Social Revolution

In 1789, the people of France decided to overtake the monarchy of their country in favor of a republic. The French Revolution played out like an echo of the American Revolution of the decade prior, with people rising against their governing bodies. Like the American Revolution, the French Revolution had its dissidents and supporters. Thomas Paine was one such supporter, and Rights of Man was his manifesto in support of people fighting for liberty.

Everyone knows Benjamin Franklin—the thrifty inventor-statesman of the Revolutionary era—but not about his love life. Poor Richard’s Women reveals the neglected voices of the women Ben loved and lost during his lifelong struggle between passion and prudence. The most prominent among them was Deborah Read Franklin, his common-law wife and partner for 44 years. Long dismissed by historians, she was an independent, politically savvy woman and devoted wife who raised their children, managed his finances, and fought off angry mobs at gunpoint while he traipsed about England.

In 1776, upon the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers concluded America’s most consequential document with a curious note, pledging “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor”. Lives and honor did indeed hang in the balance, yet just what were their fortunes? How much did the Founders stand to gain or lose through independence? In this landmark account, historian Willard Sterne Randall investigates the private financial affairs of the Founders, illuminating like never before how and why the Revolution came about.

On September 17, 1787, at the State House in Philadelphia, 39 men from 12 states, after months of often bitter debate, signed America's Constitution. Yet very few of the delegates, at the start, had had any intention of creating a nation that would last. Most were driven more by pragmatic, regional interests than by idealistic vision. Lawrence Goldstone chronicles the forging of the Constitution through the prism of the crucial compromises made by men consumed with the needs of the slave economy.

Scholars have long debated the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, yet have tended to define it narrowly, focusing on a single intellectual tradition, and on the use of the term within a single text, the Declaration of Independence. In this insightful volume, Carli Conklin considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety of intellectual traditions, and explores its usage in two key legal texts of the Founding Era, the Declaration and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.

Dynamic Pluralism presents a system of ethics that is not only easy to understand and easy to use but beneficial to the lives of those who do so. It filters out the philosophical jargon so popular in academic circles and structures ethics that it is accessible to everyone. Not only does it present an understandable system of ethics but also shows the listener how they can use ethics to create a better world.

An historical and hypothetical survey of revolution, civil war, and sedition. Tracing the causes of government overthrow from the beginning of humanity to 2019, this book has enough meat for the political scientist and political junkie alike yet easy-to-listen for the curious. Its contents will prompt further investigation or at least a good cynical knee-jerk.

The Cow Revolution is a collection of stories that contains philosophical and political reflections.

Originally published anonymously, The Federalist Papers first appeared in 1787 as a series of letters to New York newspapers exhorting voters to ratify the proposed Constitution of the United States. Still hotly debated and open to often controversial interpretations, the arguments first presented here by three of America's greatest patriots and political theorists were created during a critical moment in our nation's history.

When the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia adjourned late in the summer of 1787, the delegates returned to their states to report on the new Constitution, which had to be ratified by specially elected conventions in at least nine states. Pauline Maier recounts the dramatic events of the ensuing debate in homes, taverns, and convention halls, drawing generously on the speeches and letters of founding fathers, both familiar and forgotten, on all sides.

In Washington's Circle, David and Jeanne Heidler introduce not just the president but the group of extraordinary men who advised him. The familiar names are here, like the often irked and occasionally irksome John Adams, the scheming Alexander Hamilton, and the prodigiously talented James "Jemmy" Madison, but so are the lesser known Edmund Randolph, John Jay, and Gouverneur Morris. Washington's choices of whom to listen to, for better and sometimes worse, were as consequential as the advice his cabinet gave.

It was an age of fascinating leaders and difficult choices, of grand ideas eloquently expressed and of epic conflicts bitterly fought. Now comes a brilliant portrait of the American Revolution, one that is compelling in its prose, fascinating in its details, and provocative in its fresh interpretations.

Where did the ideas come from that became the cornerstone of American democracy? Not only the erudite Thomas Jefferson, the wily and elusive Ben Franklin, and the underappreciated Thomas Paine, but also Ethan Allen, the hero of the Green Mountain Boys, and Thomas Young, the forgotten Founder who kicked off the Boston Tea Party. These radicals who founded America set their sights on a revolution of the mind. Derided as "infidels" and "atheists" in their own time, they wanted to liberate us not just from one king but from the tyranny of supernatural religion.

In The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America, Richard R. Beeman offers an ambitious overview of political life in pre-Revolutionary America. Beeman uncovers an extraordinary diversity of political belief and practice. In so doing, he closes the gap between eighteenth-century political rhetoric and reality. Although the majority of people living in America before the Revolution would not have used the term "democracy," important changes were underway that made it increasingly difficult for political leaders to ignore "popular pressures".

Noah Webster's name is now synonymous with the dictionary he created, but his story is not nearly so ubiquitous. Webster hobnobbed with various Founding Fathers and was a young confidant of George Washington and Ben Franklin. But perhaps most important, Webster was an ardent supporter of a unified, definitively American culture, distinct from the British, at a time when the United States of America were anything but unified - and his dictionary of American English is a testament to that.

History tends to cast the early years of America in a glow of camaraderie when there were, in fact, many conflicts between the Founding Fathers - none more important than the one between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Their disagreement centered on the highest, most original public office created by the Constitutional Convention: the presidency. It also involved the nation's foreign policy, the role of merchants and farmers in a republic, and the durability of the union.

There are few international relationships as intimate, as passionate - and as dysfunctional - as that of the United States and Cuba. In The Cuba Wars, Cuba expert Daniel Erikson draws on extensive visits and conversations with both Cuban government officials and opposition leaders - plus key players in Washington and Florida - to offer an unmatched portrait of a small country with outsized importance to Americans and American policy.

Thomas Jefferson believed that every generation of Americans should rewrite our Constitution from scratch—to mirror the progress of the human mind and, most of all, to maintain the revolutionary spirit. He would be dismayed that it’s considered untouchable these days.

Die moderne Kultur wird zunehmend von Fragen und Antworten rund um die sexuelle Identität beeinflusst – ob im öffentlichen Diskurs oder bei kulturellen Trends. Jedes gesellschaftliche Phänomen hat seine historischen Wurzeln. Von Augustinus, über Rousseau bis hin zu Marx oder Freud sind unterschiedliche Auffassungen des Selbst vorgestellt worden. Im 20. Jahrhundert wurden diese Konzepte des Selbst nicht nur psychologisiert und eng mit der Sexualität verschränkt, sondern unter dem Einfluss von Leuten wie Reich, Marcuse und anderen ebenfalls zu einer politischen Angelegenheit gemacht.

The Framers’ Intentions connects political parties and the two-party system with the Constitution in a way that no previous account has, thereby providing a foundation for parties and a party system within American constitutionalism. This book will appeal to readers interested in political parties, constitutional theory, and constitutional development.