Download or read book The Decline and Fall of the American Republic written by Bruce Ackerman and published by Harvard + ORM. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Audacious . . . offers a fierce critique of democracy’s most dangerous adversary: the abuse of democratic power by democratically elected chief executives.” (Benjamin R. Barber, New York Times bestselling author of Jihad vs. McWorld ) Bruce Ackerman shows how the institutional dynamics of the last half-century have transformed the American presidency into a potential platform for political extremism and lawlessness. Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the War on Terror are only symptoms of deeper pathologies. Ackerman points to a series of developments that have previously been treated independently of one another?from the rise of presidential primaries, to the role of pollsters and media gurus, to the centralization of power in White House czars, to the politicization of the military, to the manipulation of constitutional doctrine to justify presidential power-grabs. He shows how these different transformations can interact to generate profound constitutional crises in the twenty-first century?and then proposes a series of reforms that will minimize, if not eliminate, the risks going forward. “The questions [Ackerman] raises regarding the threat of the American Executive to the republic are daunting. This fascinating book does an admirable job of laying them out.” —The Rumpus “Ackerman worries that the office of the presidency will continue to grow in political influence in the coming years, opening possibilities for abuse of power if not outright despotism.” —Boston Globe “A serious attention-getter.” —Joyce Appleby, author of The Relentless Revolution “Those who care about the future of our nation should pay careful heed to Ackerman’s warning, as well as to his prescriptions for avoiding a constitutional disaster.” —Geoffrey R. Stone, author of Perilous Times

Download or read book The Coming Collapse of the American Republic written by Robert A. Hall and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2011-05-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " ... four threats which are combining to destroy the future for our grandchildren: 1. The incomprehensible debt and unfunded financial liabilities of all levels of government; 2. The threat of uncontrolled, illegal immigration to our economy and culture; 3. The asymmetric war imposed on us by Islamic Jihadists; and, 4. The rise of China as a competitive military and economic power determined to dominate Asia. Taken together, these desperate trends put the survival of America as a united, free and prosperous country in great jeopardy"--Page 4 of cover.

Download or read book The Decline of the American Republic written by John T. Flynn and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 1955 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Building the American Republic Volume 2 written by Harry L. Watson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Building the American Republic tells the story of United States with remarkable grace and skill, its fast moving narrative making the nation's struggles and accomplishments new and compelling. Weaving together stories of abroad range of Americans. Volume 1 starts at sea and ends on the field. Beginning with the earliest Americans and the arrival of strangers on the eastern shore, it then moves through colonial society to the fight for independence and the construction of a federal republic. Vol 2 opens as America struggles to regain its footing, reeling from a presidential assassination and facing massive economic growth, rapid demographic change, and combustive politics.

Download or read book Mortal Republic written by Edward J. Watts and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book A Leap in the Dark written by John Ferling and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-06-12 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was an age of fascinating leaders and difficult choices, of grand ideas eloquently expressed and of epic conflicts bitterly fought. Now comes a brilliant portrait of the American Revolution, one that is compelling in its prose, fascinating in its details, and provocative in its fresh interpretations. In A Leap in the Dark, John Ferling offers a magisterial new history that surges from the first rumblings of colonial protest to the volcanic election of 1800. Ferling's swift-moving narrative teems with fascinating details. We see Benjamin Franklin trying to decide if his loyalty was to Great Britain or to America, and we meet George Washington when he was a shrewd planter-businessman who discovered personal economic advantages to American independence. We encounter those who supported the war against Great Britain in 1776, but opposed independence because it was a "leap in the dark." Following the war, we hear talk in the North of secession from the United States. The author offers a gripping account of the most dramatic events of our history, showing just how closely fought were the struggle for independence, the adoption of the Constitution, and the later battle between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. Yet, without slowing the flow of events, he has also produced a landmark study of leadership and ideas. Here is all the erratic brilliance of Hamilton and Jefferson battling to shape the new nation, and here too is the passion and political shrewdness of revolutionaries, such as Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, and their Loyalist counterparts, Joseph Galloway and Thomas Hutchinson. Here as well are activists who are not so well known today, men like Abraham Yates, who battled for democratic change, and Theodore Sedgwick, who fought to preserve the political and social system of the colonial past. Ferling shows that throughout this period the epic political battles often resembled today's politics and the politicians--the founders--played a political hardball attendant with enmities, selfish motivations, and bitterness. The political stakes, this book demonstrates, were extraordinary: first to secure independence, then to determine the meaning of the American Revolution. John Ferling has shown himself to be an insightful historian of our Revolution, and an unusually skillful writer. A Leap in the Dark is his masterpiece, work that provokes, enlightens, and entertains in full measure.

