History Commons^™

Burnishing Buchanan's Brand On His Birthday, Michael J. Birkner

History Faculty Publications

James Buchanan’s brand needs refreshing.

Outside his hometown, his name does not much register with Americans today. When it does, the reaction is usually negative. What a comedown from the high hopes associated with Old Buck’s election to the presidency in 1856. [excerpt]

Throwing The Switch: Eisenhower, Stevenson And The African-American Vote In The 1956 Election, Lincoln M. Fitch

Student Publications

This paper seeks to contextualize the 1956 election by providing a summary of the African American political alignment during the preceding half-century. Winning a greater portion of the black vote was a central tenant of the 1956 Eisenhower Campaign strategy. In the 1956 election a substantial shift occurred among the historically democratic black electorate. The vote shifted because of disillusionment with the Democrats and Eisenhower’s civil rights record. The swing however, was less pronounced for Republican congressional candidates. This paper draws upon extensive primary material, including countless newspapers, magazines, the NAACP Papers, and published primary sources to form the core …

Book Review: The Rise And Fall Of The American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics And The Onset Of The Civil War By Michael Holt, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

"An impartial history of American statesmanship will give some of its most brilliant chapters to the Whig party from 1830 to 1850," wrote James G. Blaine in his memoirs. This was not, unhappily, because of a great heritage of political achievement in American public life. The work of the Whigs was, as Blaine admitted, negative and restraining rather than constructive. Still, "if their work cannot be traced in the National statute books as prominently as that of their opponents, they will be credited by the discriminating reader of our political annals as the English of to-day credit Charles James Fox …

Journalism And Politics In Jacksonian New Jersey: The Career Of Stacy G. Potts, Michael J. Birkner

History Faculty Publications

The year was 1831, and the President of the Bank of the United States, Nicholas Biddle, was preparing for a difficult campaign to win the re-charter of his institution. Facing the hostility of Andrew Jackson, and the partisan newspapers that supported him, Biddle was determined to put his own views before the American public. [excerpt]

10. The Political Thought Of Machiavelli, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section V: The Rise of Capitalism and the National State to 1500

The national state in Western Europe was a new institution, without precedent in the European World. Its rise and almost immediate conflict with the Church challenged political theorists to reexamine the assumptions of a universal church in a universal empire upon which the theory of the two swords was based. These assumptions were so generally accepted that they were not easily abandoned. In the fourteenth century Marsiglia of Padua, for all his disinterest in the two swords, had arrived at his conclusions without denying either the existence of a universal church or the validity of the traditional morality. Other writers …