Über den Autor
Jack P. Greene is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, where he founded the Program in Atlantic History and Culture. He is coeditor, with Philip D. Morgan, of Atlantic History: A Critical Reappraisal and the author of Interpreting Early America: mehr anzeigen Historiographical Essays (Virginia). weniger anzeigen
Werke von Jack P. Greene
Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (1988) 207 Exemplare
Colonies to Nation, 1763-1789: A Documentary History of the American Revolution (1967) 123 Exemplare
Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (1983) — Herausgeber — 108 Exemplare
The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity From 1492 to 1800 (1993) 50 Exemplare
Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United… (1899) 50 Exemplare
The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (1963) 45 Exemplare
The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (New Histories of American Law) (2010) 36 Exemplare
Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (1992) 24 Exemplare
Encyclopedia of American Political History : Studies of the Principal Movements and Ideas (3 volumes) (1984) 22 Exemplare
Landon Carter: An Inquiry into the Personal Values and Social Imperatives of the Eighteenth-Century (1965) 17 Exemplare
Exploring the Bounds of Liberty: Political Writings of Colonial British America from the Glorious Revolution to the… (2018) 13 Exemplare
Creating the British Atlantic : essays on transplantation, adaptation, and continuity (2013) 11 Exemplare
Money, Trade, and Power : The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society (2001) 9 Exemplare
Society, freedom, and conscience : the American Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York (1977) 7 Exemplare
The South's Role in the Creation of the Bill of Rights: Essays (Chancellor's Symposium Series) (1991) 7 Exemplare
The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, 1689-1763 (Goldentree Bibliographies in American History) (1969) 6 Exemplare
Commemoration ceremony in honor of the two hundredth anniversary of the First Continental Congress in the United… (1975) 5 Exemplare
The nature of colony constitutions; two pamphlets on the Wilkes fund controversy in South Carolina (1970) 4 Exemplare
All men are created equal : some reflections on the character of the American revolution : an inaugural lecture (1976) 2 Exemplare
The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall 1752–1778 — Herausgeber — 1 Exemplar
The Atlantic World in the Early Modern Era: Selected Essays of Professor Jack Greene in History 1 Exemplar
Selling a New World — Herausgeber — 1 Exemplar
The British revolution in America 1 Exemplar
Zugehörige Werke
Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the New World, 1500-1820 (2002) — Einführung; Mitwirkender — 37 Exemplare
An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry During the American Revolution (Perspectives on the American Revolution) (1985) — Mitwirkender — 17 Exemplare
Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World (2004) — Mitwirkender — 7 Exemplare
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Wissenswertes
- Rechtmäßiger Name
- Greene, Jack Philip
- Geburtstag
- 1931-08-12
- Geschlecht
- male
- Nationalität
- USA
- Geburtsort
- Lafayette, Indiana, USA
- Ausbildung
- Duke University (Ph.D|1956)
Indiana University (MA|1952)
University of North Carolina (BA|1951) - Berufe
- professor
historian - Organisationen
- Johns Hopkins University
University of California, Irvine - Preise und Auszeichnungen
- American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction (2007)
Fellow, American Philosophical Society (1992)
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) - Kurzbiographie
- Jack P. Greene (1931-)
Jack was born in 1931 in Lafayette, Indiana, and received his PhD from Duke University in 1956. He was at the University of Michigan in 1965 and joined the Department of History in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences in 1966.
Greene spent most his career as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University’s history department. In 1990-92, he was a Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and he has been a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, Oxford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Ecole des Haute Etudes en Science Sociale, University of Richmond, Michigan State University, and the Freie Universitat de Berlin, and has held fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others.
He received his first fellowship award at the National Humanities center during 1987-1988.
During his career, Greene, whose focus is early American history, published 16 books and trained more than 75 graduate students. He was honored in 2000 with a three-day scholarly conference of former students from his more than 35 years at Hopkins.
Greene retired in 2005 and is currently an Invited Research Scholar at the John Carter Brown Library and became the 'Andrew W. Mellon' Professor Emeritus in the Humanities in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University.
In May 2009 he was once again honored by National Humanities Center and selected as one of 33 fellows for the 2009-2010 academic year.
