American Founding Research Articles

Recreating an American Myth: An Analytical Reading of Paul Bunyan by W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten

One of the ability which music possesses is to evoke the audience’s sense of cultural and national identity. In the second half of the twentieth century, people can easily travel and relocate to a new country in order to search for a better living condition. However, with this newly found freedom, people’s sense of belonging and cultural identity has been put into serious doubts and tests. W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten’s Paul Bunyan encapsulates and foresees this phenomenon. Both have just arrived at the United States to escape from the war-torn Britain. Eager to find a voice to suit their new audience and symbolically swear allegiance to their newly adopted country, Auden and Britten employed an American founding myth in order to engage with their American patrons. Through a closed reading of Paul Bunyan, listeners will soon realize the inseparable notions between the musical presentation and its cultural identity. Furthermore, the story is told in the form of American musical theater, which is the artists’ ambitious attempt to capture the American optimism and spirit. This article intends to explore the notion of “myth narrative” in the genre of Music Theater; and how it reflects both the poet and the composers’ intention to obtain their sense of American identity.

War Powers

In Presidents of War, Michael Beschloss builds a convincing case that the US president’s evolved war-making powers vastly exceed what the American Founders envisioned.

Life, Liberty, and a House in the Suburbs. The Political Construction of the Homeownership Model of Happiness in the United States

This paper presents a brief history of the use of happiness and wellbeing rhetoric to bolster political support for the expansion of homeownership in the United States. Recent research has studied the impact of homeownership on various dimensions of wellbeing, such as crime, education, health, and civic participation. However, less attention has been given to the way in which policymakers have historically defined the pursuit of happiness as a gateway to a virtuous way of life thanks to homeownership. After exploring the relations between the right to pursue happiness and the right to own property in the American founding documents, the paper studies the happiness discourse that accompanied the rise of the suburban model of homeownership in the 20th century, followed by that which accompanied the policy shifts implemented in the late 20th century to conserve this model.

History, Nature and the American Founding

History, Nature and the American Founding

“Our End Was in Our Beginning”: Judith Shklar and the American Founding

AbstractNear the end of her career, Judith Shklar sought to redeem American political thought from the “liberal consensus,” which obscured the pervasive presence of both antiliberal tendencies and ...

Taking Posterity Seriously: Future Generations' Unalienable Environmental Rights

Although the U.S. Constitution was ordained to “ourselves and our Posterity,” the type of representative democracy currently practiced under that document invites disregard of, and discrimination against, the interests of future generations, who have no present political representation. Legislative failure to adequately address the current climate crisis has prompted renewed interest in the potential of existing constitutional language to shield later generations from irreversible harm to critical natural resources. Some scholars are naturally skeptical that protections from modern environmental problems may fairly be derived from language that pre-dates the modern technology responsible for those problems. However, a close examination of the American founders’ intergenerational philosophy and their unique approach to the concept of “unalienable rights” reveals that 1) the founders were deeply concerned with intergenerational justice; 2) they framed their discussions of these principles in terms of natural resource stewardship values; and 3) these concerns were deeply, historically intertwined with the due process language that has served as the traditional source for judicial recognition of unenumerated constitutional rights.

Original Intents: Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the American Founding by Andrew Shankman

Reviewed by: Original Intents: Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the American Founding by Andrew Shankman Peter S. Onuf (bio) Original Intents: Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the American Founding. By Andrew Shankman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 176. Paper, $19.95.) Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison were all good republicans, united in their commitment to American independence. Their collaboration [End Page 557] culminated in the ratification of Madison's Constitution, Andrew Shankman writes in his succinct and engaging account of the founding, only to collapse with the inauguration of the new federal government and implementation of Treasury Secretary Hamilton's controversial financial system. Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson agreed that "the national government had to gain the power to tax, regulate trade, and enact laws that the states would have to obey" (15). But that agreement disguised fundamental disagreements about the constitution and character of a modern republic that would erupt in the 1790s, dividing Shankman's protagonists and nearly demolishing the "more perfect union" they sought to create. The vicious party battles of the 1790s reflected the founders' failure to recognize or reconcile fundamental philosophical differences. Reversing the logic of "originalist" interpretations of the Constitution, Shankman suggests that Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson were not—and could not have been—fully aware of their intentions before conflicts over controversial administration policies retrospectively revealed them. Jefferson and Madison launched a "mighty argument" over the new nation's future as they mobilized opposition to Hamilton's management of the Treasury. Republican critics and Federalist defenders of the administration imagined the worst in their opponents as they staked out conflicting interpretations of the Constitution. Their "battle to impose their original intents provides for us no legacy of singular constitutional original intent," Shankman concludes. It follows that "we should not trust any figure of the twenty first century who claims that the Constitution had one meaning for its framers" (145). Originalists who now focus on the Constitution's "public meaning" will not be troubled by Shankman's conclusion, for they focus on the text, not on its authors' putative intentions, whenever and however they were defined. What matters to them are the generally accepted understandings of the Constitution's language when the document was written and ratified—fixed understandings that constitute the regime's enduring foundation. Shankman and his fellow historians have little patience with such ahistorical formulations: What can or should be enduring about a bundle of sometimes sordid compromises designed, among other things, to perpetuate slavery? And Shankman is quite right to emphasize the ways in which Hamilton's design for an "energetic" fiscal–military state gave rise to conflicting conceptions of political economy and constitutional interpretation that would profoundly shape the future course of American history. [End Page 558] Original Intents will be recognized as a valuable contribution to our understanding of Hamilton's financial system and its impact on party formation. Jefferson and Madison agreed that preserving the union depended on the federal government's credit-worthiness in European financial markets. But Hamilton had more ambitious goals in mind. By assuming state debts, inducing monied men to invest in the government, transforming debt into a circulating medium, and establishing a national bank, the Treasury Secretary sought to secure "durable liberty" and suppress popular licentiousness (47). Enhanced state capacity would enable the new federal government to govern effectively and so restore order in the revolutionary republic. Under the aegis of a loosely interpreted Constitution, Federalists sought to "beat European monarchies at their own game," in Shankman's apt formulation, by "creating its own republican versions of those monarchies' financial institutions" (4). At first Hamilton played his hand well. After securing repayment of "the $13 million owed to foreign creditors," he rebuffed Madison's effort to discriminate between original holders of the domestic debt and the "few thousand people" who in 1790 "owned most of the $66 million" of the once nearly worthless paper (69, 68). Funding in hand, Hamilton leveraged the assumption of state debts, with the eventual relocation of the capital on the Potomac sweetening the deal. The subsequent incorporation of the First Bank raised constitutional issues that illuminated the implications of Hamilton's system. "If the power to tax could somehow...

Pure Heart: The Faith of a Father and Son in the War for a More Perfect Union by William F. Quigley Jr

Reviewed by: Pure Heart: The Faith of a Father and Son in the War for a More Perfect Union by William F. Quigley Jr Timothy D. Grundmeier Pure Heart: The Faith of a Father and Son in the War for a More Perfect Union. William F. Quigley Jr. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-1-60635-286-1, 416 pp., cloth, $39.95. William Quigley’s Pure Heart is a single book with two separate stories. The first is an examination of the intersection of religion and politics at Christ Church, an Episcopalian parish in Philadelphia, focusing especially on the sermons of its rector, Reverend Benjamin Dorr. The second is a tale of the 121st Pennsylvania Regiment, narrated chiefly through the letters of the minister’s son, William White Dorr, lieutenant and later captain. Both are thoroughly researched and beautifully told. [End Page 95] In his prologue, Quigley makes clear that the first story is his primary focus: “My purpose is to explore and explain how Benjamin Dorr managed to keep his church of mostly elite Philadelphia whites intact during and immediately after the war” (xxviii). Commonly known as the “Nation’s Church,” Christ Church was the place of worship and final resting place for many American founders, including Benjamin Franklin and six other signers of the Declaration of Independence. From 1837 to 1869, when Dorr served as the church’s rector, it was the spiritual home to a host of prominent players in Pennsylvania politics, on both sides of the partisan aisle. Some of the most fascinating sections of Quigley’s book are his forays into the lives of these church members, such as Charles Ingersoll, a Copperhead who served jail time for inciting disloyalty during the war, and Horace Binney, an antislavery Republican lawyer who helped establish the Union League. Amid the clashing political personalities in his congregation, Quigley sees Dorr as a Lincolnian figure, firm in his unionist convictions but also displaying “an exceptionally temperate public faith apart from the civil religion with which most Americans crusaded against each other” (xx). Yet because the only extant primary documents by Dorr are his sermons and a few letters to his son, the Reverend makes for a somewhat problematic lead character. To compensate for the lack of available sources, Quigley often deduces oblique references to the war in Dorr’s sermons. After his son joined the Union army in 1862, Dorr preached a sermon lauding “those who . . . show they are Christians, not in name only, but in deed and in truth.” Quigley surmises that “everyone knew he meant the young men enlisting” (75). Following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Dorr preached against “amusements and pleasures, however lawful.” Quigley speculates: “Surely Dorr’s congregants equated their rector’s warning . . . with slavery” (195). An alternative reading of the minister’s sermons is that his assiduous avoidance of wartime issues exemplifies the conviction that many Civil War–era preachers held—that politics and the pulpit should remain in “separate spheres,” as Timothy Wesley’s The Politics of Faith during the Civil War shows. Interspersed throughout the saga of Christ Church is a detailed narrative of William White Dorr’s military service. Quigley uses the officer’s letters home, as well as the diaries and letters of his comrades, to weave a captivating tale of a regiment that saw fierce action at Fredericksburg, at Gettysburg, and in the Wilderness. Yet this secondary story, which takes up about a third of the book, comes across as a bit of a sideshow. The book’s stated themes of faith and politics play almost no role in Quigley’s account of the 121st Pennsylvania. These sections instead deal mostly with the day-to-day life in the Union army and the horrors of battle. To be sure, Quigley’s storytelling ability as is on full display in these portions of the [End Page 96] book—Captain Dorr’s death at Spotsylvania in particular is movingly rendered. The disconnectedness of the two tales, however, obscures the book’s larger argument. Quigley is well acquainted with the main works of Civil War religious history. Yet his study would have been strengthened by engaging with a...

