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"Corresponding Republics" is a study of how letter writing practices shaped elite political organizing during the early years of the American, Dutch and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century. The heart of the project is a study of revolutionary leaders' correspondence and epistolary practices. Letters were the lifeblood of all early modern politics--the means to share information, develop strategies and resolve internecine disputes. This was particularly true of the eighteenth-century Atlantic patriot parties, which all faced the challenge of building cohesive movements in the fragmented political landscape of the old regime. Yet even though most studies of revolutionary politics make heavy use of private correspondence, nobody had yet examined the ways in which patriots' reliance on private letters and networks shaped the revolutions' broader political cultures. "Corresponding Republics" argues that the distinctive old regime private correspondence practices of patriots in each region persisted into the revolutionary period. These practices, which played a crucial role in patriots' political self-fashioning, helped produce different kinds of political networks and cultures of patriot organizing. Though by no means the whole explanation for the three revolutions' different courses, epistolary practices are an essential and untold part of that story. The main sources for the project are manuscript letters in American and European archives. The first three chapters of the dissertation examine inter-colonial organizing during the first years of the American Revolution. Chapters One and Two offer a revised view of the efforts by Sons of Liberty, as the patriot leaders called themselves, to build a cohesive inter-colonial patriot party from 1765 to 1772. They document patriots' deep immersion in mercantile correspondence and their persistence in using it after 1765. Yet this style, which raised high barriers to posing questions or engaging in debate, made it difficult for patriot leaders to have tactical discussions and coordinate their activities across the colonies. The Sons instead created a largely symbolic agreement on general principles of resistance. Chapter Three focuses on the developing relationship after 1772 between the patriots' private networks and public committees of correspondence. It shows how private letter writing helped the Sons organize formal inter-colonial corresponding committees in 1773, which reflected the private networks' focus on information transmission rather than discussion. Not until the meeting of the First Continental Congress in 1774 did patriot leaders develop an inter-colonial network whose affective depth enabled tactical and ideological debate. And even then, the patriots' epistolary tools still encouraged them to paper over serious differences about political strategy and ideology in order to maintain the unity of the colonies. The second half of the dissertation uses studies of national organizing in the Dutch and French Revolutions to examine what was distinctive about the Sons of Liberty's organizing efforts. The underlying problems the patriot movements confronted, I argue, were similar: like their American counterparts, Dutch and French patriots sought to build a cohesive political movement on a national scale through correspondence. In practice, however, the process differed significantly. French Jacobin leaders drew on a pre-revolutionary tradition of scholarly epistolarity, which encouraged discussion and dialogue among participants. These qualities helped them develop epistolary communities far more tightly knit than those of their American counterparts. This proved to be both an asset and a liability. It helped them forge a high degree of ideological and tactical unity within the movement. But it also made it more difficult for them to avoid internal disagreements, contributing to the serious internal dissention in 1792 that foreshadowed the eruption of violence among patriot leaders. The Dutch patriot elites, for their part, created highly hierarchical private and public networks. The division between the two types of networks, heightened by their reliance on courtly epistolary habits, inhibited their efforts to forge alliances with the growing popular militia movement. These divisions were a factor in the Dutch patriots' failure, in the short term, to successfully achieve their goal of seizing and holding national political power.

This dissertation uses the reading patterns of New York’s earliest elites, including a significant portion of the founding fathers, who checked out books from the New York Society Library (NYSL), to evaluate the shifting meanings of political thought, affiliation, and action in the years between the ratification of the Constitution and the War of 1812. The reading data come from two charging ledgers spanning two periods –1789 to 1792, and 1799 to 1806 – during which a new country was built, relations with foreign nations defined, and contestation over the character of a new democracy was intense. Using novel combinations of text and network analysis, I explore the political nature of reading and the extent to which social, economic, and political positions overlapped with what people read. In the process, I identify the key social and cultural dimensions on which New York, and by extension, American, elite society was politically stratified in its early years.

