R. B. Bernstein

The Founding Fathers Reconsidered (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Here is a vividly written and compact overview of the brilliant, flawed, and quarrelsome group of lawyers, politicians, merchants, military men, and clergy known as the "Founding Fathers"--who got as close to the ideal of the Platonic "philosopher-kings" as American or world history has ever seen. In The Founding Fathers Reconsidered, R. B. Bernstein reveals Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and the other founders not as shining demigods but as imperfect human beings--people much like us--who nevertheless achieved political greatness. They emerge here as men who sought to transcend their intellectual world even as they were bound by its limits, men who strove to lead the new nation even as they had to defer to the great body of the people and learn with them the possibilities and limitations of politics. Bernstein deftly traces the dynamic forces that molded these men and their contemporaries as British colonists in North America and as intellectual citizens of the Atlantic civilization's Age of Enlightenment. He analyzes the American Revolution, the framing and adoption of state and federal constitutions, and the key concepts and problems--among them independence, federalism, equality, slavery, and the separation of church and state--that both shaped and circumscribed the founders' achievements as the United States sought its place in the world.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. Mai 2009
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780199839940
• Artikelnr.: 38133241

Autorenporträt

R. B. Bernstein, Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law at New York Law School, has written, edited, or co-edited nineteen books on American constitutional and legal history, including Thomas Jefferson.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction
I. The History that Made the Founding Fathers
The State of the Union
Free-Born English Subjects
The Intellectual World
II. The History that the Founding Fathers Made
Independence
Constitution-Making
Federalism
Politics
Church and State
Equality, Inequality, and Slavery
America in the World
Part III. What History Made of the Founding Fathers
Ancestor Worship?
"Which Founding Father Are You?"
The Dead Hand of the Past: Original Intent
Conclusion
Notes
Chronology
Further Reading