Join In! The Rise of Self-Governance and American Organizing From the Mayflower Compact to the Modern Day

This volume includes discussions on such topics as the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, constitutional morality, the Eleventh Amendment, criticism of the courts and the duties of citizenship.

For readers of Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower, a groundbreaking history that makes the case for replacing Plymouth Rock with Jamestown as America's founding myth. We all know the great American origin story. It begins with an exodus. Fleeing religious persecution, the hardworking, pious Pilgrims thrived in the wilds of New England, where they built their fabled city on a hill. Legend goes that the colony in Jamestown was a false start, offering a cautionary tale. Lazy louts hunted gold till they starved, and the shiftless settlers had to be rescued by English food and the hard discipline of martial law. Neither story is true. In Marooned, Joseph Kelly reexamines the history of Jamestown and comes to a radically different and decidedly American interpretation of these first Virginians. In this gripping account of shipwrecks and mutiny in America's earliest settlements, Kelly argues that the colonists at Jamestown were literally and figuratively marooned, cut loose from civilization, and cast into the wilderness. The British caste system meant little on this frontier: those who wanted to survive had to learn to work and fight and intermingle with the nearby native populations. Ten years before the Mayflower Compact and decades before Hobbes and Locke, they invented the idea of government by the people. 150 years before Jefferson, they discovered the truth that all men were equal. The epic origin of America was not an exodus and a fledgling theocracy. It is a tale of shipwrecked castaways of all classes marooned in the wilderness fending for themselves in any way they could--a story that illuminates who we are today.

The Citizen's Almanac is a publication developed for new citizens.  It includes information on U.S. civic history, rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship, biographical details on prominent foreign-born Americans, landmark decisions of the Supreme Court, presidential speeches on citizenship, and several of our founding documents including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  

At a time when surveys reveal that Americans know less and less about our past, Tony Williams provides entertaining and informative descriptions of 50 of the most important and dramatic events from the colonial and Revolutionary period--some known and some forgotten--from the Mayflower Compact to the Annapolis Convention. Published in association with The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, America's Beginnings takes the reader throughout the American colonies and introduces many leading figures, from John Smith and John Winthrop to the Founding Fathers. Along the way, Williams examines the principles that led colonists to come to America and succeeding generations to become a free and independent nation. Read individually or from cover to cover, these stories illuminate the founding principles and heroic struggles that established the country and shaped the American character.

This reference work presents 27 key documents from the historic origins of the United States government through its subsequent expansion and evolution. The book is divided into five sections, the first of which is an introductory essay about American democracy. Section II includes three documents that laid the foundation for America's government: the Magna Carta, the 1628 Petition of Right, and England's Bill of Rights. The third section presents 13 core documents, such as the Mayflower Compact, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Constitution, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Section IV provides 11 documents of America's territorial expansion, from the Treaty of Paris through the Louisiana Purchase Treaty and the Alaska Treaty and Hawaii Resolution. The final section is an essay about the future of democracy. There are 12 useful appendices.

An original collection of the most influential documents in American history, from the bestselling author of A Patriot's History of the United States. Since 2005, A Patriot's History of the United States has become a modern classic for its defense of America as a unique country founded on principles of justice, equality, and freedom for all. The Patriot's History Reader continues this tradition by going back to the original sources-the documents, speeches, and legal decisions that shaped our country into what it is today. The authors explore both oft-cited documents-the Declaration of Independence, Emancipation Proclamation, and Roe v. Wade--as well as those that are less famous. Among these are George Washington's letter to Alexander Hamilton, which essentially outline America's military strategy for the next 150 years, and Herbert Hoover's speech on business ethics, which examines the government's role in regulating private enterprise. By helping readers explore history at its source, this book sheds new light on the principles and personalities that have made America great.

A tour of the history of the world through the declarations, manifestos, and agreements from the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence to Wikileaks. This fascinating collection gathers the most significant written documents that have influenced and shaped the way we think about the world and the course of history. From the Magna Carta (1215) to the Gettysburg Address (1863) to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech (1963), the documents showcased here chart dramatic high points of world history.   In addition to official charters and famous treaties, there are also less well known yet nonetheless interesting items included, such as the Apollo flight plan, Apple's 1976 incorporation documents, and the check with which the U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia. Equally interesting are Watson and Crick's scrawled notes leading to the discovery of DNA, Darwin's journal, and the annotated manuscripts for Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Orwell's novel 1984.  Beautifully illustrated in full color, this book not only informs but also entertains as it demonstrates how the power of the written word has shaped, changed, enhanced, and even revolutionized the world.

This highly acclaimed text provides a comprehensive selection of the most important documents in American legal history, integrating the history of public and private law from America's colonial origins to the present. Devoting special attention to the interaction of social and legal change,American Legal History: Cases and Materials, Fourth Edition, shows how legal ideas developed in tandem with specific historical events and reveals a rich legal culture unique to America. The book also deals with state and federal courts and looks at the relationship between the development ofAmerican society, politics, and economy and how it relates to the evolution of American law. Introductions and instructive headnotes accompany each document, tying legal developments to broader historical themes and providing a social and political context essential to an understanding of thehistory of law in America.New to this Edition* New cases on hot-button issues including guns, education, terrorism, and same sex marriage and unions* Updated material on the War on Terror and the Supreme Court response to military trials* New material on the emerging laws surrounding transgendered people* Additional material on eminent domain and the Supreme Court's controversial decision in Kelo v. City of New LondonSetting the legal challenges of the twenty-first century in a broad context, American Legal History, Fourth Edition, is an indispensable text for students and teachers of constitutional and legal history, the judicial process, and the effects of society on law.

A Progressive History of American Democracy Since 1945: American Dreams, Hard Realities offers a social, political, and cultural history of the United States since World War II. Unpacking a period of profound transformation unprecedented in the national experience, this book takes a synthetic approach to the history of the 1940s to the present day. It examines how Americans descended from a mid-century apogee of boundless expectations to the unsettling premise that our contemporary historical moment is fraught with a sense of crisis and national failure. The book's narrative explores the question of decline and more importantly, how the history of this transformation can point the way toward a recovery of shared national values. Chris J. Magoc also gives extensive treatments to the following: Grassroots movements that have expanded the meaning of American democracy, from the 1950s human rights struggle in the South to contemporary movements to confront systemic racism and the existential crisis of climate change. The resilience of American democracy in the face of antidemocratic forces. The impacts of a decades-long economic transformation. The consequences of America's expanding global military footprint and national security state. Fracturing of a nation once held together by a post-war liberal consensus and broadly shared societal goals to an America facing an attack from within on empirical truth and democracy itself. This book will be of interest to students of modern U.S. history, social history, and American Studies, and general readers interested in recent U.S. history.

In "Self-Rule," Robert Wiebe suggests that only in appreciating that history can we recognize how breathtaking democracy's arrival was, how extraordinary its spread has been, and how uncertain its prospects are. American democracy arrived abruptly in the 19th century; it changed just as dramatically early in the 20th. Hence, "Self-Rule" divides the history of American democracy into two halves: a 19th century half covering the 1820s to the present, and a 20th century half, with a major transition from the 1890s to the 1920s between them. As Wiebe explains why the original democracy of the early 19th century represented a sharp break from the past, he recreates in vivid detail the way European visitors contrasted the radical character of American democracy with their own societies. He then discusses the operation of various 19th century democratic publics, including a nationwide public, the People. Finally, he places democracy's white fraternal world of equals in a larger environment where other Americans who differed by class, race, and gender, developed their own relations to democracy. Wiebe then picks up the history of democracy in the 1920s and carries it to the present. Individualism, once integrated with collective self-governance in the 19th century, becomes the driving force behind 20th century democracy. During those same years, other ways of defining good government and sound public policy shunt majoritarian practices to one side. Late in the 20th century, these two great themes in the history of American democracy individualism and majoritarianism turn on one another in modern democracy's war on itself.

In this new political history of the labor movement, Clayton Sinyai examines the relationship between labor activism and the American democratic tradition. Sinyai shows how America's working people and union leaders debated the first questions of democratic theory?and in the process educated themselves about the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship. In tracing the course of the American labor movement from the founding of the Knights of Labor in the 1870s to the 1968 presidential election and its aftermath, Sinyai explores the political dimensions of collective bargaining, the structures of unions and businesses, and labor's relationships with political parties and other social movements. Schools of Democracy analyzes how labor activists wrestled with fundamental aspects of political philosophy and the development of American democracy, including majority rule versus individual liberty, the rule of law, and the qualifications required of citizens of a democracy. Offering a balanced assessment of mainstream leaders of American labor, from Samuel Gompers to George Meany, and their radical critics, including the Socialists and the Industrial Workers of the World, Sinyai provides an unusual and refreshing perspective on American labor history.

The book examines the problems that plague contemporary American democracy. Written from the standpoint of democratic theory, and from a progressive point of view, the book explores different facets of American democratic culture and its various deficits - deficits that can lead to the crippling of democratic politics.

In this groundbreaking book, sociologist Andrew Perrin shows that rules and institutions, while important, are not the core of democracy. Instead, as Alexis de Tocqueville showed in the early years of the American republic, democracy is first and foremost a matter of culture: the shared ideas, practices, and technologies that help individuals combine into publics and achieve representation. Reinterpreting democracy as culture reveals the ways the media, public opinion polling, and changing technologies shape democracy and citizenship. As Perrin shows, the founders of the United States produced a social, cultural, and legal environment fertile for democratic development and in the two centuries since, citizens and publics use that environment and shared culture to re-imagine and extend that democracy. American Democracy provides a fresh, innovative approach to democracy that will change the way readers understand their roles as citizens and participants. Never will you enter a voting booth or answer a poll again without realizing what a truly social act it is. This will be necessary reading for scholars, students, and the public seeking to understand the challenges and opportunities for democratic citizenship from Toqueville to town halls to Twitter.

With essays on U.S. history ranging from the American Revolution to the dawn of the twenty-first century, Contested Democracy illuminates struggles waged over freedom and citizenship throughout the American past. Guided by a commitment to democratic citizenship and responsible scholarship, the contributors to this volume insist that rigorous engagement with history is essential to a vital democracy, particularly amid the current erosion of human rights and civil liberties within the United States and abroad. Emphasizing the contradictory ways in which freedom has developed within the United States and in the exercise of American power abroad, these essays probe challenges to American democracy through conflicts shaped by race, slavery, gender, citizenship, political economy, immigration, law, empire, and the idea of the nation state. In this volume, writers demonstrate how opposition to the expansion of democracy has shaped the American tradition as much as movements for social and political change. By foregrounding those who have been marginalized in U.S society as well as the powerful, these historians and scholars argue for an alternative vision of American freedom that confronts the limitations, failings, and contradictions of U.S. power. Their work provides crucial insight into the role of the United States in this latest age of American empire and the importance of different and oppositional visions of American democracy and freedom. At a time of intense disillusionment with U.S. politics and of increasing awareness of the costs of empire, these contributors argue that responsible historical scholarship can challenge the blatant manipulation of discourses on freedom. They call for careful and conscientious scholarship not only to illuminate contemporary problems but also to act as a bulwark against mythmaking in the service of cynical political ends.