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Author: Ruth Bogin
Publisher:
Published: 1982
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA study of New Jersey's outstanding exponent of egalitarian thought. Clark emerges as a guardian of individual liberties, an enemy to every form of privilege, and a protagonist of government concern for the lowlier segments of the populace.
Author: Ruth Bogin
Publisher:
Published: 1982
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA study of New Jersey's outstanding exponent of egalitarian thought. Clark emerges as a guardian of individual liberties, an enemy to every form of privilege, and a protagonist of government concern for the lowlier segments of the populace.
Author: Barbara J. Mitnick
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2007-03-12
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 081354095X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis remarkably comprehensive anthology brings new life to the rich and turbulent late 18th-century period in New Jersey. Originally conceived for the state's 225th Anniversary of the Revolution Celebration Commission.
Author: Calvin H. Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2005-08-01
Total Pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9781139445023
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is a history that explains the adoption of the US Constitution in terms of what the proponents of the Constitution were trying to accomplish. The Constitution was a revolutionary document replacing the confederation mode with a complete three-part national government supreme over the states. The most pressing need was to allow the federal government to tax to pay off the Revolutionary War debts. In the next war, the United States would need to borrow again. The taxes needed to restore the public credit proved to be quite modest, however, and the Constitution went far beyond the immediate fiscal needs. This book argues that the proponents' anger at the states for their recurring breaches of duty to the united cause explains both critical steps and the driving impetus for the revolution. Other issues were less important.
Author: Gordon S. Wood
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2011-08-24
Total Pages: 466
ISBN-13: 0307758966
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a grand and immemsely readable synthesis of historical, political, cultural, and economic analysis, a prize-winning historian describes the events that made the American Revolution. Gordon S. Wood depicts a revolution that was about much more than a break from England, rather it transformed an almost feudal society into a democratic one, whose emerging realities sometimes baffled and disappointed its founding fathers.
Author: Clement Fatovic
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2014-12-04
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 0700621733
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIf, as many allege, attacking the gap between rich and poor is a form of class warfare, then the struggle against income inequality is the longest running war in American history. To defenders of the status quo, who argue that the accumulation of wealth free of government intervention is an essential feature of the American way, this book offers a forceful answer. While many of those who oppose addressing economic inequality through public policy today do so in the name of freedom, Clement Fatovic demonstrates that concerns about freedom informed the Founding Fathers' arguments for public policy that tackled economic disparities. Where contemporary arguments against such government efforts conceptualize freedom in economic terms, however, those supporting public policies conducive to greater economic equality invoked a more participatory, republican, conception of freedom. As many of the Founders understood it, economic independence, which requires a wide if imperfect distribution of property, is a precondition of the political independence they so profoundly valued. Fatovic reveals a deep concern among the Founders--including Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Noah Webster--about the impact of economic inequality on political freedom. America's Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality traces this concern through many important political debates in Congress and the broader polity that shaped the early Republic--debates over tax policies, public works, public welfare, and the debt from the Revolution. We see how Alexander Hamilton, so often characterized as a cold-hearted apologist for plutocrats, actually favored a more progressive system of taxation, along with various policies aimed at easing the economic hardship of specific groups. In Thomas Paine, frequently portrayed as an advocate of laissez-faire government, we find a champion of a comprehensive welfare state that would provide old-age pensions, public housing, and a host of other benefits as a matter of "right, not charity." Contrary to the picture drawn by so many of today's pundits and politicians, this book shows us how, for the first American statesmen, preventing or minimizing economic disparities was essential to the preservation of the new nation's freedom and practice of self-government.
