History
- A second (or third, or fourth) American revolution was conceived early on as attainable via the Article V Convention, as set forth in the U.S. Constitution. Occasional conventions were envisioned by many of the country's founding generation of leaders to be a sort of institutionalized avenue toward the ideal of revolution every twenty years, often attributed to Thomas Jefferson. According to Samuel Williams of Vermont (1743-1817), it was to be the means to accomplish periodic constitutional adaptation to changing times. Born the same year as Jefferson, Williams saw the federal constitutional convention as the vehicle for what loose constructionists today term the “living, breathing constitution.”
- The War of 1812 between the United States and the United Kingdom is sometimes referred to as the second American Revolution, stemming from the second British recognition of 1781 American borders. John C. Calhoun was perhaps the first to make this claim.
- The Confederates believed that they were fighting a second American Revolution by attempting to secede from the United States during the American Civil War.
Read more about this topic: Second American Revolution
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
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...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
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—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)