For decades, scholars have insisted that what most of us know instinctively to be true -- is false. Mocking the belief that individuals such as Julius Caesar, Adolf Hitler or Winston Churchill make history, experts focus on social forces. They explain the past with statistical studies and abstract theories, dismissing stories about individual initiative or heroism. While powerful economic, social and ideological movements dwarfing any individual do shape history, be it the high-tech boom, feminism or the rise of conservatism, we cannot underestimate the way a leader's action and inaction can change the world. Especially when assessing the American presidency and modern America, individual character -- and contingency -- count.
Roosevelt’s republican party split, Taft’s separation from the ideas of Roosevelt, and Wilson’s democratic perspective bring light to the idea that although these men shared the progressive opinion, their ideas differed in many ways. Theodore Roosevelt was the brain behind the progressive party that would eventually lead to the split of the Republican party. Roosevelt called for the “Square Deal” between business, consumers, and labor and supported the “Strenuous Life”. Unlike the others, Roosevelt wished to destroy bad trusts and regulate the good ones rather than break them all up. Roosevelt was the first president to introduce progressive ways of thinking and although each president’s ideas were similar in ways such as trust busting and conservation measures, his ideas were the framework for the U.S. William Howard Taft was the presidential candidate hand picked by Roosevelt.
Since that time, historians and scholars have tended to either regard Long and Coughlin as instigators of an irrational and anti-democratic uprising or as leaders and advocates of a great, forward moving social transformation. Brinkley contests both of these views quite persuasively. He maintains that Long and Coughlin had the ability to make clear the feelings of the American public that sought a means to defend the autonomy of the individual and to beat off the violations of the modern industrial state. The followers of Long and Coughlin, according to Brinkley, did not long for an economic collective, but rather for a return to a society where the individual had control over his own life and the power in society resided in institutions that were both visible and accessible from a local level. However, neither one of these leaders ever offered the American public logical plans for obtaining these goals.
I believe the author was trying to show that even though there are still segregation problems, the United States is coming a long way in that issue. What really stuck out to me in the end of the interview was how baffled Standweiss was because our president only checks one box when it comes to his race, even though he is a mixed individual. I’m not depicted that any race is better than others, but it seems like President Obama believes he can make a bigger difference being classified as African American, rather than Caucasian, like Clarence King. Works Cited: "Festival of Books." Interview by Murry Fromson.
President Johnson’s “wise men” possessed depth in their areas of expertise beyond that of the President, who was a master mover of legislation to accomplish domestic social programs but very much out of his league in military matters and international relations. To begin, evaluate this question: To what extent was the March 1968 reevaluation of the Vietnam War, as a function of Cold War ideology, accomplished to satisfy domestic concerns rather than international concerns? In a time of mixed obligations, how can we differentiate what is domestic from what is international in American politics? Impact of News Photography
Others say that the U.S. involvement wasn’t to protect democracy but to protect our economic interests in the nearby South Pacific and Middle East. These controversies are where interpretations of history can be formed but the facts of history are always clear, the United States adapted their constitution in 1787 and the Vietnam War was fought from 1959 to
As must appear self-evident to both historians and astute observers by now, the United States, in its history, has had a rather facile and at times acrimonious relationship to the idea of domestic democracy (If this is not self-evident, see Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, along with Failed States. For a specific analysis of this observation applied to the USA Patriot Act, see my A User’s Guide to the USA Patriot Act). What is seldom noticed, however, is the speed with which the U.S. has moved from a liberal democracy to, at best, an authoritarian government. To demonstrate this rapid movement in U.S. government, we will use as a base Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” address to Congress, on January 6, 1941. By all rights, and regardless of FDR’s real intent (some say it was to garner support for U.S. involvement in WWII), very few would doubt that his elucidated four freedoms form an important base for understanding liberal democracy.
This way of thinking was totally different from that of England who was a monarchy even up to now. Americans going a different and bold direction with the well established Constitution made sure that this Constitution was monarchy hostile. An example will be the title of nobility, which states that the title of nobility usually leads to inequality among people even though there is no such thing as equality but the theory was still created a government where under the circumstances people are treated equal. Therefore, the main reason the Constitution was dedicated to the idea and goal of equality. In other to discourage monarchy and reinforce the American idea, our founding fathers came up with the three branches of government where they would each have certain role to fulfill, share power which will allow them to oversee each other.
While it is common to treat the new technology as a radical innovation, here we would talk about the radical innovation both in technical and economic sense. It means that the technology should not only be absolutely new, but also account for the former solution become noncompetitive. It is considered that the incumbent firms fail to implement the radical innovations and due to this lose in the competition to the new entrants. In fact history proves that before the World War II this was the case for the majority of the firms with only 22% of the radical innovations implemented by the existing market leaders. There are different approaches to explain this phenomenon, as originally it was seen that the incumbent firms had much more resources and capabilities to succeed in innovation (Schumpeter 1934).
Since Bacon's thought fitted well into the spirit of the age, it is not surprising that he developed enthusiastic followers. One little-recognized follower was Thomas Hobbes, the philosophic apologist for monarchical absolutism who, on the eve of the Civil War, was searching for a "modern" defense of monarchical despotism that relied neither on the outworn correspondence theory of order, nor on the Grotian variant of natural law as did his friends in the Tew circle. Grotius's conservative version of consent theory held that the right of sovereignty had indeed originated with the people, but that the people, at some murkily distant point in the past, had surrendered their sovereignty irrevocably to the king. This defense of royal absolutism had been continued in England by the Tew circle, Hobbes's only disagreement being that each individual, in the last analysis, had the "right of self-preservation" and therefore had the right to disobey any orders from the king that were tantamount to the particular individual's murder.1 But more importantly, Hobbes's political theory forswore scholastic natural-law methodology for a "modern" mechanistic, scientistic methodology far more in keeping with Francis Bacon. This shift is not surprising, considering that Hobbes served his philosophic apprenticeship as secretary to Bacon himself.