Greene's project st this time was titled The British Debate on American Colonial Resistance, 1760-1783. He is credited with being one of the seminal figures in the field of Atlantic history, the study of the continents and islands surrounding the Atlantic basin during the early modern period and the demographic, economic, and political exchanges among them, exchanges that resulted in the formation of new societies in the Americas, the emergence of Europe as a transoceanic imperial center, the development of the transatlantic slave trade, and the colonization of parts of Africa.
Books
Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (October 30, 1988)
The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (New Histories of American Law) (October 25, 2010)
The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity From 1492 to 1800 (February 26, 1997)
The Quest For Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689-1776 (January 17, 1972)
Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States,... (August 1, 2008)
Understanding the American Revolution: Issues and Actors (October 22, 1995)
Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (November 22, 1992)
Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (August 22, 1994)
Political Life in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (The Foundations of America) (January 1, 1987)
Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (April 22, 1996)
American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century 1689-1763 (June 1, 1969)
Great Britain and the American colonies, 1606-1763 (January 1, 1970)
Preachers & politicians: Two essays on the origins of the American Revolution (January 1, 1977)
Mitglieder
Rezensionen
The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution von Jack P. Greene
A good overview of the argument that legal/constitutional debates were at the heart of the American Revolution.
In their introduction, Philip D. Morang and Jack P. Greene write, “Atlantic history is an analytic construct and an explicit category of historical analysis that historians have devised to help them organize the study of some of the most important developments of the early modern era: the emergence in the fifteenth century and the subsequent growth of the Atlantic basin as a site for demographic, economic, social, cultural, and other forms of exchange among and within the four continents surrounding the Atlantic Ocean – Europe, Africa, South America, and North America – and all the islands adjacent to those continents and in that ocean” (pg. 3). They continue, “Pan-Atlantic webs of association linked people, objects, and beliefs across and within the region. Though always fragmented, the early modern Atlantic world came to be increasingly united through a density and variety of connections” (pg. 8). Furthermore, “borderland areas, transfrontier regions, places where natives and newcomers collided and often none ruled, formed another vector of Atlantic history. Such places gave rise to entangled histories” (pg. 13).
Joyce E. Chaplin writes, “The history of the Atlantic’s contemporary meanings occurred in three stages. In the first, Europeans thought of the Atlantic as a geographic space to get across, a rather belated idea that contradicted an ancient suspicion that the ocean was not a real space at all. In the second stage, the peoples in the post-Columbian countries that faced the Atlantic thought of that ocean as a space in which to make or imagine physical connections, both among different places and among different natural forces. In the last stage, people emphasized the Atlantic’s value as a route elsewhere, especially when the Pacific became a new destination for them” (pg. 36).
Trevor Burnard writes, “Greater British and Atlantic history developed together at roughly the same time (the early 1970s) and at least partly for the same reasons, including a desire to move away from what was perceived as the increasingly narrow parochialism of studies of small British or American towns and parishes, and a concomitant insistence that British history had been distinct from European history because of the particular importance of imperial expansion in British history and in British self-definition” (pg. 115). He argues, “Perhaps the single most important advance attributable to the Atlantic perspective has been its encouragement of the incorporation of Africans and Native Americans into the making of colonial British America” (pg. 121). An additional advantage of this study “is that it redresses American and British exceptionalism. To study the British Atlantic without recognizing that British actions were shaped and constrained by the actions of other imperial polities, notably the Spanish and French empires, is no longer intellectually sustainable” (pg. 124).
Amy Turner Bushnell writes, “The areas of neo-European mastery in the Americas were small and slow-growing: until the late nineteenth century more than half of the habitable hemisphere (defined as everything this side of the permanent frost line) remained under indigenous control. Meanwhile, between the island-like settler enclaves and the Indian nations’ vast territories, closed to outsiders, lay the frontiers, where neo-European and Indian societies met on relatively even terms, neither side having a monopoly of violence and each side trying to change the other for the better” (pg. 191). She argues, “Indigenous peoples shaped the course of Atlantic history in the Americas by subordination, interaction, or opposition. From the perspective of colonial history, they can be divided into three categories. In the first group were the incorporated peoples inside of empire, occupying niches in colonial encounters and peripheries. In the second group were the peoples on the frontiers of empire, reconciled or contested, the difference being that on a reconciled frontier, pacified natives interacted with pacified missionaries, traders, and soldiers, both sides achieving their ends without resorting to violence, whereas on a contested ground, negotiation was apt to give way to armed conflict” (pg. 194). Finally, “The third group consisted of the autonomous peoples outside of empire, opposing the neo-Europeans with their own weapons” (pg. 194).