Why Why Liberalism Failed Fails as an Account of the American Order

In Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen contends that the American founding is fundamentally Hobbesian and that the Constitution is the application of the Hobbesian revolution concerning liberty and anthropology. I contend that Deneen fundamentally mischaracterizes the American founding. The founders and framers affirmed the necessity of consent for political authority and obligation. But they also situated the necessity of consent in the context of a morally and metaphysically realist natural law, maintained that an objective good of the whole constitutes the final end of political association, and described liberty as subjection to the law of nature and the government of God. To be determined by one’s base passions was to be a slave. Moreover, their constitutional thought and the institutional design of the constitutions they built rejected Hobbes’s theory of sovereign power and the metaphysical ground on which it rests.

Extremism, The American Founding, and Russell Kirk’s "The Roots of American Order "

Extremism, The American Founding, and Russell Kirk’s "The Roots of American Order "

Roman Law and Global Constitutionalism

The parallel between contemporary issues and Roman history often fascinates and illuminates. In this article, I argue that Roman law, which was one of several sources of inspiration for the American founders, can serve today as an inspiration toward global constitutionalism. Looking to Roman law helps reduce certain prejudices derived from the current privileging of the sovereign state and the positivist paradigm as the only genuine and possible models for international law. These prejudices constitute an actual hindrance to the right development of global constitutionalism. Global constitutionalism inherently moves beyond sovereignty, nationalism, and positivism. Roman law, which preceded notions of sovereignty, nationalism, and positivism, enables constitutionalists to eliminate from global constitutionalism any nonfoundational elements derived from a highly statist paradigm. Roman law also constitutes a good antidote to any kind of extreme global constitutionalism that seeks to extend the language and modes of national constitutionalism without sufficiently filtering and refining them.

