6/25/2023 0 Comments The second founding book reviewIt did take a Civil War, and then a Civil Rights movement, to redeem those promises, which remain unfulfilled in our time, when we see decades of progress eroding like the Arctic icecap. Almost all of American history that followed, with the exception of the fights about taxes and tariffs, were about these themes. These new amendments expanded the national definition of citizenship, altered (at least in principle) the relations between the races, and made the notions of freedom, enfranchisement and, by extension, opportunity, indisputable and indispensable elements of the national creed. ‘’The movement did not need a new Constitution,’’ Foner argues, “it needed the existing one enforced.” So consequential were those three Reconstruction-era amendments that in the ferment of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s no new constitutional amendments were required.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |