Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814)

According to Edmund Burke, Catharine Macaulay was “the greatest champion” among a group of contemporary agitators for a Bill of Rights, whom he deemed to be “a rotten subdivision” of the Whig faction. However he did not deign to answer her criticisms of him, thus initiating a tendency among mainstream, male, political philosophers to refuse to seriously engage with her arguments. This tendency continues to this day, despite the increasingly sophisticated discussion of her ideas by female historians and philosophers, published since the appearance of Lucy Donnelly’s pioneering article and Bridget Hill’s biography. This paper builds on these discussions, by adding detail to our understanding of her impact on influential American individuals, who were deeply engaged in the political controversies that resulted in the American revolution – exploiting material from letters that were not available when Hill wrote her biography. It argues further, that an accurate understanding of the inter-relationship between the emergence of the discourse on the rights of men and that urging rights of women will not be properly appreciated until the nature and extent of the impact of Macaulay’s ideas on Mary Wollstonecraft is more widely and thoroughly acknowledged.

Journal Article The Forty-Third Annual Meeting Get access The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 21, Issue 5, 1 May 1961, Pages 591–601, https://doi.org/10.1210/jcem-21-5-591 Published: 01 May 1961

The NRA steadfastly maintains that the 30,000 gun-related deaths and 300,000 assaults with firearms in the United States every year are a small price to pay to guarantee freedom. As former NRA President Charlton Heston put it, 'freedom isn't free'.And when gun enthusiasts talk about Constitutional liberties guaranteed by the Second Amendment, they are referring to freedom in a general sense, but they also have something more specific in mind - freedom from government oppression. They argue that the only way to keep federal authority in check is to arm individual citizens who can, if necessary, defend themselves from an aggressive government.In the past decade, this view of the proper relationship between government and individual rights and the insistence on a role for private violence in a democracy has been co-opted by the conservative movement. As a result, it has spread beyond extreme 'militia' groups to influence state and national policy.In Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea, Josh Horwitz and Casey Anderson reveal that the proponents of this view base their argument on a deliberate misreading of history. The Insurrectionist myth has been forged by twisting the facts of the American Revolution and the founding of the United States, the denial of civil rights to African-Americans after the Civil War, and the rise of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler. Here, Horwitz and Anderson set the record straight. Then, challenging the proposition that more guns equal more freedom, they expose Insurrectionism - not government oppression - as the true threat to freedom in the U.S. today.

This chapter introduces the Jewish patriots who chose to make themselves Americans. American Jews fought for the American Revolution, served as officers and political leaders, and in some cases suffered for their patriot beliefs. Religious diversity was present at the outset of the American experiment. The American Revolution was not a Christian event, and Protestant beliefs were not a prerequisite for being an American in 1776. The United States was not established on Christian principles, because if that were the case, the Jews should have been denied citizenship. Unlike in Europe, American Jews did not need a specific act of emancipation because the American Revolution had accepted them. Indeed, American Jews founded a new, democratic synagogue in 1782 as many of the patriot Jews ended up in Philadelphia—becoming one of the first national American religions. The chapter shows that religious diversity was endemic to the American Revolution, which in turn is fundamental to the national consciousness, politics, culture, and style.