Download or read book Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic written by Mark David Hall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of leading figures of his day, Roger Sherman was a member of the five-man committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence and an influential delegate at the Constitutional Convention. As a Representative and Senator in the new republic, he had a hand in determining the proper scope of the national government's power as well as drafting the Bill of Rights. In Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic, Mark David Hall explores Sherman's political theory and shows how it informed his many contributions to America's founding. A close examination of Sherman's religious beliefs provides insight into how those beliefs informed his political actions. Hall shows that Sherman, like many founders, was influenced by Calvinist political thought, a tradition that played a role in the founding generation's opposition to Great Britain, and led them to develop political institutions designed to prevent corruption, promote virtue, and protect rights. Contrary to oft-repeated assertions that the founders advocated a strictly secular policy, Hall argues persuasively that most founders believed Christianity should play an important role in the new American republic.

Download or read book Fall of the American Republic a Novel Preview written by James Lee and published by . This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America is in crisis. The American Republic dominates the world. The American people are getting poorer, while the American rich are getting richer. Populists, conservatives, and those caught in the middle struggle for power and influence. At the same time, America's dominance of the world is challenged by those it has defeated in the past and those on the rise.

Download or read book Phoenix Rising written by Donald G. Lett and published by Phoenix Rising. This book was released on 2008-02 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age when the supply of gasoline to feed this modern American society has become both more expensive and more scarce questions are being pondered. Inquires like, How can a modern society scale back its dependence on gasoline as a motive source?' Are there genuine alternative power sources?' Are they the answer to a growing crisis?' Recent announcements of hybrids like those from Honda, Toyota, and Ford have really brought attention to this issue. Hybrids that use both gasoline engines and electric motors. Really, though, alternative power sources have been around for as long as the automobile has been. The battle between and among the steam car, the electric and the gas car was fought out in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century. This book explores the ins and outs of that battle. A struggle from which the gasoline car emerged completely victorious. To such an extent that steam cars and electric cars virtually disappeared from the scene for many decades. We will look over all three alternatives, exploring their advantages and disadvantages. We will also look over the obstacles to the steamers and the electrics. Barriers that still exist to a certain extent. Handicaps that caused their disappearance in the first place.

Download or read book The American Republic written by Bruce Frohnen and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 724 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many reference works offer compilations of critical documents covering individual liberty, local autonomy, constitutional order, and other issues that helped to shape the American political tradition. Yet few of those works are available in a form suitable for classroom use, and traditional textbooks give short shrift to these important issues. The American Republic overcomes that knowledge gap by providing, in a single volume, critical, original documents revealing the character of American discourse on the nature and importance of local government, the purposes of federal union, and the role of religion and tradition in forming America’s drive for liberty. The American Republic is divided into nine sections, each illustrating major philosophical, cultural, and policy positions at issue during crucial eras of American development. Readers will find documentary evidence of the purposes behind European settlement, American response to English acts, the pervasive role of religion in early American public life, and perspectives in the debate over independence. Subsequent chapters examine the roots of American constitutionalism, Federalist and Anti-Federalist arguments concerning the need to protect common law rights, and the debates over whether the states or the federal government held final authority in determining the course of public policy in America. Also included are the discussions regarding disagreements over internal improvements and other federal measures aimed at binding the nation, particularly in the area of commerce. The final section focuses on the political, cultural, and legal issues leading to the Civil War. Arguments and attempted compromises regarding slavery, along with laws that helped shape slavery, are highlighted. The volume ends with the prelude to the Civil War, a natural stopping-off point for studies of early American history. By bringing together key original documents and other writings that explain cultural, religious, and historical concerns, this volume gives students, teachers, and general readers an effective way to begin examining the diversity of issues and influences that characterize American history. The result unquestionably leads to a deeper and more thorough understanding of America's political, institutional, and cultural continuity and change. Bruce P. Frohnen is Associate Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University College of Law. He holds a J.D. from the Emory University School of Law and a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University. Click here to print or download The American Republic index.

Download or read book Tom Paine s America written by Seth Cotlar and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tom Paine’s America explores the vibrant, transatlantic traffic in people, ideas, and texts that profoundly shaped American political debate in the 1790s. In 1789, when the Federal Constitution was ratified, "democracy" was a controversial term that very few Americans used to describe their new political system. That changed when the French Revolution—and the wave of democratic radicalism that it touched off around the Atlantic World—inspired a growing number of Americans to imagine and advocate for a wide range of political and social reforms that they proudly called "democratic." One of the figureheads of this new international movement was Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense. Although Paine spent the 1790s in Europe, his increasingly radical political writings from that decade were wildly popular in America. A cohort of democratic printers, newspaper editors, and booksellers stoked the fires of American politics by importing a flood of information and ideas from revolutionary Europe. Inspired by what they were learning from their contemporaries around the world, the evolving democratic opposition in America pushed their fellow citizens to consider a wide range of radical ideas regarding racial equality, economic justice, cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, and the construction of more literally democratic polities. In Europe such ideas quickly fell victim to a counter-Revolutionary backlash that defined Painite democracy as dangerous Jacobinism, and the story was much the same in America’s late 1790s. The Democratic Party that won the national election of 1800 was, ironically, the beneficiary of this backlash; for they were able to position themselves as the advocates of a more moderate, safe vision of democracy that differentiated itself from the supposedly aristocratic Federalists to their right and the dangerously democratic Painite Jacobins to their left.

