The First Congress

The First Congress
Author: Fergus M. Bordewich
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2017-02-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1451692110

"The little known story of perhaps the most productive Congress in US history, the First Federal Congress of 1789-1791. The First Congress was the most important in US history, says prizewinning author and historian Fergus Bordewich, because it established how our government would actually function. Had it failed--as many at the time feared it would--it's possible that the United States as we know it would not exist today. The Constitution was a broad set of principles. It was left to the members of the First Congress and President George Washington to create the machinery that would make the government work. Fortunately, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and others less well known today, rose to the occasion. During two years of often fierce political struggle, they passed the first ten amendments to the Constitution; they resolved bitter regional rivalries to choose the site of the new national capital; they set in place the procedure for admitting new states to the union; and much more. But the First Congress also confronted some issues that remain to this day: the conflict between states' rights and the powers of national government; the proper balance between legislative and executive power; the respective roles of the federal and state judiciaries; and funding the central government. Other issues, such as slavery, would fester for decades before being resolved. The First Congress tells the dramatic story of the two remarkable years when Washington, Madison, and their dedicated colleagues struggled to successfully create our government, an achievement that has lasted to the present day."--Publisher website.

Silent Hattie Speaks

Silent Hattie Speaks
Author: Hattie Wyatt Caraway
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 176
Release: 1979-07-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

This Sinfionetta contains the basic ingredients of a Symphony, viz. and Allegro, a Scherzo, a slow movement and a final Allegro. These elements are compressed into a one-movement form and the final Allegro is a recapitulation of the first, albeit with considerable variation. There is also a short fugue, for strings alone, between the opening Allegro and the Scherzo, which consolidates the musical ideas used throughout the piece. This work may be played by a chamber ensemble with a string nonet, for which it was originally written, or with a full orchestral string section.

The Man of the People

The Man of the People
Author: Nathaniel C. Green
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2020-10-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0700629955

Donald Trump’s election has forced the United States to reckon with not only the political power of the presidency, but also how he and his supporters have used the office to advance their shared vision of America: one that is avowedly nationalist, and unrepentantly rooted in nativism and white supremacy. It might be easy to attribute this dark vision, and the presidency’s immense power to reflect and reinforce it, to the singular character of one particular president—but to do so, this book tells us, would be to ignore the critical role the American public played in making the president “the man of the people” in the nation’s earliest decades. Beginning with the public debate over whether to ratify the Constitution in 1787 and concluding with Andrew Jackson’s own contentious presidency, Nathaniel C. Green traces the origins of our conception of the president as the ultimate American: the exemplar of our collective national values, morals, and “character.” The public divisiveness over the presidency in these earliest years, he contends, forged the office into an incomparable symbol of an emerging American nationalism that cast white Americans as dissenters—lovers of liberty who were willing to mobilize against tyranny in all its forms, from foreign governments to black “enemies” and Indian “savages”—even as it fomented partisan division that belied the promise of unity the presidency symbolized. With testimony from private letters, diaries, newspapers, and bills, Green documents the shaping of the disturbingly nationalistic vision that has given the presidency its symbolic power. This argument is about a different time than our own. And yet it shows how this time, so often revered as a mythic “founding era” from which America has precipitously declined, was in fact the birthplace of the president-centered nationalism that still defines the contours of politics to this day. The lessons of The Man of the People contextualize the political turmoil surrounding the presidency today. Never in modern US history have those lessons been more badly needed.