BOOK REVIEWS89 worthy for the reasons given not to rely on its application. It would seem to give carte bhnche to the federal government to intervene in a state to guarantee a republican form of government, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly refused to enter the touchy area of defining "republican ." The weight of the author's argument for seeing the guarantee clause as a "sleeping giant" lies in the future, but his suggestions for the uses to which constitutional activists might put it to remove a broad spectrum of inequities seem a little far-fetched. The movement toward the supremacy of the federal government over the states, its ability to intervene in state and local activities, as well as to define republican government, has gone a long way down a road marked by other constitutional clauses and amendments, such as the general welfare clause and the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, and 24th amendments. The introduction of the proposed 27th Amendment indicates that this route is not likely to be abandoned soon. History suggests the "sleeping giant" has been rather effectively bypassed. Nevertheless this is an excellent study for the general history student. It is written in a clear, crisp style that aids comprehension, and although Wiecek works in his own views and interpretations of historical events, he does so without encroaching on the creditability of his material. The book is expensive for its size, but the print is exceptionally legible, footnotes are at the bottom of the page, and it has a good bibliographical essay. The limited role played by this clause makes it an ideal brief "case study" of some of the complex interaction of ideas and the pragmatic pressures of history upon the evolution of the Constitution. With the aid of Wiecek's able presentation his sleeping giant is well worth examining. Lillian A. Pereyba University of Portland The Reformers and the American Indian. By Robert Winston Mardock. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971. Pp. x, 245. $9.00.) John Beeson, Lydia Maria Child, Peter Cooper, Helen Hunt Jackson, Wendell Phillips and other humanitarians relentlessly denounced federal Indian policy in the post-Civil War years. These middle class, Northeastern Republicans, most of whom had previously been involved with the anti-slavery movement, perceived the Indian as the white man's brother, separated only by the red man's arrested cultural development and white injustice. Until the equality guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights was extended to everyone , the Indian problem could never be solved—short of his earthly extinction . As individuals or as members of such organizations as the Universal Peace Union and the Indian Rights Association, the reformers proposed plans to achieve justice and equality for native Americans. To uplift the Indian culturally and thereby enable him to compete economically 90CIVIL WAR HISTORY and socially with white men, he must first be placed on a reservation. Then a step-by-step program based on the humanitarians' own nineteenth -century values could begin: a massive education program followed by Christianization, allotment, assimilation and citizenship. "The incorporation of many of the reform ideas into the body of Indian policy from 1869 to 1890 suggests the significance of their work," writes Mardock. Indian-rights workers helped to formulate Grant's Peace Policy and to convince several Indian delegations that its acceptance was in their best interest. They generated enough publicity and pressure to influence the appointment and the discharge of several federal bureaucrats and to defeat the proposed transfer of the Indian Bureau to the War Department. The capstone of their efforts, of course, was the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887. Generally, this reviewer has nothing but praise for Mardock's wellwritten and tightly organized discussion of the advances and setbacks of these dedicated humanitarians. At times he guides us along trails originally blazed by Loring Benson Priest's Uncle Sam's Stepchildren: The Reformation of United States Indian Policy, 1865-1889 (1942) and Henry E. Fritz. The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860-1890 (1963), but the author's exhaustive analysis of the impact of Eastern reformers on so many facets of federal Indian policy is a unique and important contribution. His thorough research...

For more than three centuries the system of government at Westminster has exerted a profound influence beyond Britain's shores and particularly in North America. In this long period it has itself changed and evolved in remarkable ways, retaining ancient forms, adapting them to the march of events, and acquiring new institutions sometimes incongruously linked with the old. Some of its most salient features today developed within the last century. The original export of the system beyond Europe began in fragmentary fashion with the emigration from England to the North American and Caribbean colonies in the seventeenth century. To preserve the basic rights of Englishmen, representative assemblies established to levy taxes for local services in time challenged the powers of governors representing the Crown. The outcome of the contest in England between king and parliament ultimately affected the political thought and life of the colonies by stimulating the drive for self-government and the liberties of the subject. The colonists were naturally selective in drawing from Westminster mainly precedents and concepts that accentuated their own freedom in the environment of a new continent. Thus they fostered the growing ambitions of their local assemblies, the rule of law, and what Burke called their fierce spirit of individual liberty. By the time of the American Revolution they were keenly conscious of their heritage from seventeenth-century England, especially the ideas, achievements, and religious dissent in the crucial period from the Petition of Right to the Bill of Rights. Their thought was permeated by the political philosophy of Puritanism, with its emphasis on a constitution reflecting a

Writing as the United States entered the Second World War, the eminent Cambridge historian Sir Denis Brogan (1900–74) began a book about American law and politics by paying homage to what he regarded as the most hallowed shrine in the American national capital.1 For Brogan this was not the White House, Capitol Hill or even the Lincoln Memorial, but rather the Rotunda of the National Archives, whose darkened, church-like interior both moved and inspired him. Within this secular shrine are preserved the 'The Charters of Freedom', and each year hundreds of thousands of people pass before the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Federal Constitution (1787) and the Bill of Rights (1791), 'inspecting — and revering', as Brogan put it, 'these fundamental documents of the American nation'.2