Download or read book The Creation of the American Republic 1776 1787 written by Gordon S. Wood and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the half dozen most important books ever written about the American Revolution.--New York Times Book Review "During the nearly two decades since its publication, this book has set the pace, furnished benchmarks, and afforded targets for many subsequent studies. If ever a work of history merited the appellation 'modern classic,' this is surely one.--William and Mary Quarterly "[A] brilliant and sweeping interpretation of political culture in the Revolutionary generation.--New England Quarterly "This is an admirable, thoughtful, and penetrating study of one of the most important chapters in American history.--Wesley Frank Craven

Download or read book The Growth of the American Republic written by Samuel Eliot Morison and published by . This book was released on 1946 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic written by Sandra M. Gustafson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-05-30 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deliberation, in recent years, has emerged as a form of civic engagement worth reclaiming. In this persuasive book, Sandra M. Gustafson combines historical literary analysis and political theory in order to demonstrate that current democratic practices of deliberation are rooted in the civic rhetoric that flourished in the early American republic. Though the U.S. Constitution made deliberation central to republican self-governance, the ethical emphasis on group deliberation often conflicted with the rhetorical focus on persuasive speech. From Alexis de Tocqueville’s ideas about the deliberative basis of American democracy through the works of Walt Whitman, John Dewey, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., Gustafson shows how writers and speakers have made the aesthetic and political possibilities of deliberation central to their autobiographies, manifestos, novels, and orations. Examining seven key writers from the early American republic—including James Fenimore Cooper, David Crockett, and Daniel Webster—whose works of deliberative imagination explored the intersections of style and democratic substance, Gustafson offers a mode of historical and textual analysis that displays the wide range of resources imaginative language can contribute to political life.

Download or read book Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic written by Mark Boonshoft and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the American Revolution, it was a cliche that the new republic's future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools--accessible, elementary education--that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites. By 1800, academies had become the most widely incorporated institutions besides churches and transportation projects in nearly every state. In this book, Mark Boonshoft shows how many Americans saw the academy as a caricature of aristocratic European education and how their political reaction against the academy led to a first era of school reform in the United States, helping transform education from a tool of elite privilege into a key component of self-government. And yet the very anti-aristocratic critique that propelled democratic education was conspicuously silent on the persistence of racial and gender inequality in public schooling. By tracing the history of academies in the revolutionary era, Boonshoft offers a new understanding of political power and the origins of public education and segregation in the United States.

Download or read book Rome and America The Great Republics written by Walter Signorelli and published by Archway Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In innumerable ways, the United States of America is the political and social descendant of the Roman Republic, and the influences of Rome reverberate throughout our world. Yet while America reflects the heights of Roman structures, ideas, and principles, we also now face a host of problems similar to those that the Romans faced—immigration and citizenship, the consequences of slavery, the growing divide between classes, the conflict between conservatives and progressives, and the challenges of being a superpower. In Rome and America: The Great Republics, author Walter Signorelli chronicles and compares these two greatest and enduring republics of history, explaining how they formed, grew, and prospered. He evaluates their strengths and weaknesses, the environments from which they emerged, and the values and practices they had in common. Signorelli also explores parallels between American and Roman military history, similarities between their constitutional governments, and the legacy of Roman law in America. Last, he questions whether our democratic-republican government will disintegrate as the Roman Republic disintegrated, whether it will grow stronger despite its similarities to the Roman experience, or whether it will transform itself into another form of government akin to Rome’s imperial dictatorship. More than an historical narrative or a collection of biographies, Rome and America: The Great Republics examines the political, social, economic, and moral factors that affected both nations, considering the successes and mistakes of the Romans and their implications for American society today.

Download or read book Rediscovering the American Republic Volume 1 1492 1877 written by Ryan MacPherson and published by . This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains over 700 pages of time-tested teaching tools, including classic biographies of five of the most influential people in American history through the era of the Civil War: William Penn, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln. Each of these men sought to establish both order and liberty in America, though they differed with their contemporaries as to the proper mix that would foster a lasting ordered liberty. Although none of them fully represented the era in which they lived, all of them interacted sufficiently with people of alternative persuasions to ensure that a focused study of their lives also will be revealing of a broad diversity of American experience. Primary source texts, time lines, and explanatory tables have been interspersed among the chapters of the biographies and organized into five distinct periods of American history: Pre-Columbian to British North America, 1492-1763; the Creation of the American Republic, 1763-1789; the Power of Political Parties, 1789-1836; Liberty, Slavery, and American Destiny, 1836-1860; and, finally, the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1860-1877. Hundreds of study questions bring distinct historical episodes into sharper focus. The result is full coverage of the most fundamental content essential to any advanced placement (AP) high school or introductory college survey course.