American Political Party History

On a December night in 1773, in an iconic act of civil disobedience, American colonists dressed as Native Americans boarded a merchant ship laden with tea. They tossed the tea into the Boston Harbor in protest of taxation without representation. Their motivation at the time was not one of a battle for independence; rather, they sought what they viewed as their constitutional right to representation in the British Parliament.

American Political Parties is a core textbook on political parties in the United States that places the US party system into a framework designed around the disagreements between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. White and Kerbel argue that the two-party system in the United States began with a common agreement on the key values of freedom, individual rights, and equality of opportunity, but that Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed—often vehemently—over how to translate these ideals into an acceptable form of governance.

America's political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes listeners from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today's parties, overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding.

In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the US, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the US government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism.

What is "the big lie" of the Democratic Party? That conservatives - and President Donald Trump in particular - are fascists. Nazis, even. In a typical comment, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow says the Trump era is reminiscent of "what it was like when Hitler first became chancellor." But in fact, this audacious lie is a complete inversion of the truth. Yes, there is a fascist threat in America - but that threat is from the Left and the Democratic Party.

The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate Black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of Whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture.

This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs. In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence - and derail - the larger agendas of a political party.

In this magisterial work, Sean Wilentz traces a historical arc from the earliest days of the republic to the opening shots of the Civil War. One of our finest writers of history, Wilentz brings to life the era after the American Revolution, when the idea of democracy remained contentious, and Jeffersonians and Federalists clashed over the role of ordinary citizens in government of, by, and for the people. The triumph of Andrew Jackson soon defined this role on the national level, while city democrats, Anti-Masons, fugitive slaves, and a host of others hewed their own local definitions.

American democracy is at an impasse. After years of zero-sum partisan trench warfare, our political institutions are deteriorating. Our norms are collapsing. Democrats and Republicans no longer merely argue; they cut off contact with each other. In short, the two-party system is breaking our democracy, and driving us all crazy.

For much of American history, evangelicalism was aligned with progressive political causes: nineteenth-century evangelicals fought for the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and public education. But contemporary conservative activists have defaulted on this majestic legacy, embracing instead an agenda virtually indistinguishable from the Republican Party platform.

The 2016 election was a watershed for the United States. But, as Tim Alberta explains in American Carnage, to understand Trump’s victory is to view him not as the creator of this era of polarization and bruising partisanship, but rather as its most manifest consequence. American Carnage is the story of a president’s rise based on a country’s evolution and a party’s collapse. As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning.

A fast-paced, rollicking, behind-the-scenes account of how the GOP since the 1950s has encouraged and exploited extremism, bigotry, and paranoia to gain power, American Psychosis offers listeners a brisk, can-you-believe-it journey through the netherworld of far-right irrationality and the Republican Party’s interactions with the darkest forces in America.

To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered the consequences of partisan politics in Britain before the American Revolution, and they wanted nothing similar for America. Yet parties emerged even before the Constitution was ratified, and they took firmer root in the following decade. In Founding Partisans, master historian H. W. Brands has crafted a fresh and lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be.

For decades, history has considered Tammany Hall, New York's famous political machine, shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft, crime, and patronage personified by notoriously corrupt characters. Infamous crooks like William "Boss" Tweed dominate traditional histories of Tammany, distorting our understanding of a critical chapter of American political history. In Machine Made, historian and New York City journalist Terry Golway convincingly dismantles these stereotypes.

Political writer and official RNC spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany spent months traveling throughout the United States conducting interviews with Americans whose powerful and moving stories were forgotten or intentionally ignored by our leaders. They discussed their deeply personal stories and the issues that are most important to them, such as illegal immigration. The New American Revolution chronicles both the losses of these grassroots voters as well as their ultimate victory in November 2016.

Prepare to conquer the CLEP History of the United States II exam with this comprehensive study guide! Covering the period from 1865 to the present, this book dives deep into the key topics outlined by the exam, including political institutions and public policy, social developments, economic developments, cultural and intellectual developments, as well as diplomacy and international relations. With detailed explanations, this guide is your essential companion for acing the exam and earning college credit. Whether you're a seasoned student or new to the subject, Conquer the CLEP History of ...

When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, President Obama observed that Trump "is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party." In Burning Down the House, historian Julian Zelizer pinpoints the moment when our country was set on a path toward an era of bitterly partisan and ruthless politics, an era that was ignited by Newt Gingrich and his allies.

Drawing comparisons to empires past, Johnson explores in vivid detail the likely consequences of US dependence on a permanent war economy, and what it will mean when the globe's sole "hyperpower" is no longer capable of paying for the vaulting ambitions of its leaders - and becomes the greatest hyper-debtor of all time. In his stunning conclusion, Johnson suggests that the crisis of a financial breakdown could ultimately prove to be the only path to a renewed nation.

The Know Nothing movement can actually be tied to a number of violent episodes and ethnically charged riots that occurred during the last 1850s. The debate over immigration in the 1850s was more than a clash of worldviews - it touched upon the core of America’s values. While nativists, like the Know Nothings, believed that immigrants who embraced politics from their native lands represented a threat to America’s values, those who opposed them argued that it was precisely America’s values that made immigration a necessity and a valuable component of American life.

In The Obama Doctrine, Colin Dueck analyzes and explains what the Obama Doctrine in foreign policy actually is and maps out the competing visions on offer from the Republican Party. Dueck, a leading scholar of US foreign policy, contends it is now becoming clear that Obama's policy of international retrenchment is in large part a function of his emphasis on achieving domestic policy goals. There have been some successes in the approach, but there have also been costs.