“People Power,” a book review from the New Yorker by Jill Lepore, asks a few very good questions: Who should participate in a democracy? What caused American democracy or how did it grow? How have historians in the past mistaken the causes of American democracy? How can historians balance those parts of history which deal with elites with those parts which are mostly populist or grassroots?<\/p>\n
As volumes could be written in an attempt to answer any of these questions, this brief article does not answer them but uses others arguments to illustrate different positions on some of these important questions. Lepore uses the different positions between Thomas Jefferson, who believed in democratic participation by white males, and Noah Webster, who seemed to believe that the masses were not fit to govern and that aristocrisy was always the mode of true governance, even in so-called democracies.<\/p>\n
Lepore also examines the example of a slave called Madison Washington, who played a role in politics by allowing congressman Joshua Giddings to take meaningful action in congress as an example of the balance that can be struck in examining politics as the business of elites and the masses, side by side. This examination seems to suggest that to examine one or the other would be myopic, and to combine both would be more honest when Lepore says “Giddings was able to do what he did because Washington did what he did.”<\/p>\n
People Power<\/em> pulls in sources such as books written by historians, articles and reviews from various magazines including the Atlantic and the New Republic, and a letter from Webster to Jefferson.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “People Power,” a book review from the New Yorker by Jill Lepore, asks a few very good questions: Who should participate in a democracy? What caused American democracy or how did it grow? How have historians in the past mistaken the causes of American democracy? How can historians balance those parts of history which deal … <\/p>\n