Philip D. Morgan argues, “A voluntary partnership best captures the relationship between African traders and rulers and European merchants and ship captains. Africans called the tune in many aspects of this relationship, even if overall Europeans benefited the most from their exchanges” (pg. 225). He continues, “the volume of Atlantic trade, no matter how rapidly it was growing, was not large enough to have transformed Africa’s economy, although arguably the social and political effects of Atlantic integration were more dramatic than the economic – and more negative than positive. But even so, much of the continent’s development continued along lines dictated by its own traditions and imperatives” (pg. 232). Morgan concludes, “Africa was a full partner in the merging Atlantic world, but much of the continent was unaffected by Atlantic influences and, indeed, was oriented in other directions. In the early modern era, Africans were more important to the Atlantic world than the Atlantic world was to Africans” (pg. 241).
Carla Rahn Phillips argues, “Although the concept of an Atlantic world remains useful for understanding the nineteenth century and beyond, it was a far different Atlantic world from the one bracketed at one end by the fifteenth-century voyages of exploration and at the other end by the era of the Atlantic revolutions” (pg. 250). Jack P. Greene writes, “While the emergence of the Atlantic perspective has served to undermine traditional national frameworks, the multicultural turn has thus largely functioned to reinforce them” (pg. 301). He continues, “The new interest in the non-English colonial histories of areas in the United States points logically in the direction of the desirability of a broad hemispheric perspective that, by promoting broad comparative analysis across both the South and North American hemispheres and their adjacent islands, might actually enhance the prospects for transcending national frameworks. Moreover, a hemispheric perspective also seems to offer better prospects for achieving one of the unfulfilled promises of the Atlantic perspective, the possibility of drawing conclusions” (pg. 301). He cautions, “the primary obstacle to the development of a hemispheric perspective is, of course, the dense historiographies that, especially in recent decades, have emerged in the study of all areas of the Americas, historiographies that require enormous time and energy to master” (pg. 301).… (mehr)
Joyce E. Chaplin writes, “The history of the Atlantic’s contemporary meanings occurred in three stages. In the first, Europeans thought of the Atlantic as a geographic space to get across, a rather belated idea that contradicted an ancient suspicion that the ocean was not a real space at all. In the second stage, the peoples in the post-Columbian countries that faced the Atlantic thought of that ocean as a space in which to make or imagine physical connections, both among different places and among different natural forces. In the last stage, people emphasized the Atlantic’s value as a route elsewhere, especially when the Pacific became a new destination for them” (pg. 36).
Trevor Burnard writes, “Greater British and Atlantic history developed together at roughly the same time (the early 1970s) and at least partly for the same reasons, including a desire to move away from what was perceived as the increasingly narrow parochialism of studies of small British or American towns and parishes, and a concomitant insistence that British history had been distinct from European history because of the particular importance of imperial expansion in British history and in British self-definition” (pg. 115). He argues, “Perhaps the single most important advance attributable to the Atlantic perspective has been its encouragement of the incorporation of Africans and Native Americans into the making of colonial British America” (pg. 121). An additional advantage of this study “is that it redresses American and British exceptionalism. To study the British Atlantic without recognizing that British actions were shaped and constrained by the actions of other imperial polities, notably the Spanish and French empires, is no longer intellectually sustainable” (pg. 124).
