Best of
Government

1998

The U.S. Constitution: And Fascinating Facts about It


Terry L. Jordan - 1998
    This book also presents insights into the men who wrote the Constitution, how it was created, and how the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution in the two centuries since its creation.

The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction


Akhil Reed Amar - 1998
    Constitution in this incisive new account of our most basic charter of liberty. Akhil Reed Amar brilliantly illuminates in rich detail not simply the text, structure, and history of individual clauses of the 1789 Bill, but their intended relationships to each other and to other constitutional provisions. Amar’s corrective does not end there, however, for as his powerful narrative proves, a later generation of antislavery activists profoundly changed the meaning of the Bill in the Reconstruction era. With the Fourteenth Amendment, Americans underwent a new birth of freedom that transformed the old Bill of Rights. We have as a result a complex historical document originally designed to protect the people against self-interested government and revised by the Fourteenth Amendment to guard minority against majority. In our continuing battles over freedom of religion and expression, arms bearing, privacy, states’ rights, and popular sovereignty, Amar concludes, we must hearken to both the Founding Fathers who created the Bill and their sons and daughters who reconstructed it. Amar’s landmark work invites citizens to a deeper understanding of their Bill of Rights and will set the basic terms of debate about it for modern lawyers, jurists, and historians for years to come.

The Declaration of Independence/The Constitution of the United States


Pauline Maier - 1998
    Drafted by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration set forth the terms of a new form of government with the following words: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."Framed in 1787 and in effect since March 1789, the Constitution of the United States of America fulfilled the promise of the Declaration by establishing a republican form of government with separate executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The first ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, became part of the Constitution on December 15, 1791. Among the rights guaranteed by these amendments are freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the right to trial by jury. Written so that it could be adapted to endure for years to come, the Constitution has been amended only seventeen times since 1791 and has lasted longer than any other written form of government.From the Paperback edition.

Race, Culture, and Equality (Hoover Essays (Stanford, Calif.: 1998), No. 23.)


Thomas Sowell - 1998
    This essay, Race, Culture, and Equality, distills the results found in the trilogy that was published during these years---Race and Culture (1994), Migrations and Cultures (1996), and Conquests and Cultures (1998). The most obvious and inescapable finding from these years of research is that huge disparities in income and wealth have been the rule, not the exception, in countries around the world and over centuries of human history. Real income consists of outputs and these outputs have been radically different because the inputs have been radically different from peoples with different cultures. Geography alone creates profound differences among peoples. It is not simply that such natural wealth as oil and gold are very unequally distributed around the world. More fundamentally, people themselves are different because of different levels of access to other peoples and cultures. Isolated peoples have always lagged behind those with greater access to a wider world, whether isolation has been the result of mountains, jungles, widely scattered islands or other geographic barriers. Cities have been in the vanguard of cultural, technological and economic progress in virtually every civilization. But the geographic settings in which cities flourish are by no means equally distributed around the globe. Urbanization has been correspondingly unequally developed in different geographic regions--most prevalent among the networks of navigable waterways in Western Europe and least prevalent where such waterways are most lacking in tropical Africa. If geography is not egalitarian, neither is demography. When the median age of Jews in the United States is 20 years older than the median age of Puerto Ricans, then there is no way that these two groups could be equally represented in jobs requiring long years of experience, in retirement homes or in sports. Even if they were identical in every other way, radically different age distributions would prevent their being equal in incomes or occupations. Discrimination is also one of the many factors operating against equality. But even if all human beings behaved like saints toward one another, the other factors would still make equality of income and wealth virtually impossible to achieve. Neither geography nor history can be undone but we can at least avoid artificially creating cultural isolation under glittering names like "multiculturalism."

Marshall the Courthouse Mouse


Peter W. Barnes - 1998
    Written and illustrated by Peter and Cheryl Barnes.

View of the Constitution of the United States: With Selected Writings


St. George Tucker - 1998
    George Tucker’s View of the Constitution , published in 1803, was the first extended, systematic commentary on the United States Constitution after its ratification. Generations learned their Blackstone and their understanding of the Constitution through Tucker.Clyde N. Wilson is Professor of History and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun at the University of South Carolina.Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

24 Years of House Work-- And the Place Is Still a Mess: My Life in Politics


Pat Schroeder - 1998
    In this candid, unblinking autobiography, Schroeder recounts her career, telling how she struggled to find a place and a voice in the guy gulag of Congress. Photos.

منشور کورش هخامنشی


Reza Moradi Ghiasabadi - 1998
    this cylinder is the first human rights statement which is the symbol of iranian peace loving nature.

Empower the People: Overthrow The Conspiracy That Is Stealing Your Money And Freedom


Tony Brown - 1998
    In capitalist and communist countries alike, elitist groups took control of international trade and national banks, with dire results for the ordinary citizen. Ever since, capital has moved toward a single inner circle -- the Ruling Class Conspiracy -- who monopolize the world's markets and even its governments for personal profit. Their stratagems range from the "war" against drugs to deliberately induced racial conflict among ethnic groups in America -- none in earnest, all carefully designed to preserve a pernicious status quo.But Tony Brown has a remedy. His provocative and empowering seven-step plan offers an opportunity to break free once and for all from the constricting control of the wealthy and powerful who have run the world for far too long -- including a point-by-point program for radical reform of the income tax and a proposal to muzzle the Federal Reserve Bank, which exerts unconscionable influence over the lives of every American.Incendiary and persuasive, this book reaches beyond race to claim the high ground of historical, logical, and moral analysis. For nearly half a century of Cold War, America and the Free World were defined by opposition to Communism . . . but was this merely a red herring to ensure the domination of the haves over the have-nots? Read Empower the People, form your own conclusions . . . and hit the brakes!

Secrecy: The American Experience


Daniel Patrick Moynihan - 1998
    Senator Moynihan begins by recounting the astonishing story of the Venona project, in which Soviet cables sent to the United States during World War II were decrypted by the U.S. Army—but were never passed on to President Truman. The divisive Hiss perjury trial and the McCarthy era of suspicion might have had a far different impact on American society, says Moynihan, if government agencies had not kept secrets from one another as a means of shoring up their power. Moynihan points to many other examples of how government bureaucracies used secrecy to avoid public scrutiny and got into trouble as a result. He discusses the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, and, finally, the failure to forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union, suggesting that many of the tragedies resulting from these events could have been averted had the issues been clarified in an open exchange of ideas. America must lead the way to an era of openness, says Moynihan in this vitally important book. It is time to dismantle the excesses of government secrecy and share information with our citizens and with the world. Analysis, far more than secrecy, is the key to national security.