Janus's Revolution

Reviewed by: Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic by Tom Cutterham, and: Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions by Caitlin Fitz, and: Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth by Holger Hoock, and: American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783–1833 by Benjamin E. Park, and: American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 by Alan Taylor Robert G. Parkinson Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic. By Tom Cutterham. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017. 205 pages. Cloth, ebook. Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions. By Caitlin Fitz. New York: W. W. Norton/Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2016. 366 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth. By Holger Hoock. New York: Crown Publishing, 2017. 575 pages. Paper, ebook. American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783–1833. By Benjamin E. Park. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 264 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804. By Alan Taylor. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. 701 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. Then of a sudden sacred Janus, in his two-headed shape,offered his double visage to my wondering eyes.A terror seized me, I felt my hair stiffen with fear, and with asudden chill my bosom froze. —Ovid, The "Fasti"1 We are at a threshold in explaining the founding of the United States. When coupled with other collections of essays, prominent conferences, and recent and forthcoming works, the five books under review here announce the unveiling of a new portrait of the American founding, and of the nationalism [End Page 545] or American character it produced.2 It is, I would argue, the fifth edition of the founding portrait—the American Revolution 5.0. The revolutionaries themselves rendered the first one. It was a self-portrait of their actions while they were performing them. The revolution was, in their eyes, a masterpiece, a phenomenon in human history—a singular example of liberty, benevolence, opportunity, and, well, happiness for all the world to follow. Fifty years later, a new romantic portrait emerged. This one purposely erased its predecessor's universalism and instead celebrated the unique character of America's heroic founding and the justice this beneficent episode had spread across North America. The romantic portrait dazzled those who gazed on it for nearly a century, until early twentieth-century critics less impressed with what they thought the revolution not only permitted but arranged—industrialized capitalism, corrupt politics, and social inequality—crafted a replacement. For these new artists, the excesses and exploitations of the Gilded Age had gnarled roots that went back to the original sin of 1787. The Founders, they maintained, had sought only to feather their nests and those of their friends, and they created a republic that would do just that, real participatory democracy be damned. The Progressives' severe, chastising portrait—the American Revolution 3.0—hung alone in the galleries for a far shorter run than its predecessor, as a competitor was already under development within thirty years. This rival returned the revolutionaries' ideas to the forefront, arguing that the Founders had been motivated by concepts of liberty, consent, and representation that made the revolution different, better, and even more radical than revolutionary popular uprisings in Russia, France, or China. [End Page 546] The third and fourth portraits hung next to one another for the last half of the twentieth century, as artists continued to add details and scenes to their preferred painting and sometimes threw paint onto the other as their disagreements grew increasingly bitter.3 Now, it seems safe to say another version has arrived. Our new revolutionary portrait has many facets that distinguish it from those that came before, although it is not wholly sui generis. First, it does not place the thirteen mainland American colonies at the center but rather features other places on the continent, the Atlantic Ocean, and even the hemisphere. More importantly, it is a chaotic canvas, one Jackson Pollock rather than John Trumbull would paint, featuring actors of...

Y Chromosome Sequences Reveal a Short Beringian Standstill, Rapid Expansion, and early Population structure of Native American Founders

The Americas were the last inhabitable continents to be occupied by humans, with a growing multidisciplinary consensus for entry 15-25 thousand years ago (kya) from northeast Asia via the former Beringia land bridge [1-4]. Autosomal DNA analyses have dated the separation of Native American ancestors from the Asian gene pool to 23 kya or later [5, 6] andmtDNA analyses to ∼25 kya [7], followed by isolation ("Beringian Standstill" [8, 9]) for 2.4-9 ky and then arapid expansion throughout the Americas. Here, we present a calibrated sequence-based analysis of222 Native American and relevant Eurasian Ychromosomes (24 new) from haplogroups Q andC [10], with four major conclusions. First, we identify three to four independent lineages as autochthonous and likely founders: the major Q-M3 and rarer Q-CTS1780 present throughout the Americas, the very rare C3-MPB373 in South America, and possibly the C3-P39/Z30536 in North America. Second, from the divergence times and Eurasian/Americandistribution of lineages, we estimate a Beringian Standstill duration of 2.7 ky or 4.6 ky, according to alternative models, and entry south of the ice sheet after 19.5 kya. Third, we describe thestar-like expansion of Q-M848 (within Q-M3) starting at 15 kya [11] in the Americas, followed by establishment of substantial spatial structure in South Americaby 12 kya. Fourth, the deep branches of theQ-CTS1780 lineage present at low frequencies throughout the Americas today [12] may reflect a separate out-of-Beringia dispersal after the melting of the glaciers at the end of the Pleistocene.

The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom. By Thomas G.West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 420. Paper, $34.99.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 44, Issue 4 p. 487-487 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: The Americas: USA The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom. By West, Thomas G.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 420. Paper, $34.99. Stephen Wolfe, Louisiana State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Stephen Wolfe, Louisiana State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 December 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.13749Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume44, Issue4Special Issue: Religion and ScienceDecember 2018Pages 487-487 RelatedInformation

Enumeration and the silences of constitutional federalism

Constitutional power enumeration was an innovation of the American Founding, an unpre cedented way to express the capacities of a national government. That enumeration was silent on a subject integral to its efficacy, namely, the principles for deciding whether national governing actions fell inside or outside the enumerated subjects of national power. The multisubject character of governing actions has hampered judicial attempts to fill this constitutional silence with effective and enduring principles for implementing power enumeration. How best to craft a law of constitutional characterization is a persisting conundrum of constitutional federalism.

