Essays in American History: From the Colonies to the Gilded Age (original) (raw)

The American experiment has shown the world that freedom, and above all the pursuit of happiness have not always been pristine roads, rather ones of turbulence and immense complexity. From the Colonial period, up to the so called "Gilded Age" the American people suffered through the persecutions of the Indigenous, slavery of African-Americans, war, poverty, and severe class distinctions. Regardless of these infallibilities, the history of the United States is one where men and women have gone through immense drudgery to achieve their own individual happiness. Out of all the nations, it is the one which has come to the closest manifestation of liberty, yet also one which had to tread on a long and painful path to achieve it. This compendium of essays deals with the narratives of people, and their struggle to find their place in the great American story. They discuss the power dynamics of the republic up until the end of the 19th century.

Sign up for access to the world's latest research.

checkGet notified about relevant papers

checkSave papers to use in your research

checkJoin the discussion with peers

checkTrack your impact

Power and Liberty in America: from Early America to the Reconstruction

2016

In an article for the National Gazette written less than five years after the signing of the Constitution, James Madison stated his view that “every word in the Constitution decides a question between power and liberty”. The idea expressed by the so-called Father of the Constitution unfolds what was the main challenge in the hands of the Founders when creating a new constitutional government: not only a more perfect Union had to be established, but a more perfect balance between opposing claims of power and liberty was the key issue to be addressed in national scale by the new Constitution. Although dealing with the constitution-making struggles of the time, Madison’s idea of a clash between power and liberty as the epicenter of the Constitution can be used as the starting point to understand, in hindsight, the development and transformation in the conceptions of liberty from Early America until today’s world. In fact, it is possible to say that, in the modern western civilization, any legitimate law-making authority has to deal with this clash of fundamental values when establishing any sort of social compact or agreement. Thus, the balance between power and liberty shapes the equation from which every generation will draw its basic concepts of liberty, in areas ranging from the political arena to the economic and social fields. Stemming from the clash between power and liberty – and through a historicist perspective of sequence and context –, this essay aims to explore the idea of liberty in its contemporary practices from Early America to the 14th Amendment Reconstruction. In a nutshell – and taking the American context into consideration –, the results from the historical strife between power and liberty will determine the depth and width of the political, economic and social freedoms, mainly by establishing the range and comprehensiveness of “we the people” who deserve to be regarded as beneficiaries of such liberties and freedoms. For methodological purposes and regarding space limitations, this essay will focus mainly on the political and economic fields, and aims to finish by briefly addressing the collateral and contemporary consequences of these analyses on the social questions about liberty in America.

A people's history of the United States: 1492-present

I am often asked how I came to write this book. One answer is that my wife Roslyn urged me to write it, and continued to urge me at those times when, daunted by the magnitude of the project, I wanted to abandon it. Another is that the circumstances of my own life (which, as I now write, has spanned a fourth of the nation's history-a startling thought) demanded of me that I try to fashion a new kind of history. By that I mean a history different from what I had learned in college and in graduate school and from what I saw in the history texts given to students all over the country. When I set out to write the book, I had been teaching history and what is grandiosely called "political science" for twenty years. Half of that time I was involved in the civil rights movement in the South (mostly while teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia). And then there were ten years of activity against the war in Vietnam. These experiences were hardly a recipe for neutrality in the teaching and writing of history.

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.