Patrick Henry was one of the most admired leaders of the American Revolution, considered by contemporaries as an indispensible instigator of revolution. He is remembered best for his passionate speeches calling his countrymen to defense of liberty against what he saw as British oppression. Both contemporary and modern observers have noted that Henry’s style tended to mimic that of the “New Light” evangelical ministers who were making progress against Virginia’s established Anglican Church in the mid-eighteenth century. Unfortunately, Henry does not enjoy the reputation that he probably deserves as a Founding Father for two reasons. First, since Henry’s greatest influence was in his dramatic oratory and his speeches were at best imperfectly recorded—and by all accounts even a full transcript could not do justice to his eloquence—the warp and woof of his contribution began to dissipate with his words. Second, and perhaps even more important, when the Philadelphia Convention drafted the Constitution in 1787 to address growing fiscal and administrative problems under the Articles of Confederation, Henry opposed the Constitution in its excessive concentration of power (declaring, so it is said, that he refused a seat in the Convention because “I smelt a rat”). He never served in a national office under the Constitution, although he was offered a position in George Washington’s cabinet and on the Supreme Court. With the new nation’s success, Henry’s opposition seemed anachronistic. Yet, even in this role, his contribution was significant, with the opposition of Henry and others to the new Constitution playing a key part in encouraging adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791.

It’s easy to forget how important the jury really is to America. The right to be a juror is one of the fundamental rights guaranteed to all eligible citizens. The right to trial by jury helped spark the American Revolution, was quickly adopted at the Constitutional Convention, and is the only right that appears in both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But for most of us, a jury summons is an unwelcome inconvenience. Who has time for jury duty? We have things to do. In Why Jury Duty Matters, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson reminds us that whether we like it or not, we are all constitutional actors. Jury duty provides an opportunity to reflect on that constitutional responsibility. Combining American history, constitutional law, and personal experience, the book engages citizens in the deeper meaning of jury service. Interweaving constitutional principles into the actual jury experience, this book is a handbook for those Americans who want to enrich the jury experience. It seeks to reconnect ordinary citizens to the constitutional character of a nation by focusing on the important, and largely ignored, democratic lessons of the jury. Jury duty is a shared American tradition. It connects people across class and race, creates habits of focus and purpose, and teaches values of participation, equality, and deliberation. We know that juries are important for courts, but we don’t know that jury service is important for democracy. This book inspires us to re-examine the jury experience and act on the constitutional principles that guide our country before, during, and after jury service.

The historical importance of the American founders as revolutionaries and state builders and the significance of their ideas in constitutional interpretation and contemporary political debates ensure that their political thought is the subject of voluminous scholarship featuring hotly contested and continuously refined interpretations. During the first half of the 20th century, the Progressive interpretation dominated. Pioneered by James Allen Smith, the Progressive interpretation was given its most visible articulation by Charles Beard in his iconoclastic and still controversial study, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (Beard 1986, cited under the Progressive and Neo-Progressive Interpretation). Although they were far from consistent, Progressives followed Beard in treating the founders’ political ideas largely as surface justifications for their immediate economic interests. During the 1950s, however, challenges to the methodological assumptions and empirical findings of Progressive scholarship released the grip of the economic interpretation of the American Revolution and the formation of the Constitution and renewed interest in the ideas of the American founders’ political thought. Since the 1960s, scholars have engaged in an exhaustive debate over the intellectual origins and character of the founders’ political thought. During the 1970s and 1980s, this debate took form as a highly visible series of confrontations about whether the political thought of the American founders was best thought of as a species of classical republicanism or Lockean liberalism. Not long after this debate began, however, a consensus formed among most scholars that the political thought of the American founders was a synthesis of ancient and modern ideas. This catholic but also diffuse and loose-jointed agreement has informed almost all recent scholarship on the political thought of the founders. Scholars have made a strong case for the importance of ideas from ancient Greece and Rome, the Scottish Enlightenment, British common law, international law, Protestant Christianity, and modern liberalism in the founders’ political thought. Nevertheless, the conclusion that the founders’ political thought was a synthesis did not end debate but rather led to exchanges about which traditions were central and how the different idioms and traditions fit together. More recently, the study of the founders’ political thought has been advanced by ever more sophisticated analyses of the political thought of specific founders, by reinterpretations of the central purposes and original understandings of important documents (including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), by the publication of a number of books that reexamine events that are important in ascertaining the political thought of the American founders (including the formation of the Bill of Rights and the Constitutional Convention), and by the publication of numerous individual and collective biographies that feature interpretations of the political thought of one or several founders. It has also been advanced by new articulations of the Progressive interpretation and the construction of a new framework of interpretation: the unionist paradigm. As these developments have taken place, social history focusing on the lives of ordinary Americans has replaced intellectual and political history as the focus of most academic research in the early republic. This transformation has had an ambiguous relationship with the study of the founders’ political thought. On the one hand, it has turned many scholars away from the study of elite discourse and toward accounts of the lived experiences of women, slaves, free blacks, and ordinary farmers. On the other hand, it has transformed who we think of as founders, illuminated the inegalitarian and ascriptive ideologies that were used to subordinate oppressed groups, and redefined scholars’ understandings of the lines between public and private actions and personal and political beliefs.