Amy Turner Bushnell writes, “The areas of neo-European mastery in the Americas were small and slow-growing: until the late nineteenth century more than half of the habitable hemisphere (defined as everything this side of the permanent frost line) remained under indigenous control. Meanwhile, between the island-like settler enclaves and the Indian nations’ vast territories, closed to outsiders, lay the frontiers, where neo-European and Indian societies met on relatively even terms, neither side having a monopoly of violence and each side trying to change the other for the better” (pg. 191). She argues, “Indigenous peoples shaped the course of Atlantic history in the Americas by subordination, interaction, or opposition. From the perspective of colonial history, they can be divided into three categories. In the first group were the incorporated peoples inside of empire, occupying niches in colonial encounters and peripheries. In the second group were the peoples on the frontiers of empire, reconciled or contested, the difference being that on a reconciled frontier, pacified natives interacted with pacified missionaries, traders, and soldiers, both sides achieving their ends without resorting to violence, whereas on a contested ground, negotiation was apt to give way to armed conflict” (pg. 194). Finally, “The third group consisted of the autonomous peoples outside of empire, opposing the neo-Europeans with their own weapons” (pg. 194).
Philip D. Morgan argues, “A voluntary partnership best captures the relationship between African traders and rulers and European merchants and ship captains. Africans called the tune in many aspects of this relationship, even if overall Europeans benefited the most from their exchanges” (pg. 225). He continues, “the volume of Atlantic trade, no matter how rapidly it was growing, was not large enough to have transformed Africa’s economy, although arguably the social and political effects of Atlantic integration were more dramatic than the economic – and more negative than positive. But even so, much of the continent’s development continued along lines dictated by its own traditions and imperatives” (pg. 232). Morgan concludes, “Africa was a full partner in the merging Atlantic world, but much of the continent was unaffected by Atlantic influences and, indeed, was oriented in other directions. In the early modern era, Africans were more important to the Atlantic world than the Atlantic world was to Africans” (pg. 241).
Carla Rahn Phillips argues, “Although the concept of an Atlantic world remains useful for understanding the nineteenth century and beyond, it was a far different Atlantic world from the one bracketed at one end by the fifteenth-century voyages of exploration and at the other end by the era of the Atlantic revolutions” (pg. 250). Jack P. Greene writes, “While the emergence of the Atlantic perspective has served to undermine traditional national frameworks, the multicultural turn has thus largely functioned to reinforce them” (pg. 301). He continues, “The new interest in the non-English colonial histories of areas in the United States points logically in the direction of the desirability of a broad hemispheric perspective that, by promoting broad comparative analysis across both the South and North American hemispheres and their adjacent islands, might actually enhance the prospects for transcending national frameworks. Moreover, a hemispheric perspective also seems to offer better prospects for achieving one of the unfulfilled promises of the Atlantic perspective, the possibility of drawing conclusions” (pg. 301). He cautions, “the primary obstacle to the development of a hemispheric perspective is, of course, the dense historiographies that, especially in recent decades, have emerged in the study of all areas of the Americas, historiographies that require enormous time and energy to master” (pg. 301).… (mehr)
Time for a segment of "A moment in obscure history." This time, we're looking at the constitutional dispute that resulted in the American Revolution.
Since sometime in 2009, the Tea Party movement has lead a revival of interest in the US Constitution. Senator Mike Lee summed up why the increased interest of late during the release of his new book, "The Freedom Agenda: Why a Balanced Budget Amendment is Necessary to Restore Constitutional Government": many of our problems today stem from when the "federal government started ignoring those Constitutional boundaries about what Congress is supposed to be doing."
Suddenly, propelled by Glenn Beck, books like The 5000 Year Leap , a right-wing conservative's guide to the making of the federal constitution, "leaped" to the Amazon best seller list (it's now listed at 2,615 overall and the top 100 under "Politics"). While it provides only a simple, somewhat white-washed, and superficial vision of the US Constitution, no amount of increased attention in our federal constitution is too little.
"Where does the Constitution," goes the rallying cry, "give the President and Congress the authority for the laws they are passing?"
Neither the revival, however, nor questioning the constitutionality of the federal laws, is unique in history. In fact, it was a dispute over the constitutionality of a central government's actions that lead to another major event in our country's history: the American Revolution.
