Druid Magazine

Author : Luke Mayville
Genre : Philosophy
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN : 9780691183244
Type book : PDF, Epub, Kindle and Mobi
File Download : 230 page
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Why American founding father John Adams feared the political power of the rich—and how his ideas illuminate today's debates about inequality and its consequences Long before the "one percent" became a protest slogan, American founding father John Adams feared the power of a class he called simply "the few"—the wellborn, the beautiful, and especially the rich. In John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, Luke Mayville explores Adams’s deep concern with the way in which inequality threatens to corrode democracy and empower a small elite. Adams believed that wealth is politically powerful not merely because money buys influence, but also because citizens admire and even identify with the rich. Mayville explores Adams’s theory of wealth and power in the context of his broader concern about social and economic disparities—reflections that promise to illuminate contemporary debates about inequality and its political consequences. He also examines Adams’s ideas about how oligarchy might be countered. A compelling work of intellectual history, John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy has important lessons for today’s world.

Author : Dennis C. Rasmussen
Genre : History
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN : 9780691241418
Type book : PDF, Epub, Kindle and Mobi
File Download : 288 page
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The surprising story of how George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson came to despair for the future of the nation they had created Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them—including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—came to deem America’s constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation. Fears of a Setting Sun is the first book to tell the fascinating and too-little-known story of the founders’ disillusionment. As Dennis Rasmussen shows, the founders’ pessimism had a variety of sources: Washington lost his faith in America’s political system above all because of the rise of partisanship, Hamilton because he felt that the federal government was too weak, Adams because he believed that the people lacked civic virtue, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions laid bare by the spread of slavery. The one major founder who retained his faith in America’s constitutional order to the end was James Madison, and the book also explores why he remained relatively optimistic when so many of his compatriots did not. As much as Americans today may worry about their country’s future, Rasmussen reveals, the founders faced even graver problems and harbored even deeper misgivings. A vividly written account of a chapter of American history that has received too little attention, Fears of a Setting Sun will change the way that you look at the American founding, the Constitution, and indeed the United States itself.

Author : Glory M. Liu
Genre : Business & Economics
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN : 9780691240879
Type book : PDF, Epub, Kindle and Mobi
File Download : 384 page
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The unlikely story of how Americans canonized Adam Smith as the patron saint of free markets Originally published in 1776, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was lauded by America’s founders as a landmark work of Enlightenment thinking about national wealth, statecraft, and moral virtue. Today, Smith is one of the most influential icons of economic thought in America. Glory Liu traces how generations of Americans have read, reinterpreted, and weaponized Smith’s ideas, revealing how his popular image as a champion of American-style capitalism and free markets is a historical invention. Drawing on a trove of illuminating archival materials, Liu tells the story of how an unassuming Scottish philosopher captured the American imagination and played a leading role in shaping American economic and political ideas. She shows how Smith became known as the father of political economy in the nineteenth century and was firmly associated with free trade, and how, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the Chicago School of Economics transformed him into the preeminent theorist of self-interest and the miracle of free markets. Liu explores how a new generation of political theorists and public intellectuals has sought to recover Smith’s original intentions and restore his reputation as a moral philosopher. Charting the enduring fascination that this humble philosopher from Scotland has held for American readers over more than two centuries, Adam Smith’s America shows how Smith continues to be a vehicle for articulating perennial moral and political anxieties about modern capitalism.

Author : Richard Alan Ryerson
Genre : History
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN : 9781421419237
Type book : PDF, Epub, Kindle and Mobi
File Download : 571 page
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This trailblazing study explores Adams’s political thought across his entire career in law and public service. Winner of the Sally and Morris Lasky Prize of The Center for Political History Lebanon Velley College Scholars have examined John Adams’s writings and beliefs for generations, but no one has brought such impressive credentials to the task as Richard Alan Ryerson in John Adams’s Republic. The editor-in-chief of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Adams Papers project for nearly two decades, Ryerson offers readers of this magisterial book a fresh, firmly grounded account of Adams’s political thought and its development. Of all the founding fathers, Ryerson argues, John Adams may have worried the most about the problem of social jealousy and political conflict in the new republic. Ryerson explains how these concerns, coupled with Adams’s concept of executive authority and his fear of aristocracy, deeply influenced his political mindset. He weaves together a close analysis of Adams’s public writings, a comprehensive chronological narrative beginning in the 1760s, and an exploration of the second president’s private diary, manuscript autobiography, and personal and family letters, revealing Adams’s most intimate political thoughts across six decades. How, Adams asked, could a self-governing country counter the natural power and influence of wealthy elites and their friends in government? Ryerson argues that he came to believe a strong executive could hold at bay the aristocratic forces that posed the most serious dangers to a republican society. The first study ever published to closely examine all of Adams’s political writings, from his youth to his long retirement, John Adams’s Republic should appeal to everyone who seeks to know more about America’s first major political theorist.

Author : Richard B. Bernstein
Genre : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN : 9780199740239
Type book : PDF, Epub, Kindle and Mobi
File Download : 369 page
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This book, a free-standing companion to Bernstein's 2003 biography Thomas Jefferson, responds to the public curiosity about Adams, his life, and his work for those intrigued by popular-culture portrayals of Adams in the Broadway musical 1776 and the HBO television miniseries John Adams. As with Bernstein's other work (e.g., The Founding Fathers: A Very Short Introduction), it is a clear, scholarly, concise, well-written, and well-researchedaccount of Adams's life, career, and thought addressing anyone seeking to learn more about him.