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE CULTURAL EVOLUTION OF THE WESTERN WORLD The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, following the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, were a time of great intellectual ferment in Western Europe. Philosophers challenged ideas based on tradition and faith, and they urged their colleagues to show skepticism about long-term religious dogma and the concept of absolute monarchy. Its early practitioners included the philosophers Baruch Spinoza and John Locke in the late seventeenth century, followed by Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Paine in the eighteenth century. The Age of Enlightenment was accompanied by a Scientific Revolution, including a physicist, Isaac Newton, a geologist, James Hutton, and a mathematician, Leonhard Euler. Eventually, the Age of Enlightenment spread to the American colonies, led by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom were scientists as well as political leaders. The American Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are direct products of the Age of Enlightenment as Americans sought to establish an ideal democracy in the New World. For Immanuel Kant, in an essay in 1784, enlightenment marked the liberation of human consciousness from a state of ignorance to a state of reason. These views swept across Europe, and, among other results, led to a scientific treatment of disease. As described elsewhere ( Population Explosion and Increased Earthquake Risk to Megacities ), Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution were accompanied by an improvement of medical care and health, which itself led to people living longer and to an increase in population that continues today. THE LISBON EARTHQUAKE At 9:30 a.m. on November 1, 1755, All Saints Day, the views of Enlightenment philosophers were subjected to a major crisis. As described by Fonseca (2004), Lisbon, the capital city of Portugal, a maritime superpower with colonies in Africa, Asia, and South America, was destroyed in a few minutes by a massive earthquake (Figure 13.1). The earthquake was felt in many parts of Western Europe and North Africa (Figure 13.2). Western society was shocked that one of the most beautiful and prosperous cities in Europe could suffer such a fate. About 40,000 people, one-fifth of Lisbon's population, lost their lives, and another 10,000 died in Morocco to the south. A subsequent report gave the losses in Lisbon as nearly 100,000.

Reviewed by: Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalismby Emma Hart Kristin Condotta Lee Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism. By Emma Hart. American Beginnings, 1500–1900. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. vi, 274. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-226-65981-7.) Well before Revolutionary committees of correspondence monitored their neighbors' consumption of tea, residents of the soon-to-be United States debated the role of the "public good" in their commercial exchanges. Emma Hart's Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalismfollows the contours of this argument, beginning with the medieval fairs of Great Britain, moving through early American frontier settlement, and ending with the idea of "republican citizenship in the marketplace" that emerged in the 1780s and 1790s (p. 185). Hart brings to her text a focus on the places where trade occurred in British North America. Centering on Pennsylvania and South Carolina, she contends that early settlers did business as individuals, prioritizing "private good" or "selfish ends" above the traditional regulations of Old World trade (pp. 8, 47). Over time, however, as economic crises arose and creole elites concentrated their power, price controls, standard measures, and especially centralized markets took on new appeal. The idea of an economic common good, monitored in shared trading spaces, became key to the Revolutionary cause. The early nation under the Constitution and those landed white men used the concept's malleability to their profit—often at the expense of women, racial minorities, and the propertyless. Trading Spacesparticularly traces the ways early Americans forgot about, then rediscovered, existing ideas of the public good by looking at everyday sites of exchange. The first two chapters establish where trade happened in England, Scotland, and British North America: concentrated fairs, marketplaces, and shops for the former two and decentralized ferries, taverns, and even private homes for the last. Distance, Hart argues, crucially shaped the colonial economy. It simply did not make sense for sellers to cart their goods to limited hubs with customers nearby. Chapter 3 points to the successes Americans achieved in such spaces, including women, Indigenous traders, and enslaved African Americans—all of whose actions traditionally would have been limited in centralized marketplaces. This system, however, continued to favor propertied white men, who could access credit in hard times. Chapters 4 and 5 point to exactly such moments, especially after 1763 and during the 1770s and 1780s when colonial assemblies compacted frontier trading and urban provisions markets in order to assert control over economic rivals. In doing so, Hart shows, elite men used commercial policies to re-identify the local—and, as chapter 6 concludes, the national—good with their own interests. Although never uncontested, their efforts negotiated a role for economic limitations in a country that, in part, was founded to preserve the private right to trade freely. Hart builds on a solid scholarship on transatlantic commodity chains, shifts in retailing, and merchant firms. Trading Spacesadds a unique focus on the physical spaces where Americans exchanged. Yet Hart also proposes a fascinating argument about the continuity of familiar institutions in the British imperial world. In a manner reminiscent of Alison Games's The Web of Empire: [End Page 905] English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660(New York, 2008), Hart probes why successful Old World models initially failed to travel to new settings and how, when they did, they were adapted to New World purposes. Ultimately, Trading Spacestells the story of early American identity, weaving together social histories gathered from an array of qualitative sources with discussions of political economy. Hart remains primarily interested in the big question of how contemporaries understood their commercial spaces, and there are moments when readers may wish some of her interesting anecdotes about ordinary, especially minority, traders were further elaborated. But this is only to acknowledge that her work starts a conversation that one hopes others will continue. Kristin Condotta Lee Washington University in St. Louis Copyright © 2020 Southern Historical Association

