Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Constitutional law
Languages : en
Pages : 102
Book Description
A Candid Examination of the Address of the Minority of the Council of Censors to the People of Pennsylvania
Author: Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania, 1774-1800
Author: Kenneth OwenPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192563025
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania challenges the ways we understand popular sovereignty in the American Revolution. Whereas previous histories place undue focus on elite political thought or analysis based on class, this study argues that it was ordinary citizens that cared most about the establishment of a proper, representative, publicly legitimate political process. Popular activism constrained the options available to leaders and created a system through which the actions of government were made more representative of the will of the community. Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania analyzes political developments in Pennsylvania from 1774, when Americans united in opposition to Britain's Intolerable Acts, through to 1800 and the election of Thomas Jefferson. It looks at the animating philosophy of the Pennsylvania state constitution of 1776, a 'radical manifesto' which espoused a vision of popular sovereignty in which government was devolved from the people only where necessary. Even when governmental institutions were necessary, their legitimacy rested on being able to clearly demonstrate that they operated on popular consent, expressed in a variety of forms of popular mobilization.
To Organize the Sovereign People
Author: David W. HouptPublisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813950511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
This book explores the struggle to define self-government in the critical years following the Declaration of Independence, when Americans throughout the country looked to the Keystone State of Pennsylvania for guidance on political mobilization and the best ways to create a stable arrangement that could balance liberty with order. In 1776 radicals mobilized the people to overthrow the Colonial Assembly and adopt a new constitution, one that asserted average citizens’ rights to exercise their sovereignty directly not only through elections but also through town meeting, petitions, speeches, parades, and even political violence. Although highly democratic, this system proved unwieldy and chaotic. David Houpt finds that over the course of the 1780s, a relatively small group of middling and elite Pennsylvanians learned to harness these various forms of "popular" mobilization to establish themselves as the legitimate spokesmen of the entire citizenry. In examining this process, he provides a granular account of how the meaning of democracy changed, solidifying around party politics and elections, and how a small group of white men succeeded in setting the framework for what self-government means in the United States to this day.
Conceived in Crisis
Author: Christopher R. PearlPublisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813944554
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
Conceived in Crisis argues that the American Revolution was not just the product of the Imperial Crisis, brought on by Parliament’s attempt to impose a new idea of empire on the American colonies. To an equal or greater degree, it was a response to the inability of individual colonial governments to deliver basic services, which undermined their legitimacy. Factional bickering over policy, violent extralegal regulations, and the dreadful experiences of conducting an imperial war while governing a demographically growing and geographically expanding population all led colonists and imperial officials to consider reforming the colonial governments into more powerful and coercive entities. Using Pennsylvania as a case study, Christopher Pearl demonstrates how this history of ineffective colonial governance precipitated a process of state formation that was accelerated by the demands of the Revolutionary War. The powerful state governments that resulted dominated the lives of ordinary people well into the nineteenth century. Conceived in Crisis makes sense of the trajectory from weak colonial to strong revolutionary states, and in so doing explains the limited success of efforts to consolidate state power at the national level during the early Republican period.
Bibliotheca Americana
Author: Joseph SabinPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 600
Book Description
A Dictionary of Books Relating to America
Author: Joseph SabinPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 598
Book Description
The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
Author: The Council of Censors
Author: Lewis Hamilton MeaderPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 88
Book Description
The Proud Papers (Robert Proud, Historian of Pennsylvania) Embracing, Original Manuscript[s]
![The Proud Papers (Robert Proud, Historian of Pennsylvania) Embracing, Original Manuscript[s] PDF](https://books.google.com/books/content/images/frontcover/d18EAAAAYAAJ?fife=w80-h100)
Author: Robert ProudPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Pennsylvania
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
Catalogue of the Library of the American Philosophical Society, Held at Philadelphia, for Promoting Useful Knowledge
Author: American Philosophical Society. LibraryPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Classification
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description