Author: Daniel R. Mandell
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2020-04-07
Total Pages: 329
ISBN-13: 1421437120
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn important examination of the foundational American ideal of economic equality—and how we lost it. Winner of the Missouri Conference on History Book Award for 2021 The United States has some of the highest levels of both wealth and income inequality in the world. Although modern-day Americans are increasingly concerned about this growing inequality, many nonetheless believe that the country was founded on a person's right to acquire and control property. But in The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870, Daniel R. Mandell argues that, in fact, the United States was originally deeply influenced by the belief that maintaining a "rough" or relative equality of wealth is essential to the cultivation of a successful republican government. Mandell explores the origins and evolution of this ideal. He shows how, during the Revolutionary War, concerns about economic equality helped drive wage and price controls, while after its end Americans sought ways to maintain their beloved "rough" equality against the danger of individuals amassing excessive wealth. He also examines how, after 1800, this tradition was increasingly marginalized by the growth of the liberal ideal of individual property ownership without limits. This politically evenhanded book takes a sweeping, detailed view of economic, social, and cultural developments up to the time of Reconstruction, when Congress refused to redistribute plantation lands to the former slaves who had worked it, insisting instead that they required only civil and political rights. Informing current discussions about the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States, The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America is surprising and enlightening.
Author: Maxine N. Lurie
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2010-01-27
Total Pages: 520
ISBN-13: 9780813549149
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis anthology contains seventeen essays covering eighteenth-century agrarian unrest, the Revolutionary War, politics in the Jackson era, feminism and the women's movements, slavery from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, strikes and labor struggles, land use and regional planning issues, Blacks in Newark, the current political state of New Jersey, and more. The contributors are Michal R. Belknap, Patricia U. Bonomi, Lyle W. Dorsett, John P. Dwyer, Jim Fisher, Charles E. Funnell, Steve Golin, Bradley M. Gottfried, Paul E. Johnson, David L. Kirp, Mark Edward Lender, Maxine N. Lurie, Richard P. McCormick, Mary R. Murrin, Larry A. Rosenthal, Amy Shapiro, Warren E. Stickle III, Lorraine E. Williams, Giles R. Wright
Author: Marc W. Kruman
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2014-03-24
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 1469620383
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a major reinterpretation of American political thought in the revolutionary era, Marc Kruman explores the process of constitution making in each of the thirteen original states and shows that the framers created a distinctively American science of politics well before the end of the Confederation era. Suspicious of all government power, state constitution makers greatly feared arbitrary power and mistrusted legislators' ability to represent the people's interests. For these reasons, they broadened the suffrage and introduced frequent elections as a check against legislative self-interest. This analysis challenges Gordon Wood's now-classic argument that, at the beginning of the Revolution, the founders placed great faith in legislators as representatives of the people. According to Kruman, revolutionaries entrusted state constitution making only to members of temporary provincial congresses or constitutional conventions whose task it was to restrict legislative power. At the same time, Americans maintained a belief in the existence of a public good that legislators and magistrates, when properly curbed by one another and by a politically active citizenry, might pursue.
Author: Barbara Clark Smith
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2010-11-09
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 1595585974
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA brilliant and original examination of American freedom as it existed before the Revolution, from the Smithsonian’s curator of social history. The American Revolution is widely understood—by schoolchildren and citizens alike—as having ushered in “freedom” as we know it, a freedom that places voting at the center of American democracy. In a sharp break from this view, historian Barbara Clark Smith charts the largely unknown territory of the unique freedoms enjoyed by colonial American subjects of the British king—that is, American freedom before the Revolution. The Freedoms We Lost recovers a world of common people regularly serving on juries, joining crowds that enforced (or opposed) the king’s edicts, and supplying community enforcement of laws in an era when there were no professional police. The Freedoms We Lost challenges the unquestioned assumption that the American patriots simply introduced freedom where the king had once reigned. Rather, Smith shows that they relied on colonial-era traditions of political participation to drive the Revolution forward—and eventually, betrayed these same traditions as leading patriots gravitated toward “monied men” and elites who would limit the role of common men in the new democracy. By the end of the 1780s, she shows, Americans discovered that forms of participation once proper to subjects of Britain were inappropriate—even impermissible—to citizens of the United States. In a narrative that counters nearly every textbook account of America’s founding era, The Freedoms We Lost challenges us to think about what it means to be free.
