Tag: Thomas Jefferson

David Blight on Frederick Douglass: 'I call him beautifully human' Read more Harvard professor Jill Lepore chooses to begin her history of the United States with that quotation, and much of the worst of America, from lynching to brutality to Native Americans, is rightly here. Is it possible for the US – or any nation – to be ruled by reason and choice? This is, therefore, a history of political equality which necessarily becomes primarily a political history. The question nearly sundered the colonies from all government. Like so many Americans, Lepore asks that question and another: “By what right are we ruled?” Her aims are ambitious. Finally, “this book aims to be something else, too – an explanation of the nature of the past.” “History isn’t only a subject,” Lepore writes. Lepore offers an unabashedly liberal perspective, but seeks to be scrupulously fair to the modern conservative movement American politics has always been robust, but technology and better methods of analysis have magnified the impact. She offers an unabashedly liberal perspective, but seeks to be scrupulously fair to the modern conservative movement, devoting numerous pages to its intellectual origins as well as to its nativist and conspiratorial elements. This is a history for the 21st century, far more inclusive than the standard histories of the past. Lincoln did not say merely that we “can” save the country, but that we “shall”.

Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. [Get On Politics delivered to your inbox.] Late Thursday afternoon, he revoked her military transport for a secret trip to Afghanistan — a visit to a war zone that Mr. Trump derided as a “public relations event.” He suggested Ms. Pelosi, third in line for the presidency, fly commercial. Now, none of the fighting over flights gets the country any closer to ending a government shutdown that’s crippling the finances of 800,000 federal workers and starting to have economic impacts far bigger than even the White House anticipated. Dozens of Democrats spent months campaigning against supporting Ms. Pelosi as speaker. Ms. Pelosi kept Representative Kathleen Rice’s name off the list of suggested members for the Judiciary Committee, a powerful spot that will be at the center of investigations into Mr. Trump — and any possible impeachment. Divided government, a special counsel investigation, the longest government shutdown in history, the biggest Democratic primary field in decades, secretive meetings with Russia — at this point in the Trump administration, we’ve written “unprecedented” so much that it’s become a cliché. This is, “Wait, can they do that?” Our first topic: Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking President Trump to scrap or delay his State of the Union address. After George Washington gave the first address on Jan. 8, 1790, in New York, the practiced continued for about a decade. Thanks for reading.

Architecture can save the world, or so sayeth the members of a panel discussion hosted by the design firm Henning Larsen recently. Notions veered from public-private partnerships to the fringes of socialism as panelists discussed the need for architects to be given greater control over their projects and even seats of political power. “What seems to be missing most, from my perspective, is architecture being well represented in government,” said Federico Negro, head of design at WeWork. “Most of our politicians are either coming from legal backgrounds or managing backgrounds or other types of backgrounds that don’t necessarily have the connection nor the expertise in understanding how cities function or how they should function. “We keep waiting for someone to magically invent a vision for our cities that’s going to be in line with what we all think is right, and that’s not going to come from those places,” he added. “It just won’t.” Moderator Paul Goldberger, an architecture critic and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, concurred, pointing out that the last president with an architecture background was Thomas Jefferson, who designed his own home at Monticello. During the event, which was attended by Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark and Anders Samuelsen, the country’s foreign minister, the main thrust of the conversation was that cities — especially conduits for global capital, such as New York — are developing in ways that are increasingly inequitable and therefore less sustainable. However, he argues that technology and planning could be used to build more responsibly. “In Denmark, people are building buildings, in New York, people are building spreadsheets,” he said. “In Scandinavia,” he said, “We have a long tradition of debating dialogue that makes people have to somehow be part of the greater good.”

While the nation was following the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, I was thinking of what I learned about politics and the Supreme Court in writing my latest. Consider John Rutledge, arguably the second chief justice. Rutledge had spoken against Jay’s Treaty, a controversial agreement with Britain that the Federalist party supported. He campaigned for John Adams for president and gave charges to grand juries that were (Federalist) political speeches. After the first Republican party (now the Democrats) swept Congress and the White House in the elections of 1800, Chase hung by a thread. The House impeached him at the end of Thomas Jefferson’s first term, and he was tried by the Senate in February 1805. Lame-duck veep Aaron Burr presided, despite having been indicted for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel. In 1828 he ran for governor against Van Buren, who creamed him, so he stayed on as associate justice. John Marshall died that summer. When a new Senate, with a Democratic majority, met in December, Taney was confirmed as chief justice.

The US celebrated the 242nd anniversary of its independence this week, roiled by fallout from the Trump administration’s family-separations policy at the same time it considers long-simmering questions over addressing its racial history and confronts the world with an isolationist trade policy. At heart of the debate is the question of identity—of us and them. Why is identity so often a source of conflict? Jelani Cobb, a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, suggests the answer goes all the way back to founding of the republic. “The question of ‘We, the people’ has been our ongoing and unresolved conflict in American identity,” Cobb said at a Chautauqua Institute talk in western New York. “We’ve never sufficiently understood and defined who is included in that term.” Ever since Thomas Jefferson’s passage famously decrying the transatlantic slave trade in the Declaration of Independence was cut, American democracy has been characterized by a boom-and-bust cycle, Cobb said. “An expanding concept of ‘we,’” followed by “a contracting, fearful idea of who ‘we’ should be.” Identity politics—and a cycle of progress, followed by backlash— have shaped the course of US history. The Civil War was followed by Reconstruction—in which more than 2,000 African-Americans were elected to political office—which was followed by the repressive Jim Crow era. The US has vacillated between opening its borders to immigrants and lashing out against them, from an 1882 law that forbade Chinese immigrants from entering to turning away boats filled with Jewish refugees during World War II. And the past 10 years have seen both the election of the first black US president and the ensuing rise of political movements centered on the idea that the white identity is under threat.

Long before the revolution, there were two Americas, implicitly at odds. In the US, all history is contemporary history and its rhetoric is integral to the American experiment. Behold, America tells a story of outrageous bombast braided with the most violent arguments about capitalism, democracy and race. The American dream was not to be found, for instance, on the lips of Woodrow Wilson, a great Democrat idealist. By the 1940s, the promises of the American dream were not what they were, if they ever had been. By the second world war, that faltering dream had shrunk to a vague, intermittent corrective within the national conversation whenever the forces of inequality and oligarchy seemed too oppressive to ordinary Americans. The dark history of 'America first' Read more For more than a decade, once the war was over, it seemed as if the visceral side of the American psyche had overwhelmed its softer, more humane and idealistic alter ego. A society made of words had not forgotten the power and consolations of language. Behold, America is an enthralling book, almost a primer for the ferocious dialectic of US politics, inspired by the events of 2015/16. • Behold, America by Sarah Churchwell is published by Bloomsbury (£20).