Master of Arts / Department of Communication Studies, Theatre, and Dance / Charles J. Griffin / This rhetorical history study attempts to refocus the narrow debate on the concept of the “Separation of Church and State.” Most scholars and popular organizations primarily focus their determination of the original intent of the Establishment Clause on the views of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Virginia. However, according to the United States Constitution it takes three-fourths of the states and two-thirds of Congress to ratify an amendment. As a result, most arguments on this topic center on an extremely small minority of evidence: one of fourteen states, and only one of eighty-one members of Congress to determine the Founders’ original intent. This study reverses this trend and consults evidence from all the states involved as well as the records of Congress. Since comparable documents are vital to understanding history, all the state constitutions, state bills of rights, and state proposed amendments to the Federal Constitution are consulted as evidence at the beginning of this study. Additionally, every reference of religion in the above documents are individually presented in order to alleviate concerns of potential evidence manipulation. Further, the debates in Congress and the multiple drafts of the Establishment Clause are evaluated in the process of determining the Founders’ original intent. Throughout the study, several useful tables have been constructed in order to facilitate the processing and evaluation of such a large base of evidence. The results of this study indicate a lack of evidence for the contemporary view that the Founders’ intent was to create a total separation between church and state. From the specific religious concerns voiced in the state ratification debates of the Constitution, what religious limits were written into state constitutions/bills of rights, and the amendments that states proposed concerning religion; it becomes evident that the Founders’ intention was only to prevent a particular Christian denomination from becoming the established "National American Church.”

Higher education has always occupied an important place in this nation's concerns. This study was undertaken in an attempt to determine how the Founding Fathers, especially the nation's first six presidents, regarded the subject of higher education. The study was limited to these six men because they were charged with inaugurating the new government and because these six men were all participants in the drafting and ratifying of the Constitution. Findings for this study came from the personal and private papers of the first six presidents, government documents, and the press. A comparison of the findings indicates that these men shared many beliefs while disagreeing on some aspects of higher education.

La lontananza tra il diritto e l’“orizzonte” della fraternità è molto avvertita non solo nell’“accademia” ma anche nell’immaginario collettivo. Il tentativo di questa tesi è quello di dimostrare la possibilità, teorica e pratica, di accostare queste realtà apparentemente molto distanti e inconciliabili tra loro: il diritto, e in particolare il diritto pubblico, e il principio di fraternità. Dopo aver analizzato le difficoltà e le obiezioni fondamentali a tale ipotesi, la tesi propone alcune soluzioni e percorsi per cercare un dialogo, cioè per risolvere l’apparente antinomia tra la spontaneità della fraternità e la coattività tipica del diritto. Terreno di elezione per la messa alla prova dell’idea proposta è la Costituzione italiana e, in particolare, la fase della sua nascita. La convinzione che fa da sfondo alla ricerca è la consapevolezza che, per la comprensione dell’importanza teorica e pratica del principio giuridico di fraternità, occorre pur sempre partire dall’esperienza di un vissuto quotidiano di rapporti fraterni. / The distance between the law and the “horizon“ fraternity is felt not only in the “academic circles“ but also in the collective imagination. The aim of this dissertation is to prove the theoretical and practical possibility to combine these dimensions apparently distant and incompatible: the law, in particular public law, and the principle of fraternity. After analyzing the difficulties and the fundamental objections to this idea, the dissertation proposes some solutions and paths to search for a dialogue, that is, to solve the ostensible contradiction between the spontaneity of fraternity and the typical coercive character of law. The basis used to prove the sustained idea is the Italian Constitution and specifically the period of its birth. The background is the firm belief that in order to understand the theoretical and practical importance of the juridical principle of fraternity it's always necessary to start from the fraternal relationships experienced in the daily life.

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This diploma thesis aims to analyze the issue of one of the most significant congressional powers found in Article I., Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. Congressional power to regulate interstate commerce has been instrumental to the federal government's legislative efforts in many areas of law. This constitutional provision enabled the Congress to react to the changing conditions and new problems the country has been facing, especially in the area of working conditions, civil rights, criminal justice or even environmental law and many others. The expansion of power of the federal government, however, was not always greeted with enthusiasm, especially in the first three decades of the 20th century, before the Supreme Court began to read the commerce power much more broadly, to the point that it ceased to be a factual limitation of its powers. This trend was meant to be stopped by the New Federalism movement and the five new conservative justices who issued rulings that limited the scope of the Commerce Clause. However, this group of justices proved to be very inconsistent in its own approach toward this constitutional provision and eventually fell apart, which rendered Rehnquist's attempted constitutional revolution with respect to state's rights partly a failure. As the new Court membership under...

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