Saturday, March 20, 2004

Forrest McDonald.
E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the American Republic, 1776–1790, Second Edition.
Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1979.

This book surveys economic conditions in the 1780s of the individual States and of Congress following the termination of the War for American Independence, and the conflict between "republicans" (who favored strong State soverignty and a week Union) versus "nationalists" (who recognized the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederations and then developed and supported adoption of the Constitution of 1787 - they are now known as the Federalists). Some of the crises of the 1780s included public debt problems of the States and Congress, the anarchic condition of State laws regarding interstate commerce, and whatever other factors led to public order breakdowns, most prominent of which was Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts. McDonald's comments on the attendees of the Constitutional Convention during the Summer of 1787 really bring them down to earth. On the other hand, he ends the book with a grand paragraph:

That the American Revolution and the American people - of all the world's peoples the most materialistic and most vulgar and least disciplined - should have produced a governmental system adequate to check the very forces they unleashed; this was the miracle of the age, and of the succeeding age, and of all ages to come. The French, the Russians, the Italians, the Germans, all the planet's peples in their turn, would become so unrestrained as to loose contact with sanity. The Americans might have suffered a similar history, had they followed the lead of those who, in 1787 and 1788, spoke in the name of the people and of popular "rights." But there were giants in the earth in those days, and they spoke in the name of the nation, and the people followed them. As a result, the Americans were, despite themselves, doomed forever to be free.

I find this book an excellent supplement to:

both of which I found a little weak regarding events during the 1780s between the end of the War and the 1787 Consititution.

Monday, March 08, 2004

Peter Brown (aka Peter Robert Lamont Brown).
The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750.
New York & London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989.
(Originally published: London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 1971.)