History.

This A-to-Z encyclopedia surveys the history, meaning, and enduring impact of the Declaration of Independence by explaining its contents and concepts, profiling the Founding Fathers, and detailing depictions of the Declaration in art, music, and literature. A comprehensive resource for understanding all aspects of the Declaration of Independence, which marked the formal beginning of the colonies' march toward the creation of the United States of America, this encyclopedia contains more than 200 entries examining various facets of the Declaration of Independence and its enduring impact on American law, politics, and culture. It details key concepts, principles, and intellectual influences that informed the creation of the document, reviews charges leveled in the Declaration against the British crown, summarizes the events of the first and second Continental Congresses, profiles influential architects and signers of the Declaration, discusses existing copies of the Declaration, explains the document's influence on other governments/nations, covers historic sites related to the document, and discusses depictions of the document and its architects in American art, music, and literature over time.

The Magna Carta was an astonishing document in its time. As the first document to limit the power of the British monarchy, it also protected the rights of the individual. The Magna Carta's impact reverberated throughout history and was on the minds of the American colonists as they prepared to fight England. They believed that their rights, established by the Magna Carta, had been stripped from them by their mother country. This book explains what was happening in England in 1215 when the Magna Carta was forced into the hands of King John. Readers will come to understand how the Magna Carta is still relevant to our nation and world.

The Founding Fathers drew inspiration heavily from other countries’ comparable documents, especially the Magna Carta, which limited the power of the English king. This prospect appealed to the American colonists, who worked key ideas from the Magna Carta into their new founding documents. Through detailed main text enhanced with informative graphic organizers and engaging fact boxes, readers learn how influential the Magna Carta was on the government of what is now the United States. In addition, sidebars and discussion questions challenge readers to think more deeply about this essential social studies topic.

How and why countries become democracies remain intriguing questions. This innovative volume provides a theoretically informed comparative investigation of the links between revolutions, totalitarianism and democracy. It will appeal to those interested in the relationship between history and democracy and the implications for the understanding of democracy today.

In this book top scholars analyse the historic and contemporary influence of Magna Carta, challenging its common myths.

How do the justices of a nation’s highest court arrive at their decisions? In the context of the US Supreme Court, the answer to this question is well established: justices seek to enshrine policy preferences in their decisions, but they do so in a manner consistent with ‘the law’ and in recognition that they are members of an institution with defined expectations and constraints. In other words, a justice’s behaviour is a function of motives, means, and opportunities. Using Norway as a case study, this book shows that these forces are not peculiar to the decisional behaviour of American justices. Employing a modified attitudinal model, Grendstad, Shaffer and Waltenburg establish that the preferences of Norway’s justices are related to their decisions. Consequently, the authors show how an understanding of judicial behaviour developed and most fully tested in the American judicial system is transportable to the courts of other countries.

First published in 1964, this series of essays gives important insight into American history by one who could trace American development in terms of the Christian ideas which gave it direction. These essays will greatly alter your understanding of, and appreciation for, American history. Topics discussed include: the legal issues behind the War of Independence; sovereignty as a theological tenet foreign to colonial political thought and the Constitution; the desire for land as a consequence of the belief in .inheriting the land" as a future blessing, not an immediate economic asset; federalism's localism as an inheritance of feudalism; the local control of property as a guarantee of liberty; why federal elections were long considered of less importance than local politics; how early American ideas attributed to democratic thought were based on religious ideals of communion and community; and the absurdity of a mathematical concept of equality being applied to people.

In mid-nineteenth-century Mexico, garrisons, town councils, state legislatures, and an array of political actors, groups, and communities began aggressively petitioning the government at both local and national levels to address their grievances. Often viewed as a revolt or a coup d'état, these pronunciamientos were actually a complex form of insurrectionary action that relied first on the proclamation and circulation of a plan that listed the petitioners' demands and then on endorsement by copycat pronunciamientos that forced the authorities, be they national or regional, to the negotiating table. In Independent Mexico, Will Fowler provides a comprehensive overview of the pronunciamiento practice following the Plan of Iguala. This fourth and final installment in, and culmination of, a larger exploration of the pronunciamiento highlights the extent to which this model of political contestation evolved. The result of more than three decades of pronunciamiento politics was the bloody Civil War of the Reforma (1858-60) and the ensuing French Intervention (1862-67). Given the frequency and importance of the pronunciamiento, this book is also a concise political history of independent Mexico.