This semester, I am taking both this history class and American Politics. Many subjects overlap when we begin to discuss American democracy. Consequently,\u00a0The Rise of American Democracy<\/em> has been a slightly boring read for me personally. However, historical details not mentioned in political science add to the knowledge I already have and help to fill in gaps and explain motives. The struggle between Federalists and Democratic Republicans in particular is an event I have now read much about. Though I wish Wilentz talked less about politics and more about history, I understand that leaving one side out could deplete the value of the chapter.<\/p>\n

I agree with Mitch Han when he discusses Wilentz’s demonstrated dislike of the Federalists. Though historically, the Federalist party sputters and falls, Wilentz does not give them too much credit. He describes Adams as a “pudgy”, “short”, and “anxious”, and speaks very admiringly of Burr (Wilentz 32). Also, By highlighting the Alien and Sedition Acts as much as he did, Wilentz throws a negative light upon the methods used by Adams’s party. The Mastodon article puts the Republicans further ahead by crediting Jefferson with a symbol of continental domination and power. The Federalists never sent an exploration out West to possibly find an enormous, man-eating carnivore.<\/p>\n

Luckily for me, Chapter 5 and the Turner article proved to be more historical and less like my political science class. I liked how in the Turner article, he described the frontier as constantly being moved back from, first, the Atlantic coast of North America, to the Mississippi valley and Appalachian Mountain Range, and then deeper into the continent. I wonder if this is an ethnocentric way of seeing the “unexplored” land, because the indigenous tribes had existed on the continent for quite a while. However, I did like the way the article lead me to think of where our frontier is now. Is it possibly the arctic? Or, since we’ve landed on the moon, is it outer space and the far reaches of our solar system? Beyond? I don’t believe history repeats itself but I can imagine a campaign into the unknown similar to Columbus’s or Louis and Clark’s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This semester, I am taking both this history class and American Politics. Many subjects overlap when we begin to discuss American democracy. Consequently,\u00a0The Rise of American Democracy has been a slightly boring read for me personally. However, historical details not mentioned in political science add to the knowledge I already have and help to fill … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Blog post Oct. 23”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[98,131,134],"class_list":["post-508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-democratic-republicans","tag-exploration","tag-federalists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}