Jack N. Rakove

Ticklish Experiments: The Paradox of American Constitutionalism

The United States entered the twenty-first century with the structural features of its eighteenth-century Constitution still largely intact. In celebration, the political fates conspired to produce one of the strangest elections in its history. In the presidential election of 2000, the remarkably narrow division in the national electorate was replicated in six states where a swing of a few hundred or thousand voters would have moved the electors into the opposing column; and the outcome of the national election came to depend on the final disposition of ballots in Florida. Five weeks of political and legal maneuvering over the balloting in Florida ended when the Supreme Court of the United States effectively halted any further recount of the vote in that state. Although this decision falls short of the “self-inflicted wound” label ritually pinned on its ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), or the moral obloquy associated with the “separate but equal” implications of Plessy v. Ferguson, the per curiam opinion in Bush v. Gore seems destined to sustain searching criticism for years to come. 1

Ideas, Ideology, and the Anomalous Problem of Revolutionary Causation

When properly taught, the arguments of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution pivot on three issues; (1) how a Radical Whig ideology explains increasing American resistance after 1765; (2) how colonial and imperial differences on ideas such as representation, the nature of a constitution, and sovereignty illustrate the ways American governance had diverged from British antecedents; and (3), how Loyalists failure to recognize the depth of grievances demonstrates what Bailyn called the [Revolutions] transforming radicalism.

Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism. By Drew Maciag. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013. Pp. xvi, 286.

discussions helped make plays and the theatre acceptable forms of entertainment that should be encouraged and developed even more. Eamon also discusses the role of the local coffeehouses in relation to printed materials. Coffeehouses subscribed to newspapers so that customers could read them, but they also became places where the news was discussed. Although appealing to social elites, community groups, plays, and coffeehouses with newspapers and other printed materials, Eamon argues, provided public spaces that pulled different groups together and encouraged an emerging British perspective and identity. Eamon concludes that the print community in Halifax and Quebec City consisted of people from all levels of society who turned to the press for helpful and reassuring information. This community “transcended regional differences and functioned in quite similar and overarching ways” (p. 187). As presented in studies by historians such as Linda Colley and Maya Jasanoff, the eighteenth century was a pivotal moment for the development of a British imperial identity, and Eamon’s study expands this understanding in Canada. His study of the impact of newspapers presents an interesting, well-researched, and capably argued discussion of the important role played by the press in creating a common culture in North America, a part of the British Empire that was quite diverse and under stress as it split apart in the late seventeen hundreds.

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quent religious thought, and Abraham Lincoln is the terminus ad quem who provides a recapitulation of Edwardsean themes in his profound analyses of the Civil War.3 Although Noll interprets that conoict as tragic rather than ironic, he implicitly draws on the thought of both Niebuhrs to make the ironic argument that the Civil War was caused, in part, by the failure of American Protestants to disentangle essential Christian belief from the cultural religion that had developed between Edwards and Lincoln at both popular and elite levels.4 This argument, theological as it may be, also makes for good history, and scarcely detracts from this work’s considerable value. As both a survey of American religious thought and a reoection on American distinctiveness, this is an important work for those historians who may have lost sight of the profound impact of religion on American history.

The Mythic Meanings of the Second Amendment: Taming Political Violence in a Constitutional Republic (review)

Unless I am mistaken, political history is not far behind. How many universities today offer courses on the English, French, and Russian Revolutions? In how many places is the evolution of parliamentary government a focus? British historians tell me that, in the United States, English constitutional history is a dying field. I hear the like from Renaissance historians. If so, general trends would help explain the apparent decline in the number of scholars working on or even teaching the American founding. I do not mean to denigrate the work done by social and economic historians, but I do assert the centrality of political history understood in the broadest possible sense. The other fields are in the end ancillary. Their greatest value lies in the contribution they make to political understanding, which is, let me underline, very considerable. One need only consider the manner in which slavery shaped the early American republic to see just how much social and economic historians can

An Agenda for Early American History

For many of his countrymen, Thomas Jefferson has become an unlikely authority to invoke on behalf of a modern conception of human rights. The embarrassing contradiction between his abstract commitment to equality and his self-indulgent life as the slave-owning master of Monticello has become too gross to bear. The strong likelihood that he fathered one or more enslaved children by Sally Hemings—his paramour, consort, or mistress, as well as half-sister-in-law—has only compounded the sin.1 In the hands of Conor Cruise O’Brien, the distinguished diplomat and political commentator, Jefferson’s glib rationalizations for the violence of the French Revolution foreshadow the naivete with which so many intellectuals condoned the murderous purges of Stalin or Mao, while his enthusiasm for states’ rights places him closer to the rabidly anti-nationalist ideology of the so-called militia movement than to the new political order that most Americans have accepted since the 1930s.2 And his famous endorsements of freedom of speech and the press notwithstanding, Jefferson’s record as a civil libertarian has long been questioned.3 Where Jefferson is concerned, the admonition to love the sinner but hate the sin may no longer apply.

Jefferson, Rights, and the Priority of Freedom of Conscience

In the 1790s, the United States Congress solidified its role as the national legislature. The ten essays in this work show the mechanisms by which this bicameral legislature developed its institutional identity. The first essay sets the scene for the institutional development of Congress by examining its constitutional origins and efforts of the Founders to empower the new national legislature. The five following essays focus attention on two related mechanisms - petitioning and lobbying - by which citizens and private interests communicated with national lawmakers. Although scholars tend to see lobbying as a later 19th-century development, the papers presented here show the existence of lobbyists and lobbying in the 1790s. The final four papers examine other aspects of the institutional development of the House and the Senate, including the development of political parties and congressional leadership. The essays in this collection, the third volume in the series Perspectives on the History of Congress, 1789-1801, originated in a series of conferences held by the United States Capitol Historical Society from 1994 to 2001.