Download or read book The Birth of Modern Politics written by Lynn Hudson Parsons and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1828 presidential election, which pitted Major General Andrew Jackson against incumbent John Quincy Adams, has long been hailed as a watershed moment in American political history. It was the contest in which an unlettered, hot-tempered southwestern frontiersman, trumpeted by his supporters as a genuine man of the people, soundly defeated a New England "aristocrat" whose education and political résumé were as impressive as any ever seen in American public life. It was, many historians have argued, the country's first truly democratic presidential election. It was also the election that opened a Pandora's box of campaign tactics, including coordinated media, get-out-the-vote efforts, fund-raising, organized rallies, opinion polling, campaign paraphernalia, ethnic voting blocs, "opposition research," and smear tactics. In The Birth of Modern Politics, Parsons shows that the Adams-Jackson contest also began a national debate that is eerily contemporary, pitting those whose cultural, social, and economic values were rooted in community action for the common good against those who believed the common good was best served by giving individuals as much freedom as possible to promote their own interests. The book offers fresh and illuminating portraits of both Adams and Jackson and reveals how, despite their vastly different backgrounds, they had started out with many of the same values, admired one another, and had often been allies in common causes. But by 1828, caught up in a shifting political landscape, they were plunged into a competition that separated them decisively from the Founding Fathers' era and ushered in a style of politics that is still with us today.
Download or read book Birth of the State written by Charlotte Epstein and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-12-18 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted ideas about the two defining political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces, under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other since their original crafting in the seventeenth century. Considering multiple sites of theory and practice, Charlotte Epstein analyses the fundamental rights to security, liberty, and property respectively as the initial knots where the state-subject relation was first sealed.
Download or read book Vindicating Andrew Jackson written by Donald B. Cole and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The presidential election of 1828 is one of the most compelling stories in American history: Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans and man of the people, bounced back from his controversial loss four years earlier to unseat John Quincy Adams in a campaign notorious for its mudslinging. With his victory, the torch was effectively passed from the founding fathers to the people. This study of Jackson's election separates myth from reality to explain why it had such an impact on present-day American politics. Featuring parades and public participation to a greater degree than had previously been seen, the campaign itself first centered on two key policy issues: tariffs and republicanism. But as Donald Cole shows, the major theme turned out to be what Adams scornfully called "electioneering": the rise of mass political parties and the origins of a two-party system, built from the top down, whose leaders were willing to spend unprecedented time and money to achieve victory. Cole's innovative study examines the election at the local and state, as well as the national, levels, focusing on New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia to provide a social, economic, and political cross section of 1828 America. He describes how the Jacksonians were better organized, paid more attention to detail, and recruited a broader range of workers-especially state-level party leaders and newspaper editors who were invaluable for raising funds, publicizing party dogma, and smearing the opposition. The Jacksonians also outdid the Adams supporters in zealotry, violence of language, and the overwhelming force of their campaigning and succeeded in painting their opponents as aristocratic, class conscious, and undemocratic. Tracing interpretations of this election from James Parton's classic 1860 biography of Jackson to recent revisionist accounts attacking Old Hickory for his undemocratic treatment of blacks, Indians, and women, Cole argues that this famous election did not really bring democracy to America as touted-because it was democracy that enabled Jackson to win. By offering a more charismatic candidate, a more vigorous campaign, a more acceptable recipe for preserving the past, and a more forthright acceptance of a new political system, Jackson's Democrats dominated an election in which campaigning outweighed issues and presaged the presidential election of 2008.
Download or read book The Birth of Politics written by Melissa Lane and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "First published in the United Kingdom as: Greek and Roman political ideas: a Pelican introduction, by the Penquin Group, Penguin Books ... London"--T.p. verso.
