The United States: An Experiment in DemocracyRoutledge, 17/04/2018 - 333 páginas According to Carl Becker "if the framers of the Constitution could come back to earth and see what the federal government is doing to-day, they would all agree that this monstrous thing was no child of theirs; for to-day the federal government exercises as a matter of course powers which they never dreamed of." This prescient statement rings as true today as it did when Becker wrote An Experiment in Democracy nearly eighty years ago. This American classic is an engaging, gracefully rendered piece of historical literature as well as a non-ideological meditation on the "meaning of America." Carl Becker's ruminations are invariably provocative, notably wise, and remarkably enduring. He clearly believed in what has been called a "living Constitution," one that must be adapted to changing circumstances and imperatives in America life, and his faith in democracy seems to have strengthened as the decades progressed. In his new introduction, Michael Kammen places this American classic in historical perspective. Kammen sees Becker as more than an archival historian, but rather as a master of the "creative synthesis" looking at familiar sources in fresh ways and developing new points of view that were frequently revisionist and, on occasion, radically arresting. Much has changed between 1920 and the present; but Carl Becker's sagacity persists, just as his expository prose will continue to please a new generation of historians and students of American social history. Carl Becker was the author of "Kansas"; The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas; Modern History: The Rise of a Democratic, Scientific, and Industrial Civilization; "Benjamin Franklin"; "Everyman His Own Historian"; The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers; How New Will the Better World Be?; and Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way of Life. |
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... interests in an industrial democracy seem timeless. They are still posted at the peak of our agenda eighty years later as the “American Century” moves toward closure. That is the principal reason why An Experiment in Democracy deserves ...
... interest on account of their wisdom, wit, originality, acuity, and succinctness. A cursory look at some highlights from his career as “public historian” (a wordconcept that emerged only in the 1970s) is indicative of his enduring power ...
... interests, populists confronting powerful elites. (See, e.g., p. 42.)4 Becker more than compensated for such lapses, and for accepting some contemporary orthodoxies, by salting his text with insights that would be developed and ...
... interest of the classes that controlled them, there was in each colony a governor, and in most colonies an executive council which was also usually an upper legislative chamber; but the governors in every colony, except Connecticut and ...
... interests of their particular colonies. The interests of the British Empire chiefly centered in the trade laws, those regulations which required the Colonies to export certain staple products, such as sugar, tobacco, indigo, and naval ...
Índice
DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT | |
NEW WORLD DEMOCRACY AND OLD WORLD INTERVENTION | |
DEMOCRACY AND FREE LAND | |
DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY | |
DEMOCRACY AND IMMIGRATION | |
DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION | |
DEMOCRACY AND EQUALITY | |