Where does all this originate? In American Revolutions, Alan Taylor offers a surprising answer: the struggle for independence itself. Until well into the 20th century, Southern blacks who wanted to exercise the right to vote faced violent retribution from the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups. The 19th century saw fistfights in Congress and riots at election time in major American cities. (That ‘respectable’ and ‘Nixon’ can be included in the same sentence illustrates how far our political standards have evolved since the 1970s.) Violence isn’t unknown in American political history. Not to mention more respectable types such as Richard Nixon, whose ‘Southern strategy’ offered a blueprint for mobilising white resentment over the gains of the Civil Rights movement. Among Trump’s predecessors are the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings of the 1850s, white supremacist politicians of the Jim Crow era, and more recent hucksters and demagogues including Joe McCarthy and George Wallace. But precursors to Trump do exist, candidates who struck electoral gold by appealing to exaggerated fears, real grievances and visceral prejudices. The racism, xenophobia and violence of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is widely seen as an aberration, as if reasoned debate had been the default mode of American politics. But it was Jefferson’s expansive “empire of liberty” that carried the revolution forward, propelling white settlement and slavery west, preparing the ground for a new conflagration.American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 Assuming the mantle of “We the People,” the advocates of national power ratified the new frame of government.
The discord smoldering within the fragile new nation called forth a movement to concentrate power through a Federal Constitution.
The war exploded in set battles like Saratoga and Yorktown and spread through continuing frontier violence. When war erupted, Patriot crowds harassed Loyalists and nonpartisans into compliance with their cause. Emerging from the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, the revolution pivoted on western expansion as well as seaboard resistance to British taxes. The American Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain’s colonies, fueled by local conditions and resistant to control. Alan Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history.
The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the nation its democratic framework. Taylor conveys this sprawling continental history with economy, clarity, and vividness.”-Brendan Simms, Wall Street Journal History Forum: American Revolutions with Alan Taylor
0 kommentar(er)
