Defining the Scope and Power of American Government: Federalism, Anti-Federalism, and other Issues in Constitutional Law

In Federalist #6, in defense of the ratification of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton cited the defects of human nature to explain the need for vigorous federal government. According to Hamilton, pretending that the States could maintain peace in the absence of strong federal authority, "would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious."1 In Federalist # 10, James Madison used less forceful language, but he also pointed to human imperfection to justify the expansion of federal power. By comparing and contrasting Hamilton's and Madison's arguments, this essay will show that both viewed centralized government as the safest means to restrain the irrational impulses that drive human behavior.

Proponents of the doctrine of original intent contend that we are required either to follow the Constitution as was written or to change it if we choose to depart from the historical text. Rejecting this position, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall publicly criticized the idea that constitutional questions should be settled according to the intentions of the men who wrote the original document. In support of Marshall’s conclusions, this essay will compare the opinion issued in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857 to the decision reached in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

The Tea Party is widely seen as a grassroots movement motivated by secular commitments to small government, free markets, and individual rights. However, an examination of the commonalities among Tea Party supporters shows that the majority are most interested in increasing the role of religion and, more specifically, conservative Christianity in American political life. By summarizing recent surveys of the Tea Party movement, this essay will explore its members' efforts to lower traditional boundaries between church and state in American politics.

Race & Politics Before & After the Civil War

Before the Civil War, abolitionists and supporters of women's suffrage united in a common struggle for equal rights. However, after black men won the right to vote, a split developed between civil rights leaders and proponents of women's right to vote. By examining the historical break between the civil rights and women's rights movements, this essay will explore how this split hindered the progress of equality in American politics.

One of the highest expectations of Barack Obama's presidency was that the election of the nation's first African-American president would transform the conversation about race relations in the United States. However, despite Obama's re-election in 2012, many people still contend that the exchange of ideas about race in America remains fundamentally unchanged. By analyzing various explanations for our apparent impasse on racial issues, this essay will explore why Obama's elevation to the Oval Office has yet to resolve the problem of race in American politics.

In 2008, in "Two Speeches on Race," historian Garry Wills compared an address that presidential candidate Barack Obama had recently given in Philadelphia to a speech made by Abraham Lincoln in New York City in 1860, when he was seeking the Republican nomination for president. Although Wills' comparison is instructive, he misinterprets Lincoln's campaign pledge to do nothing about slavery as a brilliant political strategy. By casting aside this effort to minimize Lincoln's racism in my own comparison between these two speeches, I will argue that the historical tendency to excuse the racial prejudices of prominent political leaders helps to explain why Obama was forced to contend with the irrational fears of white extremists so many decades later.

Before the award-winning film 12 Years a Slave opened in theaters, British-born director Steve McQueen castigated American film makers for their general failure to address brutalities of slavery, pointing out that fewer than twenty movies on the subject had been made in the U.S. But while McQueen is right that Hollywood has overlooked the realities of slavery, the true story of Solomon Northup, whose account of his captivity in the deep South from 1841to1853 inspired 12 Years a Slave, was portrayed on screen, not for release in theaters, but in Solomon Northup's Odyssey, broadcast by American Playhouse in 1984. By comparing these two adaptations of Northup's memoir, this essay will explore the differences and similarities in their presentations of his harrowing ordeal.

Capitalism & Democracy from the Industrial Revolution to the Post-Industrial Age

In 2011, speaking in Osawatomie, Kansas, President Barack Obama evoked the Progressive policies of Theodore Roosevelt, who delivered his "New Nationalism Speech" in the same city in 1910. Unlike Roosevelt, who went to Osawatomie to dedicate a statue of abolitionist John Brown, Obama did not mention slavery, nor did he follow his predecessor's example by quoting Abraham Lincoln. While it is ironic that the first African-American president ignored the legacy of slavery in a place so closely associated with the Civil War, it is even more striking that Obama's speech was in some ways profoundly more conservative than Roosevelt's. By comparing these two historic orations, this essay will argue that Obama's ringing endorsement of free competition and his reluctance to regulate financial institutions shows how far to the right the U.S. has traveled since the Progressive Era.
As J. Robert Constantine observed in "Eugene V. Debs: An American Paradox," Debs was denounced as an extremist and jailed for advocating social and political reforms in the early twentieth century that were later widely accepted. By tracing the historical movement of some of Debs's ideas from the radical fringe to the mainstream, this essay will explore the socialist roots of prohibitions against child labor, equal pay for equal work, and other principles that have passed into orthodoxy in the United States.
When Barack Obama won the presidential election of 2008, it was widely assumed that he would be a transformational leader on par with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. However, having started his second term, Obama has turned out to be far more moderate than his supporters had hoped and his detractors will admit. By comparing major aspects of Roosevelt's New Deal with the policy achievements of the Obama Administration, this essay will explore the contrasts between them.

Race, Gender & Politics Before and After the Civil Rights and Women's Rights Movements

In "Du Bois's Crisis and Woman's Suffrage," Jean Fagan Yellin describes how the scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois differed with other African-American men, including civil rights advocates, in actively supporting voting rights for women. Du Bois had no illusions about the racism of some of the white women who led the women's rights movement, but he maintained that these prejudices would fall away after women became more involved in political life. Drawing from Yellin's work and other sources, this essay will show how much more effective the women's rights and civil rights movements of the 1960's and 1970's would have been if both had heeded Du Bois's warning that progress toward equality would be hampered by divisions based on race and sex.
Looking back on Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream Speech" fifty years after it was delivered, Gary Younge argued that the message that the civil rights leader meant to send in 1963 had yet to be properly understood in 2013. Drawing from Younge's "The Misremembering of 'I Have a Dream,'" as well as other sources, this essay will explore the meaning of King's iconic address both from the perspective of his time and from the vantage point of the twenty-first century.
In 2012 and 2013, academics and activists looked back fifty years to the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), books by two very different women that transformed American politics in similarly fundamental ways. Carson's work played a central role in sparking the environmental movement, while Friedan's ushered in a new chapter in the struggle for women's rights. Comparing the ferocious backlash that each of these landmarks ignited is instructive because it illustrates both how far the women's movement has come and the progress that has yet to be made toward realizing the environmental ideals that Carson espoused.
In "Fear of a Black President," Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects on the political forces and historical legacies that have deterred President Barack Obama from focusing on racial issues since his election in 2008. Drawing from Coates, as well as studies that document the over-sized role of race in shaping white Americans' view of Obama, this essay will explore the extent to which our first African-American president has been forced to downplay the problem of race in American politics.

American Politics in an Age of Inequality

One of the interesting observations included in "Federal Government 101," a guide put together by the National Priorities Project (NPP), is that tax breaks will cost the federal government more than all of the appropriations included in the federal budget for 2014. These exceptions to general provisions such as lower tax rates for hedge-fund managers, deductions of home mortgage interest, and reduced taxes on capital gains, provide insight into increasing economic inequality because they mainly benefit people at the top of the income scale. By drawing from NPP and other sources, this essay will describe how our tax code has widened the gap between the upper and lower segments of American society.
In "Wall Street and Main Street: The Rise of Finance," Colin Gordon places the growing gap between the top and the bottom of American society within the context of the growth of the financial services industry. By using specific examples drawn from other sources, this paper will provide additional insight into Gordon's historical analysis of the role of the financial services in fostering inequality in the United States.

Miscellaneous Topics

One of the most interesting and overlooked aspects of the advent of communications technology in American society is that it dealt an unprecedented blow to the supremacy of the testimony of white men in courts of law. Previously, the word of a white man would almost always carry more weight than that of a woman, a child, or an adult male member of a minority group. In order to explore the anxiety created by the introduction of visual and audio evidence into the American legal system, this essay will examine the first Supreme Court ruling on wiretapping, Olmstead v. United States.

In 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court granted women qualified access to abortion. Since then, anti-abortion forces have steadily reduced the scope of abortion rights. By summarizing landmark cases before and after Roe v. Wade, this essay will provide a brief history of decreasing access to reproductive choices in the United States.

In 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court included the decision to obtain an abortion within a general zone of privacy that is implicit in various amendments to the Constitution. Although privacy rights expanded throughout the twentieth century, the boundaries between public and private are often difficult or impossible to fix. By examining the logic used in this landmark decision, this essay will explore the problems inherent in defining access to abortion as a subset of privacy rights.

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