonstrating against the outcome, and, in the most severe cases, lead to outbreaks of conflict and violence. Understanding this process is of vital concern for domestic reformers and the international community, as well as attracting a growing new research agenda. The editors, from the Electoral Integrity Project, bring together scholars considering a range of fresh evidence– analyzing public opinion surveys of confidence in elections and voter turnout within specific countries, as well as expert perceptions of the existence of peaceful electoral demonstrations, and survey and aggregate data monitoring outbreaks of electoral violence. The book provides insights invaluable for studies in democracy and democratization, comparative politics, comparative elections, peace and conflict studies, comparative sociology, international development, comparative public opinion, political behavior, political institutions, and public policy.

Download or read book A Historical and Legal Digest of All the Contested Election Cases in the House of Representatives of the United States from the First to the Fifty sixth Congress 1789 1901 written by Chester Harvey Rowell and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 890 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Historical and Legal Digest of All the Contested Election Cases in the House of Representatives of the United States from the Fifty seventh to and Including the Sixty fourth Congress 1901 1917 written by United States. Congress. Contested Elections and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Contested States in World Politics written by D. Geldenhuys and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-04-22 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates a phenomenon in world politics that is largely overlooked by scholars, namely entities lacking international recognition of their status as independent states. It includes case studies on the Eurasian Quartet, Kosovo, Somaliland, Palestine, Northern Cyprus, Western Sahara and Taiwan.

Download or read book Cases of Contested Elections in Congress written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Elections and published by . This book was released on 1834 with total page 1038 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Contested Will written by James Shapiro and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.

Download or read book The Contested City written by John H. Mollenkopf and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1983-11-21 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes case studies of Boston (Mass) and San Francisco.