Admin matters: Evernote experiment, some major theses to iron out

Evernote notebooks (experimental tool)
1. conservativism 
2. radicalism
3. exceptionalism
4. liberalism
5. stock political science phrases
6. historical facts about the revolution
7. republicanism
8. federalism 
9. anti-federalism

Major issues from first half of the semester:
1. Lipset vs Hartz
2. Bailyn vs Wood
2. British conservatism vs American conservatism
3. New deal liberalism vs founding liberalism
4. Start state conditions of the American revolution
5. Federalists vs anti-federalists
6. How do Americans reconcile with fed and state rights given their liberal roots?


Tutorial questions:
1. “The story of Anglo-American divergence must be told alongside the story of Anglo-American convergence; for every instance of Anglophobia there is an instance of Anglophilia. (They are two sides, according to Peter Onuf, of the same story. The dueling of competing claims to American exceptionalism might have something to do with the irony that the further Americans predicated their national identity in opposition to the Old World, the more they needed to establish their lineage from the motherland. Indeed, even the language of the Declaration of Independence seems to concede that the rights of Englishmen are not so different from the rights of the American.)“ Discuss.

2. Was the American Revolution radical or conservative? What was “first” in the “First New Nation?”

3. What are the key precepts of republicanism? Compare and contrast Bailyn and Wood's account of republicanism.

4. What, according to Hartz, is special about American liberalism? If Hartz is right, the American revolution was conservative; if Lipset and/or Wood are right, the American revolution was radical. Which is it?

5. Did the Federalists or the Anti-Federalists have the more sober view of human nature? To what extent is Madison's new republicanism still republicanism?

6. Can we square the idea that America was supposedly born liberal with the formidable reach of state authority in the long nineteenth century?

7. Is it possible to constitutionalize prerogative or must republics, in the end, still hope for virtue in the modern executive?

8. How does dualism reconcile rights foundationalism and democracy, Burkeanism and democracy, liberalism and republicanism?

9. How and to what extent did the Civil War and Reconstruction refound the United States?