What’s the Matter with Akhil Amar: Update

I’ve just copied this update from the previous post: [UPDATE: A better theory [about why Amar would even want to make his monolithically successful, even hegemonic theory about democracy in the Constitution seem an insurgent, embattled one]. As Amar goes about defending the health insurance law, including the individual mandate, as utterly constitutional — anything, [...]

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What’s the Matter with Akhil Reed Amar?: Liberal History, Democracy, and the Constitution

You won’t find a better-expressed, more compelling encapsulation of the precise reverse of how I see the founders and the U.S. Constitution than in this talk by the constitutional scholar and well-regarded author Akhil Amar, “Andrew Jackson and the Constitution.” Is this yet another Tea Party rant against abuse of the “necessary and proper” clause [...]

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Historiography: Douglass Adair and the Triumph of Founding Ideas over Founding Action

I swore I’d never abuse a blog this way, but the following is straight b-roll. I’m cutting this out of a book I’m just now finishing. George Wolfe, playwright and sometime artistic director of New York City’s Public Theater, was reputed to respond to actors’ suggestions for things they might want to add to a [...]

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Wood, Lepore, and the Tea Party: a Comment Intended for John Fea’s Blog

For some reason I’m having huge trouble responding, with Blogger, to comments on this issue at John Fea’s excellent blog, where much discussion is ongoing. A virtue of the FB board would be to address the problem of diffusion I complain about below — but only John Bell and I are posting there, so no [...]

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Facebook discussion board on Wood, Lepore, and Tea Party

Those interested in ideas about critical history and popular memory, raised by Gordon Wood’s New York Review of Books piece on Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes, can comment on a Facebook discussion board dedicated to the topic, established by John Bell of Boston 1775. It would be good to see other interested parties [...]

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Gordon Wood, Jill Lepore, and the Tea Party

First impression [UPDATE: I meant of Wood's whole piece, not just the part in front of the firewall [[UPDATE: OK, that's not what a firewall is (IT figuratively); I was just copping imprecise language from hnn.us]]; I read the Wood piece in something called print (HNN complains about NYRB “firewall” here, Wed. 1/5/10)]. Anyway, as [...]

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