p discourse about religion and society has come long way. Scholars, pundits, and policy makers of an stripes now take religion seriously as a social tk~rce and, pe,'haps more remarkably, as a potential force for good in political life. This is a happy development. If we take proper advantage of it, we might achieve a deeper understanding of religion, society, and politics. But this moment of enthusiasm also may tempt us to overstate religion's power for good. Professor Turner succumbs to this temptation, tlis main conclusion is this: "The religious voter, who is by moral training well accustomed to separating his own personal valuations and priorities from those of God, and is thus habitually "double" already, may be a better w~ter and citizen than the purely "sinele" secular voter who has no theoretical basis for dividing his view of the world from that of the larger community." lie arrives at this conclusion by combining a sensible normative position with a dubious empirical assumption. His sensible normative claim is that "doubleness"--the capacity to advance our own interests but at the same time "'step outside of our own interests and perspectives," and the willingness to "'algue [one's] position but accept the position of the electorate"---is a virtue of the democratic citizen. But his application of this normalive principle to our current condition is marred by the dubious empirical assumption that religious people are more inclined than nonreligious people to exhibit this sort of doubleness. A world in which religious people were "'habitually double" in Professor Turner's sense would be a world in which religious leaders found it more difficult than they apparently do to identify their own personal and institutional interests with what they believe God is calling them to do. But there are in fact multiple opportunities for self-deception in religious life, as in secular life, and the ease with which religious leaders and their followers conflate rather than distinguish between their wills and God's will is writ large in the historical record. A list of relevant examples would be familiar to all: Crusades, religious wars, persecution of religious minorities by religious mt(iorities, conflicts within American Protestantism over slavery (recall that the Southern Baptist Convention is the Southern Baptist Convention because American Baptists split in the 1850s over slavery), intrareligious conflict over civil rights for African Americans, religious collabo,'ation with oppressive regimes, the initial response of the Catholic hierarchy to accusations of sexual abuse by clergy, and so on. Over and over again leaders of religious institutions large and small seem, like secular leaders, quite capable of deciding that their deepest beliets justify rather than call into question their self-interested action. Similarly, a world in which religious people were "'well accustomed to separating [their] own personal valuations and priorities from those of God" would be a world in which political leaders, when they connect their religious beliefs to their policies, would be given pause rather than greater assurance that they are doing God's will. But this ideal seems far removed from actual instances of political leaders who have connected religion with public policy. George W. Bush's religiosity made him more, not less, convinced that God endorsed war in Iraq. And the President is not a lone-indeed, he is typical-in having a faith that is self-justifying rather than self-denying. Religious critics of the war are just as sure, after all, that God endorses their position. Indeed, God frequently is understood to have endorsed the values and political preferences--even the directly contlicting values and preferences---of those who seek such endorsement. And religious people frequently seem to discover, after prayerful reflection and study of the scriptures, that God favors their own personal desires and plans. A world in which religion worked mainly to inculcate a moral sensibility that inclined people to distinguish clearly between their own interests and those of the collective would be a world in which humility, ahmg with "'the pain and tension of religious doubleness,'"

Attack by a Turkey: Learning to Write History from Bernard Bailyn