Thomas G. West, The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom

Thomas G. West, The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom

Toward a Sociology of Colonial Subjectivity: Political Agency in Haiti and Liberia

The authors seek to connect global historical sociology with racial formation theory to examine how antislavery movements fostered novel forms of self-government and justifications for state formation. The cases of Haiti and Liberia demonstrate how enslaved and formerly enslaved actors rethought modern politics at the time, producing novel political subjects in the process. Prior to the existence of these nations, self-determination by black subjects in colonial spaces was impossible, and each sought to carve out that possibility in the face of a transatlantic structure of slavery. This work demonstrates how Haitian and Liberian American founders responded to colonial structures, though in Liberia reproducing them albeit for their own ends. The authors demonstrate the importance of colonial subjectivities to the discernment of racial structures and counter-racist action. They highlight how anticolonial actors challenged global antiblack oppression and how they legitimated their self-governance and freedom on the world stage. Theorizing from colonized subjectivities allows sociology to begin to understand the politics around global racial formations and starts to incorporate histories of black agency into the sociological canon.

Racist on Tuesdays: The Relationship between High-Salience Events and Variation in Discrimination

One of the persistent questions in the social sciences is why economic discrimination continues despite legal and social pressures. Multiple studies have considered how large organizations may reduce inequality through organizational or regulatory change. However, it is less obvious how to reduce the interpersonal biases in the one-on-one interactions that dominate market interactions. In particular, taste-based biases are assumed to be constant: people who dislike the members of a particular group do not solicit new information or update their behavior. We propose that taste- based bias varies as the salience of the governing category fluctuates. We consider how an event that increases the salience of racial divisions might affect the unrelated economic activity of minorities–crowdfunding project success. Our preliminary findings indicate that African- American founders experience negative effects, in particular for projects with a creative orientation, which may reflect the fact that these projects are more closely tied to the founder than technical projects. Finally, we have some evidence that African-American founders anticipate a negative response and that they are more likely to withdraw from the market than non-black founders. The findings suggest that changes in the national-level salience of a trait drive changes in founder and backer behavior, with founders anticipating bias, and financial contributions to projects by African Americans decreasing in the wake of a racially salient event.

The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders

The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders

АМЕРИКАНСКОЕ ГОСУДАРСТВО: КРИЗИС ДОВЕРИЯ

Why do not American people like their government? What does it mean? How Donald Trump happened to come up on the U.S. political stage, and does it stem from the general discontent of the people? To answer these questions, the authors of the article turn to intellectual origins of the American state, namely to the concepts of individualism, egalitarianism and etatism. Basically, when one says that Americans dislike their government, one means that people are dissatisfied either with the fact that there is too much government in their everyday lives or, vice versa, that their government cannot protect them, and its engagement is not enough. The authors explore prominent works of such thinkers as T. Hobbs, A. Hamilton, J. Madison, J. Jay, T. Pain, etc. to understand why American Founding Fathers have created such a system of checks and balances – to protect the people from the government or to protect the government itself from decay and degradation to the mob rule? How did they come up with the idea of Republic, and could they imagine to which extent the Federal government would broaden its authority only 100 years later? Starting from abolition of slavery, and later, the Great Depression established the course on the Welfare State building, and the Federal Government staff has grown up to three million people, broadening its capabilities by creating new Federal institutes. Since then, the power of the Federal Government has never come to the level the Founding Fathers designed it. Such a trend has spiraled into a situation when a part of the American electorate is always dissatisfied that they have to pay too much of taxes, go to wars, sponsor other countries’ safety programs and help to build democracy abroad, so to say, that the State is regulating too many aspects of their lives, whereas the other part of nation feels not protected enough, first and foremost, economically. During the last 15 years, that dissatisfaction has been growing so dramatically, that American people who brought B. Obama to the White House with great expectations for changes, turned to be disillusioned and chose D. Trump, hoping that a non-politician will be able to break the pattern. People are very tired of the Government which lives torn from the society and its needs, which has turned the sacred election process into a show “with dirty laundry”. The whole “Russian intrusion” hysteria as well as numerous social protests that have been shaking the United States since Trump has come into power, are now aimed at one thing – blocking the normal working process in the Government. And the Democrats who are in charge of all this, together with some Republicans, who cannot bear D. Trump’s leadership style, will sooner or later also face the need to make a compromise with their electorate. Will people accept the new conditions, or will they prefer to get rid of the State itself? It is an open question, because that is how America was designed by the Founding Fathers.  Acknowledgements. The article has been supported by a grant of the Russian Science Foundation. Project no. 151830069 “World Order Crisis: Expert Community Answers”.