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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... wealth to the question of its distribution. The problem of an equitable distribution of wealth is indeed a vital problem of the age” (pp. 317-18). That remains as valid in 2000 as it was in 1920. For a very long time the U. S. Supreme ...
... wealth was even more marked. The early eighteenth century was a golden age in agriculture and commerce, and in this prosperity the Colonies shared. In nearly every colony there came to be a small group of landowning and commercial ...
... wealthy merchants of New York, who copied the manners and the dress of the English “gentleman,” made sport of the grave manners and precise speech of the solemn New-Englanders. In 1760 Benjamin Franklin wrote that no one need fear that ...
... wealth and population. Some years before, Franklin had pointed out the fact that the population of the Colonies doubled every twenty years, and on account of the immense stretches of free land it would continue to do so for an ...
... wealth, commerce, and power of the mother country, at the hazard of their lives and fortunes, ought not, and in fact do not thereby lose their native rights. By their native rights, Americans meant the traditional right of Englishmen to ...
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 | |