A Study of "Monarchical" Tendencies in the United States
A Study of

Author: Louise Burnham Dunbar

Publisher: Legare Street Press

Published: 2023-07-18

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781019419830

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Louise Burnham Dunbar's insightful analysis of monarchical tendencies in early US history challenges our assumptions about the nature of American democracy. Drawing on a wealth of historical sources, Dunbar provides a nuanced account of the political and social forces at play during this formative period in US history. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Invention of Party Politics
The Invention of Party Politics

Author: Gerald Leonard

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003-10-15

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0807861316

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This ambitious work uncovers the constitutional foundations of that most essential institution of modern democracy, the political party. Taking on Richard Hofstadter's classic The Idea of a Party System, it rejects the standard view that Martin Van Buren and other Jacksonian politicians had the idea of a modern party system in mind when they built the original Democratic party. Grounded in an original retelling of Illinois politics of the 1820s and 1830s, the book also includes chapters that connect the state-level narrative to national history, from the birth of the Constitution to the Dred Scott case. In this reinterpretation, Jacksonian party-builders no longer anticipate twentieth-century political assumptions but draw on eighteenth-century constitutional theory to justify a party division between "the democracy" and "the aristocracy." Illinois is no longer a frontier latecomer to democratic party organization but a laboratory in which politicians use Van Buren's version of the Constitution, states' rights, and popular sovereignty to reeducate a people who had traditionally opposed party organization. The modern two-party system is no longer firmly in place by 1840. Instead, the system remains captive to the constitutional commitments on which the Democrats and Whigs founded themselves, even as the specter of sectional crisis haunts the parties' constitutional visions.