Constitutional History of the American Revolution V. 4; Authority of Law
Constitutional History of the American Revolution V. 4; Authority of Law

Author: John Phillip Reid

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2003-03

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780299139841

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This work addresses the central constitutional issues that divided the American colonists from their English legislators: the authority to tax, the authority to legislate, the security of rights, the nature of law, and the foundation of constitutional government in custom and contractarian theory.

Rival Visions
Rival Visions

Author: Dustin Gish

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2021-02-05

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0813944481

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The emergence of the early American republic as a new nation on the world stage conjured rival visions in the eyes of leading statesmen at home and attentive observers abroad. Thomas Jefferson envisioned the newly independent states as a federation of republics united by common experience, mutual interest, and an adherence to principles of natural rights. His views on popular government and the American experiment in republicanism, and later the expansion of its empire of liberty, offered an influential account of the new nation. While persuasive in crucial respects, his vision of early America did not stand alone as an unrivaled model. The contributors to Rival Visions examine how Jefferson’s contemporaries—including Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and Marshall—articulated their visions for the early American republic. Even beyond America, in this age of successive revolutions and crises, foreign statesmen began to formulate their own accounts of the new nation, its character, and its future prospects. This volume reveals how these vigorous debates and competing rival visions defined the early American republic in the formative epoch after the revolution.

American Exceptionalism
American Exceptionalism

Author: Charles W. Dunn

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2013-04-04

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1442222794

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American Exceptionalism provokes intense debates culturally, economically, politically, and socially. This collection, edited by Charles W. Dunn of Regent University's Robertson School of Government, brings together analysis of the idea's origins, history and future. Contributors include: Hadley Arkes, Michael Barone, James W. Ceasar, Charles W. Dunn, Daniel L. Dreisbach, T. David Gordon, Steven Hayward, Hugh Heclo, Marvin J. Kolkertsma, William Kristol, and George H. Nash. While many now argue against the policies and ideology of American Exceptionalism as antiquated and expired, the authors collected here make the bold claim that a closer reading of our own history reveals that there is still an exceptional aspect of American thought, identity and government worth advancing and protecting. It will be the challenge of the coming American generations to both refine and examine what we mean when we call America "exceptional," and this book provides readers a first step towards a necessary understanding of the exceptional purpose, progress and promise of the United States of America.

American States of Nature
American States of Nature

Author: Mark Somos

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-04-01

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0190462868

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American States of Nature transforms our understanding of the American Revolution and the early makings of the Constitution. The journey to an independent United States generated important arguments about the existing condition of Americans, in which rival interpretations of the term "state of nature" played a crucial role. "State of nature" typically implied a pre-political condition and was often invoked in support of individual rights to property and self-defense and the right to exit or to form a political state. It could connote either a paradise, a baseline condition of virtue and health, or a hell on earth. This mutable phrase was well-known in Europe and its empires. In the British colonies, "state of nature" appeared thousands of times in juridical, theological, medical, political, economic, and other texts from 1630 to 1810. But by the 1760s, a distinctively American state-of-nature discourse started to emerge. It combined existing meanings and sidelined others in moments of intense contestation, such as the Stamp Act crisis of 1765-66 and the First Continental Congress of 1774. In laws, resolutions, petitions, sermons, broadsides, pamphlets, letters, and diaries, the American states of nature came to justify independence at least as much as colonial formulations of liberty, property, and individual rights did. In this groundbreaking book, Mark Somos focuses on the formative decade and a half just before the American Revolution. Somos' investigation begins with a 1761 speech by James Otis that John Adams described as "a dissertation on the state of nature," and celebrated as the real start of the Revolution. Drawing on an enormous range of both public and personal writings, many rarely or never before discussed, the book follows the development of America's state-of-nature discourse to 1775. The founding generation transformed this flexible concept into a powerful theme that shapes their legacy to this day. No constitutional history of the Revolution can be written without it.

No Establishment of Religion
No Establishment of Religion

Author: T. Jeremy Gunn

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-11-02

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 0199986010

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The First Amendment guarantee that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" rejected the millennium-old Western policy of supporting one form of Christianity in each nation and subjugating all other faiths. The exact meaning and application of this American innovation, however, has always proved elusive. Individual states found it difficult to remove traditional laws that controlled religious doctrine, liturgy, and church life, and that discriminated against unpopular religions. They found it even harder to decide more subtle legal questions that continue to divide Americans today: Did the constitution prohibit governmental support for religion altogether, or just preferential support for some religions over others? Did it require that government remove Sabbath, blasphemy, and oath-taking laws, or could they now be justified on other grounds? Did it mean the removal of religious texts, symbols, and ceremonies from public documents and government lands, or could a democratic government represent these in ever more inclusive ways? These twelve essays stake out strong and sometimes competing positions on what "no establishment of religion" meant to the American founders and to subsequent generations of Americans, and what it might mean today.