A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.86 (596 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B071VW98Q8 |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 417 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-07-26 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
In A Sovereign People, her brilliant new political history of the 1790s, the acclaimed historian Carol Berkin argues that the young nation would not have survived absent the interventions of the Federalists, above all Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams. In power throughout the decade, they faced four successive crises of sovereignty. In each instance the Federalists demonstrated the necessity of the federal government established by the Constitution, and by decade's end the American people understood that without an "energetic government", there could be no United States. He was right to be concerned: The existence of the new nation was anything but secure. The XYZ Affair involved foreign threats intended to draw the United States into a European war. As Berkin ultimately reveals, while the Revolution freed the states and the Constitution linked them as never before, it was the Federalists who transformed them into an enduring nation.. Without the support of the American people, after all, the Constitution was only a piece of paper. The final crisis was self-inflicted, the result of the Federalists' desire
Mark Lu said Berkin argues that men like Washington, Hamilton and Adams who called themselves Federalists. In A Sovereign People, Carol Berkin has produced a timely -- and very readable -- antidote to a modern attitude in America in which she says we have seen, "an ebbing of confidence in government's capacity to play a positive role," and in which nationalism, "has become closely associated with a call for limited government, and patriotism often takes the form of jingoism and empty chauvinism."While many today who call for limited government often invoke the Founding Fathers to support their posit