The second episode of American History Too! focuses on the Constitution of the United States. To help us understand the goings-on down
eighteenth century Philadelphia way, we bring aboard our very own American, and
revolutionary scholar, Jane Judge.
During the podcast we examine why the US even needed a
constitution, and whether it was all an exercise in elites getting richer or
just a way of giving the British the intellectual middle-finger. Malcolm also gets put on the spot regarding
his comments in the last podcast, Jane tells us that Charles Beard is not a man
to be listened to, and Mark argues that this is the first moment in American
History where the axiom of the ‘New World’ is justified. What’s more, we investigate whether
Anti-Federalists were indeed ‘men of little faith’ and why Massachusetts was
the most high-maintenance of all the former colonies.
Finally, we leap forward into the twenty-first century and discuss
the relevance of the second amendment (hello AK-47s) and the legacy of the
Founding Fathers in modern America.
All this and much more on this week’s American History Too!.
Thanks to all of you who listened to the first podcast and we will be
back in two weeks with a discussion of ever-fascinating Andrew Jackson.
Cheers,
Mark & Malcolm
Saul Cornell, ‘Aristocracy Assailed: The
Ideology of Backcountry Anti-Federalism’, Journal
of American History 76 (1990), pp.1148-1172
Cecelia M. Kenyon, ‘Men of Little Faith: The
Anti-Federalists and the Nature of Representative Government’, William and Mary Quarterly, 12 (1955),
pp.3-42
Lance Banning, ‘Republican Ideology and the
Triumph of the Constitution, 1789 to 1793’, William
and Mary Quarterly, 31 (1974), pp.167-188
Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
(New York: Macmillan, 1921 [c1913]) – for full text see
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433080136850;view=1up;seq=1
Pauline Maier,
Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788, (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2010)
Pauline Maier, American scripture : making the Declaration of Independence (New
York: Knopf, 1997)
Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the people the rise of popular sovereignty in England and
America, (New York: Norton, 1988)
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