Word: federalists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...called Constitutional Convention adjourned four days later, after the networks announced that they were scrapping live coverage in exchange for ten-minute nightly summaries of the proceedings at 11:30. Madison's diaries, renamed Federalist Follies, topped the best-seller list...
Anyone who doubts that the Constitution is a living thing that changes and evolves should think about the difference between the document then and now. As framed 200 years ago, the Constitution was virtually paranoid on the subject of democracy. James Madison wrote in The Federalist about his view of democracy and direct government. If every Athenian citizen had been a Socrates, he thought, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob. The founders began, "We the People." And yet "the People" had very little to do with writing the thing. The framers, working behind closed doors and shut...
...Federalist papers, in a grandiose moment, predicted that the Constitution would "vindicate the honor of the human race." What the founders created, at any rate, was an extraordinary civilizing program, and a moral style in which conscience -- the Judiciary, the third eye -- was turned into an institution. The genius of the Constitution has been the moral restlessness it embodies, and its capacity to change even while its basic structure abides. Today, all but six of the world's nations either have or are committed to having a single-document constitution. That idea was born in Philadelphia. Reverence...
...meaning. But for an authentic and authoritative version of what the Constitution is about and how it got that way, it is hard to beat two of the original works written on the subject: James Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 and The Federalist, by Alexander Hamilton, Madison and John Jay. Both are currently in print and widely available in paperback editions. Separately and together they tell the intertwined story of Constitution and framers with the clear voice of the times, not the way present-day passions may choose to perceive...
...Federalist, a series of essays churned out for New York newspapers under the group anonym "Publius," was frankly designed as propaganda and used to persuade doubters in state conventions to ratify the nascent Constitution. The pieces appeared at the rate of two to four a week. Hamilton, who hatched the idea, dashed off "Federalist No. 1" in October 1787 aboard a sloop on the Hudson and cranked out the 85th and last in May 1788, after Jay had fallen too sick to write and Madison had decamped for Virginia to fight the ratifying battle there. "Whilst the printer was putting...