Download or read book Realism and the Birth of the Modern United States written by Stanley Corkin and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an interdisciplinary view of American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the conventions of historical study, Stanley Corkin draws out the ways in which the works of writers and filmmakers from 1885 to 1925 shaped and were shaped by the business, politics, and social life of the period. Corkin traces the entrance of the United States into the modern age by considering the historical dimension of cinema and literary aesthetics: first of realism, then naturalism, and finally modernism. He begins with the work of writer William Dean Howells and the advent of American cinema under the stewardship of Thomas Edison, arguing that realism was complexly involved in Progressive political and economic reform. Next, analyses of Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie and the films of the Edison Company's star director, Edwin S. Porter, detail the relationships of naturalism to the increasingly abstract presentation of the material commodity through mass marketing. The study culminates with an examination of the parallels between Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time and the D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation. These two modernist works, Corkin contends, illustrate strategies of expression that attempt to move the material commodity away from its economic base and into a pristine, apolitical realm. These literary and cinematic works both reflect and participate in the economic, political, and social reorganization of American life from the top down. The result, Corkin concludes, is a world in which a conception of a human being is asserted as differing little from that of a machine, a tree, or an animal.
Download or read book Four Hats in the Ring written by Lewis L. Gould and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2008-04-09 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine a presidential election with four well-qualified and distinguished candidates and a serious debate over the future of the nation! Sound impossible in this era of attack ads and strident partisanship? It happened nearly a century ago in 1912, when incumbent Republican William Howard Taft, former president Theodore Roosevelt running as the Progressive Party candidate, Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson, and Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs all spoke to major concerns of the American people and changed the landscape of national politics in the bargain. The presidential election of 1912 saw a third-party candidate finish second in both popular and electoral votes. The Socialist candidate received the highest percentage of the popular vote his party ever attained. In addition to year-round campaigning in the modern style, the 1912 contest featured a broader role for women, two exciting national conventions, and an assassination attempt on Roosevelt's life. The election defined the major parties for generations to come as the Taft-Roosevelt split pushed the Republicans to the right and the Democrats' agenda of reform set them on the road to the New Deal. Lewis L. Gould, one of America's preeminent political historians, tells the story of this dramatic race and explains its enduring significance. Basing his narrative on the original letters and documents of the candidates themselves, he guides his readers down the campaign trail through the factional splits, exciting primaries, tumultuous conventions and the turbulent fall campaign to Wilson's landslide electoral vote victory in November. It's all here-Gene Debs's challenge to capitalism, the progressive rivalry of Roosevelt and Robert La Follette, the debate between the New Freedom of Wilson and the New Nationalism of Roosevelt, and the resolve of Taft to defeat his one-time friend TR and keep the Republican Party in conservative hands. Gould combines lively anecdotes, the poetry and prose of the campaign, and insights into the clash of ideology and personality to craft a narrative that moves as fast as did the 1912 election itself. Americans sensed in 1912 that they stood at a turning point in the nation's history. Four Hats in the Ring demonstrates why the people who lived and fought this significant election were more right than they could ever have known.
Download or read book The Birth of the Museum written by Tony Bennett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a series of richly detailed case studies from Britian, Australia and North America, Tony Bennett investigates how nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums, fairs and exhibitions have organized their collections, and their visitors. Discussing the historical development of museums alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition, Bennett sheds new light upon the relationship between modern forms of official and popular culture. Using Foucaltian perspectives The Birth of the Museum explores how the public museum should be understood not just as a place of instruction, but as a reformatory of manners in which a wide range of regulated social routines and performances take place. This invigorating study enriches and challenges the understanding of the museum, and places it at the centre of modern relations between culture and government. For students of museum, cultural and sociology studies, this will be an asset to their reading list.