"The fruit of half a century of research and reflection, Greene's masterly book restores legal pluralism and constitutional controversy to their proper place among the causes, course, and consequences of the American Revolution." - David Armitage, Harvard University
In his short, and dense, review of the century and a half leading up to the American Revolution, "The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution," Jack P. Greene postulates and examines that evidence that the American revolution did not erupt purely as a simple dispute over "taxation without representation," but rather that such rallying cries emerged after decades of disagreement on who justly had the right to legislate for the American colonies
"Whether the king-in-Parliament, the ultimate source of statute law in Great Britain, could legislate for British colonies overseas was the ostensible question in dispute, but many other related and even deeper legal issues involving the nature of the constitution of the empire and the location of sovereignty within the empire emerged from and were thoroughly canvassed during the debate."
(From Constitutional Origins, p. 1)
It was only after the conflicting opinions of metropolitan Britain and that of the colonists failed to be reconciled that open warfare broke out in 1775, and it was why the decision to broach the topic of and ultimately pursue independence from Great Britain was so cautiously and tentatively pursued. The colonists considered themselves British subjects, citizens, not vassals and secession was not a choice they relished.
They saw themselves as part and partial of the British Empire. Indeed, as one Virginia lawyer at the time phrased it, they might be "subordinate to the Authority of Parliament," but only "in Degree" and "not absolutely so." (p.78). As free men and
"As free-born Britons, the colonists assumed, they could not be subjected to any but what Bland referred to as "a constitutional Subordination" to the parent state."
(From Constitutional Origins p. 78)
The nature of this "constitutional Subordination" was such that the colonists readily accepted the authority of Parliament in certain areas, but balked at the idea of taxation, seeing it as beyond Parliament's authority. "Indeed, considerable evidence suggests that the colonists' strong initial impulse was to exclude Parliament from all jurisdiction over the domestic affairs of the colonies." (p.79) Like our modern idea of the federal government, the states concern themselves with their domestic activities while the federal government's most basic responsibility is national security.
Interestingly, from a historical perspective, we start to see the first signs of federalism in the disputes between the colonies and the home country.
Further,
"[s]o long as Parliament confined its regulations to "restrictions on navigation, commerce, or other external regulations," they reasoned, the '"legislatures of the colonies" would be "left entire"and "the internal government, powers of taxing for its support, and exemption from being taxed without consent, and [all] other immunities which legally belong[ed] to the subjects of each colony agreeable to their own particular constitutions" would thereby, according to the "general principles of the British constitution," remain "secure and untouched.""
Sound familiar? If you hear the foreshadowing of the federalism that would be later inscribed into the US Constitution, there's a reason. It was rooted in the relationship between Great Britain and its far-flung colonies.
If, during the last couple years, you've found yourself at all more interested in the federal constitution and the limitations it places on the federal government, I urge you to look at the role constitutions, and constitutional disputes, played in leading to our own American constitution.
It's a great read, if a bit scholarly, and evidence that whether a law is constitutional is not a new question, but actually may be at the very root of the American experiment and its origins in the American revolution. The American revolution was not, nor is it today, an obscure moment in history, but rooted in obscure legal disputes between the colonies and mother country, long predating the Stamp Acts and the Boston Massacre. It began as a constitutional dispute between the central government in London and the British colonies in America.
Understanding why the colonist went to war, how they got there, and the legal battles that preceded the battlefields can be useful in understanding why the Founders drafted what they did--into the Declaration of Independence and into the federal constitution--and what those words mean to us now, even in the midst of our own constitutional disputes.
Pick up The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution by Jack P. Greene from Cambridge University Press, 2011.
(h/t Patrick Charles, who introduced the book to me)… (mehr)
Since sometime in 2009, the Tea Party movement has lead a revival of interest in the US Constitution. Senator Mike Lee summed up why the increased interest of late during the release of his new book, "The Freedom Agenda: Why a Balanced Budget Amendment is Necessary to Restore Constitutional Government": many of our problems today stem from when the "federal government started ignoring those Constitutional boundaries about what Congress is supposed to be doing."
Suddenly, propelled by Glenn Beck, books like The 5000 Year Leap , a right-wing conservative's guide to the making of the federal constitution, "leaped" to the Amazon best seller list (it's now listed at 2,615 overall and the top 100 under "Politics"). While it provides only a simple, somewhat white-washed, and superficial vision of the US Constitution, no amount of increased attention in our federal constitution is too little.