Author : Marianne Holdzkom
Genre : History
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN : 9781476683430
Type book : PDF, Epub, Kindle and Mobi
File Download : 252 page
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Has John Adams been forgotten? He is the only Founding Father without a major memorial in the nation's capital. When he lamented that "monuments will never be erected to me," he predicted as much. His pessimism was understandable, but it was unjustified: Adams has since been portrayed in numerous biographies, plays, musicals, poems, novels, and television shows. This is the first comprehensive overview of John Adams as he appears in scholarship and in popular culture. The second president is one-dimensional at times, and perhaps best known to the public as "obnoxious and disliked," but he is always fascinating. The varied ways in which biographers and artists represented Adams provide a glimpse into his character. These portrayals also provide insight into the various ways in which people continue to find meaning in the American Revolution and its aftermath.

Author : Arthur Scherr
Genre : History
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN : 9798216106821
Type book : PDF, Epub, Kindle and Mobi
File Download : 319 page
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Providing the first full investigation of second U.S. president John Adams' attitudes toward slavery, blacks, and the Haitian Revolution, this iconoclastic study illuminates the inner and outer worlds of Adams for scholars and general readers. John Adams was a Founding Father of the United States who not only played a key role in laying the foundation of the nation but is also highly regarded as a great speaker, thinker, lawyer, revolutionary, diplomat, vice president, and president. But was Adams an opponent of slavery and a believer in racial equality? The historical evidence points to the contrary. This book is the first to discuss at any length John Adams's views on race, slavery, and slavery extension by examining his writings, politics, and diplomacy. Historian Arthur Scherr, an expert who is uniquely knowledgeable about Adams's views on slavery, race, and the Haitian Revolution, reveals Adams's attitudes toward slavery and race in and out of office, spotlighting his views on slavery during the American Revolution, his perspective regarding race as vice president and president of the United States, and his opinions in retirement. Readers will be able to form their opinions based on factual documentation of Adams's statements and actions regarding the key events involving slavery and race during this period: the gradual emancipation of slaves; U.S. aid to Haiti, the only black-governed nation in the world, and to its Governor-General Toussaint Louverture in gaining its independence; and the U.S. government's decision to permit slavery in new states and territories formed from public lands such as the Old Northwest and the Louisiana Purchase.

Author : Colin Nicolson
Genre : History
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN : 9781351767422
Type book : PDF, Epub, Kindle and Mobi
File Download : 236 page
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Imaginary Friendship is the first in-depth study of the onset of the American Revolution through the prism of friendship, focusing on future US president John Adams and leading Loyalist Jonathan Sewall. The book is part biography, revealing how they shaped each other’s progress, and part political history, exploring their intriguing dangerous quest to clean up colonial politics. Literary history examines the personal dimension of discourse, resolving how Adams’s presumption of Sewall’s authorship of the Loyalist tracts Massachusettensis influenced his own magnum opus, Novanglus. The mystery is not why Adams presumed Sewall was his adversary in 1775 but why he was impelled to answer him.

Author : Wendell Bird
Genre : History
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN : 9780674243880
Type book : PDF, Epub, Kindle and Mobi
File Download : 561 page
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In the first complete account of prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts, dozens of previously unknown cases come to light, revealing the lengths to which the John Adams administration went in order to criminalize dissent. The campaign to prosecute dissenting Americans under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 ignited the first battle over the Bill of Rights. Fearing destructive criticism and “domestic treachery” by Republicans, the administration of John Adams led a determined effort to safeguard the young republic by suppressing the opposition. The acts gave the president unlimited discretion to deport noncitizens and made it a crime to criticize the president, Congress, or the federal government. In this definitive account, Wendell Bird goes back to the original federal court records and the papers of Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and finds that the administration’s zeal was far greater than historians have recognized. Indeed, there were twice as many prosecutions and planned deportations as previously believed. The government went after local politicians, raisers of liberty poles, and even tavern drunks but most often targeted Republican newspaper editors, including Benjamin Franklin’s grandson. Those found guilty were sent to prison or fined and sometimes forced to sell their property to survive. The Federalists’ support of laws to prosecute political opponents and opposition newspapers ultimately contributed to the collapse of the party and left a large stain on their record. The Alien and Sedition Acts launched a foundational debate on press freedom, freedom of speech, and the legitimacy of opposition politics. The result was widespread revulsion over the government’s attempt to deprive Americans of their hard-won liberties. Criminal Dissent is a potent reminder of just how fundamental those rights are to a stable democracy.

Author : Robert M. S. McDonald
Genre : History
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN : 9780813945002
Type book : PDF, Epub, Kindle and Mobi
File Download : 366 page
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The America of the early republic was built on an experiment, a hopeful prophecy that would only be fulfilled if an enlightened people could find its way through its past and into a future. Americans recognized that its promises would only be fully redeemed at a future date. In Revolutionary Prophecies, renowned historians Robert M. S. McDonald and Peter S. Onuf summon a diverse cast of characters from the founding generation—all of whom, in different ways, reveal how their understanding of the past and present shaped hopes, ambitions, and anxieties for or about the future. The essays in this wide-ranging volume explore the historical consciousness of Americans caught up in the Revolution and its aftermath. By focusing on how various individuals and groups envisioned their future, the contributors show that revolutionary Americans knew they were making choices that would redirect the "course of human events." Looking at prominent leaders such as Washington, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, and Monroe, as well as more common people, from backcountry rebels and American Indians to printer Isaiah Thomas, the authors illuminate the range and complexity of the ways in which men and women of the founding generation imagined their future—and made our history.