Download or read book Andrew Jackson written by Sean Wilentz and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The towering figure who remade American politics—the champion of the ordinary citizen and the scourge of entrenched privilege "It is rare that historians manage both Wilentz's deep interpretation and lively narrative." - Publishers Weekly The Founding Fathers espoused a republican government, but they were distrustful of the common people, having designed a constitutional system that would temper popular passions. But as the revolutionary generation passed from the scene in the 1820s, a new movement, based on the principle of broader democracy, gathered force and united behind Andrew Jackson, the charismatic general who had defeated the British at New Orleans and who embodied the hopes of ordinary Americans. Raising his voice against the artificial inequalities fostered by birth, station, monied power, and political privilege, Jackson brought American politics into a new age. Sean Wilentz, one of America's leading historians of the nineteenth century, recounts the fiery career of this larger-than-life figure, a man whose high ideals were matched in equal measure by his failures and moral blind spots, a man who is remembered for the accomplishments of his eight years in office and for the bitter enemies he made. It was in Jackson's time that the great conflicts of American politics—urban versus rural, federal versus state, free versus slave—crystallized, and Jackson was not shy about taking a vigorous stand. It was under Jackson that modern American politics began, and his legacy continues to inform our debates to the present day.
Download or read book Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India written by Mytheli Sreenivas and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-05-03 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.
Download or read book Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics written by Joel H. Silbey and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2002 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the life of Martin Van Buren, focusing on his role in the development and transformation of American politics in the early part of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book The Politics of Birth written by Sheila Kitzinger and published by Books for Midwives. This book was released on 2005 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Birth explores ways in which we learn about birth, how we talk and feel about it, assumptions that professional caregivers may make, and the roles and skills of midwives. Topics include home birth and water birth; the use of drugs in childbirth; obstetric and nursing interventions which are often used routinely; Caesarean sections; pressures that care-givers are under, and the choices presented to women that are more apparent than real. Throughout, the author draws on research-based evidence to present both an holistic yet grounded examination of topical issues surrounding pregnancy and childbirth. This is not a "how to" book. The aim of The Politics of Birth is to help the reader develop deeper insight and understanding of how a technocratic birth culture shapes our ideas about birth and obstetric practice.
Download or read book New Orleans after the Civil War written by Justin A. Nystrom and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We often think of Reconstruction as an unfinished revolution. Justin A. Nystrom’s original study of the aftermath of emancipation in New Orleans takes a different perspective, arguing that the politics of the era were less of a binary struggle over political supremacy and morality than they were about a quest for stability in a world rendered uncertain and unfamiliar by the collapse of slavery. Commercially vibrant and racially unique before the Civil War, New Orleans after secession and following Appomattox provides an especially interesting case study in political and social adjustment. Taking a generational view and using longitudinal studies of some of the major political players of the era, New Orleans after the Civil War asks fundamentally new questions about life in the post–Civil War South: Who would emerge as leaders in the prostrate but economically ambitious city? How would whites who differed over secession come together over postwar policy? Where would the mixed-race middle class and newly freed slaves fit in the new order? Nystrom follows not only the period’s broad contours and occasional bloody conflicts but also the coalition building and the often surprising liaisons that formed to address these and related issues. His unusual approach breaks free from the worn stereotypes of Reconstruction to explore the uncertainty, self-doubt, and moral complexity that haunted Southerners after the war. This probing look at a generation of New Orleanians and how they redefined a society shattered by the Civil War engages historical actors on their own terms and makes real the human dimension of life during this difficult period in American history.
Download or read book Sovereign City written by Geoffrey Parker and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title provides an examination of the rise, evolution and decline of the city-state, from ancient times to the present day.
Download or read book American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism 1867 1940 written by Thomas W. Simpson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-08-26 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, college-age Latter-day Saints began undertaking a remarkable intellectual pilgrimage to the nation's elite universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Chicago, and Stanford. Thomas W. Simpson chronicles the academic migration of hundreds of LDS students from the 1860s through the late 1930s, when church authority J. Reuben Clark Jr., himself a product of the Columbia University Law School, gave a reactionary speech about young Mormons' search for intellectual cultivation. Clark's leadership helped to set conservative parameters that in large part came to characterize Mormon intellectual life. At the outset, Mormon women and men were purposefully dispatched to such universities to "gather the world's knowledge to Zion." Simpson, drawing on unpublished diaries, among other materials, shows how LDS students commonly described American universities as egalitarian spaces that fostered a personally transformative sense of freedom to explore provisional reconciliations of Mormon and American identities and religious and scientific perspectives. On campus, Simpson argues, Mormon separatism died and a new, modern Mormonism was born: a Mormonism at home in the United States but at odds with itself. Fierce battles among Mormon scholars and church leaders ensued over scientific thought, progressivism, and the historicity of Mormonism's sacred past. The scars and controversy, Simpson concludes, linger.