"Where does the Constitution," goes the rallying cry, "give the President and Congress the authority for the laws they are passing?"
Neither the revival, however, nor questioning the constitutionality of the federal laws, is unique in history. In fact, it was a dispute over the constitutionality of a central government's actions that lead to another major event in our country's history: the American Revolution.
"The fruit of half a century of research and reflection, Greene's masterly book restores legal pluralism and constitutional controversy to their proper place among the causes, course, and consequences of the American Revolution." - David Armitage, Harvard University
In his short, and dense, review of the century and a half leading up to the American Revolution, "The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution," Jack P. Greene postulates and examines that evidence that the American revolution did not erupt purely as a simple dispute over "taxation without representation," but rather that such rallying cries emerged after decades of disagreement on who justly had the right to legislate for the American colonies
"Whether the king-in-Parliament, the ultimate source of statute law in Great Britain, could legislate for British colonies overseas was the ostensible question in dispute, but many other related and even deeper legal issues involving the nature of the constitution of the empire and the location of sovereignty within the empire emerged from and were thoroughly canvassed during the debate."
(From Constitutional Origins, p. 1)
It was only after the conflicting opinions of metropolitan Britain and that of the colonists failed to be reconciled that open warfare broke out in 1775, and it was why the decision to broach the topic of and ultimately pursue independence from Great Britain was so cautiously and tentatively pursued. The colonists considered themselves British subjects, citizens, not vassals and secession was not a choice they relished.
They saw themselves as part and partial of the British Empire. Indeed, as one Virginia lawyer at the time phrased it, they might be "subordinate to the Authority of Parliament," but only "in Degree" and "not absolutely so." (p.78). As free men and
"As free-born Britons, the colonists assumed, they could not be subjected to any but what Bland referred to as "a constitutional Subordination" to the parent state."
(From Constitutional Origins p. 78)
The nature of this "constitutional Subordination" was such that the colonists readily accepted the authority of Parliament in certain areas, but balked at the idea of taxation, seeing it as beyond Parliament's authority. "Indeed, considerable evidence suggests that the colonists' strong initial impulse was to exclude Parliament from all jurisdiction over the domestic affairs of the colonies." (p.79) Like our modern idea of the federal government, the states concern themselves with their domestic activities while the federal government's most basic responsibility is national security.
Interestingly, from a historical perspective, we start to see the first signs of federalism in the disputes between the colonies and the home country.
Further,
"[s]o long as Parliament confined its regulations to "restrictions on navigation, commerce, or other external regulations," they reasoned, the '"legislatures of the colonies" would be "left entire"and "the internal government, powers of taxing for its support, and exemption from being taxed without consent, and [all] other immunities which legally belong[ed] to the subjects of each colony agreeable to their own particular constitutions" would thereby, according to the "general principles of the British constitution," remain "secure and untouched.""
Sound familiar? If you hear the foreshadowing of the federalism that would be later inscribed into the US Constitution, there's a reason. It was rooted in the relationship between Great Britain and its far-flung colonies.
If, during the last couple years, you've found yourself at all more interested in the federal constitution and the limitations it places on the federal government, I urge you to look at the role constitutions, and constitutional disputes, played in leading to our own American constitution.
It's a great read, if a bit scholarly, and evidence that whether a law is constitutional is not a new question, but actually may be at the very root of the American experiment and its origins in the American revolution. The American revolution was not, nor is it today, an obscure moment in history, but rooted in obscure legal disputes between the colonies and mother country, long predating the Stamp Acts and the Boston Massacre. It began as a constitutional dispute between the central government in London and the British colonies in America.
Understanding why the colonist went to war, how they got there, and the legal battles that preceded the battlefields can be useful in understanding why the Founders drafted what they did--into the Declaration of Independence and into the federal constitution--and what those words mean to us now, even in the midst of our own constitutional disputes.
Pick up The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution by Jack P. Greene from Cambridge University Press, 2011.
(h/t Patrick Charles, who introduced the book to me)… (mehr)
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