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Charles A. Beard (1874–1948)

Författare till An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States

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Indiana-born Charles A. Beard studied at Oxford, Cornell, and Columbia universities, where he taught history and politics for more than a decade. One of the founders of the New School for Social Research, he also served as director of the Training School for Public Service in New York. A political visa mer scientist whose histories were always written from an economic perspective, Beard was an authority on U.S. politics and government. Yet his great survey history, The Rise of American Civilization, published in 1927, deals with the whole range of human experience-war, imperialism, literature, art, music, religion, the sciences, the press, and women-as well as politics and economics. Collaborating with Beard on this and other books was his wife, Mary Ritter Beard. Charles Beard described their coauthorship as a "division of argument." An able historian in her own right, Mary Ritter Beard took a special interest in the labor movement and feminism, subjects on which she produced several works. The Beards's books are scholarly, well written, and often witty, though sometimes a bit ponderous. Yet they stand the test of time well. Some critics agree that their Basic History can be considered the best one-volume history that has ever been written about the United States. (Bowker Author Biography) visa färre
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(eng) Please do NOT combine this page with any of the various "Charles and Mary Beard" pages (or Charles Beard and anyone else). Single authors should never be combined with multiple authors. Thank you for your help.

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Verk av Charles A. Beard

History of the United States (1921) 143 exemplar
The Republic (1943) 69 exemplar
The Economic Basis of Politics (1934) 50 exemplar
Whither Mankind (1928) — Redaktör — 45 exemplar
The Enduring Federalist (1948) 9 exemplar
American Citizenship (2016) 6 exemplar
The industrial revolution (1901) 6 exemplar
Toward Civilization (1930) 3 exemplar
That Noble Dream 2 exemplar
The Old Deal and the New (1940) 2 exemplar
Our Old World Background (2016) 2 exemplar
A Century of Progress (1933) 2 exemplar
American city government (1974) 1 exemplar
The Navy: Defense or Portent (1932) 1 exemplar

Associerade verk

The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (1956) — Bidragsgivare — 327 exemplar
American Government: Readings and Cases (1977) — Bidragsgivare, vissa utgåvor245 exemplar
The Philosophy of History in Our Time (1959) — Bidragsgivare — 217 exemplar
American Progressivism: A Reader (2008) — Bidragsgivare — 111 exemplar
Ambassadör Dodds dagbok 1933-1938 (1941) — Inledning — 25 exemplar
Sources: Notable Selections in American Government (1996) — Bidragsgivare — 10 exemplar

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Charles Beard thought that an adequate US History book was needed for high school students. So being a historian he wrote one. It was published in 1921 and ends with the 1920 election. While is was intended to be a high school text it would be a good thing to read for most adults in this county. Beard covered the social and economic develop of the United States from it's colonial beginnings. He did not focus on the details of battles and wars as some histories do. If I was to find a fault it would be the light way he passed over some injustices and discrimination that today we find unacceptable. Though he did give the vote for women and the loss of voting rights for blacks in the South good coverage. Beard's writing about the abuses of power and position by the wealthy in the 19th century sound very contemporary. I am glad I read Beard's HIstory of the United States and I recommend it highly. It can be found for free as an e-book on Gutenberg Project and Amazon.… (mer)
 
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MMc009 | Jan 30, 2022 |
Charles Beard was mentioned on The Writers Almanac on NPR on 11-27-2013. I am reading it and it is really making me mad. Contemporary is right! The first chapter is about how the blacks and poor whites were disenfranchised in the South after Reconstruction. It sound so much like the voter suppression of today. Next chapter is about the railroads and other industrialists who got millions of public assets for them selves. Including millions of acres of public land granted to them by their cronies in Congress. Again so much like right now.
… (mer)
 
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MMc009 | Jan 30, 2022 |
My rating is probably partially the result of the fact that the copy I read, the Kindle eBook copy, was horribly formatted. It was a straight-up scan, with footnotes mixed directly into the text and no spacing between chapter titles, subsections and the text itself. It was very difficult to read, on top of the material itself just being terribly dry and horribly organized. The author addressed different topics in a list format, turning entire chapters into something akin to encyclopedia entries. He would have been better off addressing each state in turn, in a flowing, linear narrative.

As for what he proposes, it's very interesting and it's a take on American history that I haven't seen before, not that I'm particularly well read in American history. Every course I've taken up to now has been on Middle Eastern and South Asian history. It is very unfortunate that my first intro to college level American history is a graduate historiography course. That being said, I can't tell if his arguments are valid or not, but from the information he presents, it's certainly something worth looking into more, and something that probably has been addressed by later authors. I would not recommend this as a starter book on American constitutional history though.
… (mer)
 
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SGTCat | 5 andra recensioner | Feb 25, 2021 |
The history is mostly good, inasmuch as there are no overaggressive moral claims as our current crop of historians feel obliged to place in their work. It is strictly fact based, and it provides a range of facts far exceeding that presented in most works of history, in large part because the Beards were early adherents of the study of the material influences on political and social development. In that sense it is more comprehensive--and more instructive--than any of the variety of textbooks we now use to teach high school students.

However--while there are no overaggressive moral claims in the work, there are moral claims hidden in the telling, and they are hidden in such a way as to make it easy to overlook their presence. This I have a problem with, because it is a way of distorting history that is very subtle. So, for instance, the figure of John C. Calhoun is discussed as a War Hawk senator and later the most aggressive of the Southern congressmen, but in their discussion of the Nullification Crisis of 1832 the Beards never mention his name, and they never mention his work as Vice President, in which office, largely because of the Nullification Crisis, he was one of the three most important occupants in our history, along with Thomas Jefferson and Richard Nixon. When discussing the literary output of the antebellum period, they give short shrift to the Disquisition on Government, and they do not mention the phrase 'concurrent majority' which is Calhoun's major idea. Instead it seems they give more credence to advances in surgery at the time, ignoring the fact that this was a period that did not know germ theory and whose advances, in light of the rate of surgical failure during the Civil War, can only be considered as minimal. In the same vein, the name of Henry David Thoreau does not appear--as though, in the literary advances of the antebellum period, neither Walden nor Civil Disobedience was of any importance.

In essence one has to be very careful reading this book, because the omissions are overwhelming, especially as regards the South. The name of Stonewall Jackson does not appear, despite the fact that he is one of the greatest of all American generals and his military strategy remains a subject of study. Regardless of whether you agree with the Confederate ideal, it seems to me almost impossible to discuss the Civil War and not mention Stonewall Jackson, whose death changes the course of it, if not necessarily the outcome. The same is true of J.E.B. Stuart, one of the great heroes, albeit in a losing cause, of American history. Ditto for John Randolph of Roanoke, one of the great politicians of the early Republic and an important influence on Southern conservatism, which was then and remains now an enormously influential trend in American politics.

The book takes for granted the role of the federal government and does not present in a serious manner the serious concept of 'states' rights' which Henry Adams, himself no states' rights proponent, called 'a sound and true doctrine.' And this to me is problematic. It takes the Hobbesian model of a Leviathan, growing at its subjects' expense, as the model of United States government--and it uses the Constitution as its justification for so doing. In that sense it parallels Richard Hofstadter's claim in The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It that the Constitution was created with Hobbes and Calvin as its primary intellectual progenitors.

According to Hobbes civil society is an implementation of God's will and when men join into it, the act of rebellion becomes theologically and morally wrong under any pretexts whatsoever. And in that line of thinking also comes Calvin, who says that men get the government they deserve, and if they get tyranny they must passively bear with it, as it is God's preordained wish for them to have it.

On the surface of it the attribution of intellectual debt from the Constitution to Hobbes and Calvin is a contradiction in terms. Under Hobbes' philosophical model there is no need for a Constitution, and the very act of writing one is most likely a dangerous evil. Under Calvin's model a Constitution is merely a waste of time and energy, since no human construction matters and only the will of God will prevail.

So, long story made long, I recommend this book with extreme caution, as a student both of political theory and of American History. It is better than much of what has been written, especially in its emphasis on the material foundations of American political and social development, but it is extremely problematic in several respects, all of which deserve to be noticed.
… (mer)
 
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jrgoetziii | Apr 27, 2015 |

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65
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1,976
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#13,014
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½ 3.6
Recensioner
17
ISBN
125
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