Download or read book The Red and the Blue written by Steve Kornacki and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From MSNBC correspondent Steve Kornacki, a lively and sweeping history of the birth of political tribalism in the 1990s—one that brings critical new understanding to our current political landscape from Clinton to Trump In The Red and the Blue, cable news star and acclaimed journalist Steve Kornacki follows the twin paths of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, two larger-than-life politicians who exploited the weakened structure of their respective parties to attain the highest offices. For Clinton, that meant contorting himself around the various factions of the Democratic party to win the presidency. Gingrich employed a scorched-earth strategy to upend the permanent Republican minority in the House, making him Speaker. The Clinton/Gingrich battles were bare-knuckled brawls that brought about massive policy shifts and high-stakes showdowns—their collisions had far-reaching political consequences. But the ’90s were not just about them. Kornacki writes about Mario Cuomo’s stubborn presence around Clinton’s 1992 campaign; Hillary Clinton’s star turn during the 1998 midterms, seeding the idea for her own candidacy; Ross Perot’s wild run in 1992 that inspired him to launch the Reform Party, giving Donald Trump his first taste of electoral politics in 1999; and many others. With novelistic prose and a clear sense of history, Steve Kornacki masterfully weaves together the various elements of this rambunctious and hugely impactful era in American history, whose effects set the stage for our current political landscape.
Download or read book Common Sense written by Sophia Rosenfeld and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Common sense has always been a cornerstone of American politics. In 1776, Tom Paine’s vital pamphlet with that title sparked the American Revolution. And today, common sense—the wisdom of ordinary people, knowledge so self-evident that it is beyond debate—remains a powerful political ideal, utilized alike by George W. Bush’s aw-shucks articulations and Barack Obama’s down-to-earth reasonableness. But far from self-evident is where our faith in common sense comes from and how its populist logic has shaped modern democracy. Common Sense: A Political History is the first book to explore this essential political phenomenon. The story begins in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution, when common sense first became a political ideal worth struggling over. Sophia Rosenfeld’s accessible and insightful account then wends its way across two continents and multiple centuries, revealing the remarkable individuals who appropriated the old, seemingly universal idea of common sense and the new strategic uses they made of it. Paine may have boasted that common sense is always on the side of the people and opposed to the rule of kings, but Rosenfeld demonstrates that common sense has been used to foster demagoguery and exclusivity as well as popular sovereignty. She provides a new account of the transatlantic Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions, and offers a fresh reading on what the eighteenth century bequeathed to the political ferment of our own time. Far from commonsensical, the history of common sense turns out to be rife with paradox and surprise.
Download or read book Abortion Politics written by Ziad Munson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-05-21 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abortion has remained one of the most volatile and polarizing issues in the United States for over four decades. Americans are more divided today than ever over abortion, and this debate colors the political, economic, and social dynamics of the country. This book provides a balanced, clear-eyed overview of the abortion debate, including the perspectives of both the pro-life and pro-choice movements. It covers the history of the debate from colonial times to the present, the mobilization of mass movements around the issue, the ways it is understood by ordinary Americans, the impact it has had on US political development, and the differences between the abortion conflict in the US and the rest of the world. Throughout these discussions, Ziad Munson demonstrates how the meaning of abortion has shifted to reflect the changing anxieties and cultural divides which it has come to represent. Abortion Politics is an invaluable companion for exploring the abortion issue and what it has to say about American society, as well as the dramatic changes in public understanding of women’s rights, medicine, religion, and partisanship.
