Download or read book The New England Town Meeting written by Joseph F. Zimmerman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1999-03-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking study, Zimmerman explores the town meeting form of government in all New England states. This comprehensive work relies heavily upon surveys of town officers and citizens, interviews, and mastery of the scattered writing on the subject. Zimmerman finds that the stereotypes of the New England open town meeting advanced by its critics are a serious distortion of reality. He shows that voter superintendence of town affairs has proven to be effective, and there is no empirical evidence that thousands of small towns and cities with elected councils are governed better. Whereas the relatively small voter attendance suggests that interest groups can control town meetings, their influence has been offset effectively by the development of town advisory committees, particularly the finance committee and the planning board, which are effective counterbalances to pressure groups. Zimmerman provides a new conception of town meeting democracy, positing that the meeting is a de facto representative legislative body with two safety valves—open access to all voters and the initiative to add articles to the warrant, and the calling of special meetings to reconsider decisions made at the preceding town meeting. And, as Zimmerman points out, a third safety valve—the protest referendum—can be adopted by a town meeting.
Download or read book Local Government in Early America written by Brian P. Janiskee and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2010-03-16 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Local Government in Early America is a concise and thought-provoking exploration of the American desire for political participation, most notably in the 'town hall meeting.' A product of early New England democracy, this form of direct local participation remains one of the most celebrated, yet feared, institutions in our political life. Depending upon one's political perspective on the issue at hand, a lively town hall meeting can be the glorious epitome of grassroots activism or the wretched embodiment of reactionary zeal. For all of the media attention devoted to the conservative revolt against health care reform at town hall meetings across the country, the political right is late to game on local activism. From resolutions opposed to the Patriot Act or the declaration of nuclear free zones in cities, the political left has used the rhetorical power of the local political pulpit to great effect for many years. All of this is possible because of the manner in which local governments were constructed during the colonial period. Author Brian Janiskee details the origins of our local system by examining key characteristics of local colonial political life, including what key founders like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had to say about the role of our villages, towns, and cities in our complex system of government. Through this timely analysis of our political heritage, Janiskee may cause observers to reevaluate the phrase 'all politics is local.' Indeed it may be the case that 'all local politics is national.'
Download or read book The New England Village written by Joseph S. Wood and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2002-09-24 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New England colonists, Wood argues, brought with them a cultural predisposition toward dispersed settlements within agricultural spaces called "towns" and "villages." Rarely compact in form, these communities did, however, encourage individual landholding. By the early nineteenth century, town centers, where meetinghouses stood, began to develop into the center villages we recognize today. Just as rural New England began its economic decline, Wood shows, romantics associated these proto-urban places with idealized colonial village communities as the source of both village form and commercial success.
Download or read book A New England Town written by Kenneth A. Lockridge and published by New York : Norton. This book was released on 1970 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reference Book written by and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 926 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Puritan Village written by Sumner Chilton Powell and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize Winner: “A meticulous and remarkably detailed account of the early government and social organization of the town of Sudbury, Massachusetts.” —Time In addition to drawing on local records from Sudbury, Massachusetts, the author of this classic work, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History, traced the town’s early families back to England to create an outstanding portrait of a colonial settlement in the seventeenth century. He looks at the various individuals who formed this new society; how institutions and government took shape; what changed—or didn’t—in the movement from the Old World to the New; and how those from different local cultures adjusted, adapted, competed, and cooperated to plant the seeds of what would become, in the century to follow, a commonwealth of the United States of America. “An important and interesting book . . . to the student of institutions, even to the sociologist, as well as to the historian.” —The New England Quarterly
Download or read book Town Born written by Barry Levy and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-07-06 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British colonists found the New World full of resources. With land readily available but workers in short supply, settlers developed coercive forms of labor—indentured servitude and chattel slavery—in order to produce staple export crops like rice, wheat, and tobacco. This brutal labor regime became common throughout most of the colonies. An important exception was New England, where settlers and their descendants did most work themselves. In Town Born, Barry Levy shows that New England's distinctive and far more egalitarian order was due neither to the colonists' peasant traditionalism nor to the region's inhospitable environment. Instead, New England's labor system and relative equality were every bit a consequence of its innovative system of governance, which placed nearly all land under the control of several hundred self-governing town meetings. As Levy shows, these town meetings were not simply sites of empty democratic rituals but were used to organize, force, and reconcile laborers, families, and entrepreneurs into profitable export economies. The town meetings protected the value of local labor by persistently excluding outsiders and privileging the town born. The town-centered political economy of New England created a large region in which labor earned respect, relative equity ruled, workers exercised political power despite doing the most arduous tasks, and the burdens of work were absorbed by citizens themselves. In a closely observed and well-researched narrative, Town Born reveals how this social order helped create the foundation for American society.
Download or read book Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor written by and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 1172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Making of the American Landscape written by Michael P. Conzen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only compact yet comprehensive survey of environmental and cultural forces that have shaped the visual character and geographical diversity of the settled American landscape. The book examines the large-scale historical influences that have molded the varied human adaptation of the continent’s physical topography to its needs over more than 500 years. It presents a synoptic view of myriad historical processes working together or in conflict, and illustrates them through their survival in or disappearance from the everyday landscapes of today.
Download or read book History of the Frontier written by Frederick Jackson Turner and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History of the Frontier is a collection of works related to the history of American colonization of Wild West. Turner expresses his views on how the idea of the frontier shaped the American being and characteristics. He writes how the frontier drove American history and why America is what it is today. Turner reflects on the past to illustrate his point by noting human fascination with the frontier and how expansion to the American West changed people's views on their culture. Contents: The Significance of the Frontier in American History The First Official Frontier of the Massachusetts Bay The Old West The Middle West The Ohio Valley in American History The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History The Problem of the West Dominant Forces in Western Life Contributions of the West to American Democracy Pioneer Ideals and the State University The West and American Ideals Social Forces in American History Middle Western Pioneer Democracy
Download or read book The Modern Gazetteer Or A Short View of the Several Nations of the World The Fourth Edition with Large Additions Etc written by Thomas Salmon and published by . This book was released on 1757 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Commentaries on the Law of Municipal Corporations written by John Forrest Dillon and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia written by William Dwight Whitney and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 938 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Geo P Rowell and Co s American Newspaper Directory written by and published by . This book was released on 1871 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Documents written by Boston (Mass.). School Committee and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 760 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Book News written by and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Country Life written by and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
