When we speak of the American melting pot, we tend to think of nineteenth-century cities where many ethnicities blended to form hybrid cultures. But was there an earlier melting pot, rural and agricultural rather than urban and industrial? The slave plantation brought together not only the blacks of the quarters and the whites of the … Continued
During the Civil War, Americans both North and South were surrounded by death. Battle claimed over 600,000 lives. A similar casualty rate in today’s America would result in about 6 million deaths. Just as we would struggle to make sense of such massive tragedy, our countrymen did 150 years ago. And then, as now, new … Continued
America would not exist without rhetoric. John Quincy Adams observed that rhetoric is essential to democracy. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution stand on firm rhetorical foundations, and rhetoric has shaped debate on issues from abolition in the nineteenth century to abortion in the twenty-first. Legislation requires deliberative rhetoric; the courts require judicial rhetoric; … Continued
How did the electorate change between 1800 and the 1830s? How did ideas about who was entitled to membership in the political community change? How did the practice of politics — the rules of the political game — change? Who gained power as the result of these changes? Who lost power? How democratic was the … Continued
Between 1947 and 1991 the Cold War touched virtually every aspect of life in the United States. At the height of the conflict in the 1950s and 60s, our anxieties magnified the Soviet Union into an enemy so militarily powerful and diabolically sly that it seemed destined to conquer us through invasion or subversion. We … Continued
Prohibition bred glamour — speakeasies, flappers, the Jazz age. Prohibition bred crime — gangsters, smuggling, shoot-outs. It also pitted country folk against city dwellers, Protestants against Catholics, the native-born against immigrants. It promoted women’s liberation, stoked racial fears, made drinking alcohol an act of treason, and turned America into a nation of informers, all this … Continued
Looking back on American independence, John Adams wrote that the Revolution involved a radical change in religious sentiments before it eroded old political loyalties. That prior change came in the First Great Awakening, energized by the preaching of the Reverend George Whitefield. He sparked an evangelical movement that swept through the colonies between the 1730s … Continued
In July of 1925, the Tennessee jury in the Scopes “monkey” trial delivered its verdict, finding high school science teacher John T. Scopes guilty of teaching evolution. In a larger sense, however, the jury is still out. While we await the latest verdict, we can explore some questions that place the famous trial in the … Continued
A nation set apart, divinely empowered to lead the world — that is how Americans have seen ourselves since the very beginning. The 17th century’s “city upon a hill” became, in the eighteenth, a model of liberty for all the world. In the nineteenth century, Manifest Destiny drove this nation from the Atlantic to the … Continued
Benjamin Franklin thought America had an immigration problem in 1751. “Why,” he lamented, “should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens?” If Franklin resented “aliens,” many of them loathed people like him, whom they considered British, and they resisted the cultural and political dominance the British claimed. Who were these “aliens?” How … Continued