Imperial reforms after the Seven Years' War set Britain and its American colonies on a path that led to conflict, but what concerns prompted those initiatives and how did they operate? Instead of a single coherent program, officials in London adopted various policies for different reasons. The eventual backlash among colonists made the reasons for failure seem clearer in retrospect than at the time.
The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) hosts an annual conference to invite scholars, prominent writers, and speakers to come together each spring to discuss the school’s speaker series topic. American political order emerged from a wider crisis in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic world that brought the founding of the United States. Shared triumph in the Seven Years War (1756-1763) won British mastery of North America and ended threats to the colonies posed by France from Canada.
Three decades of elite failure has polarized the United States fuel
During the 1760s and 1770s, the colonists in British North America faced a crisis, both at home and abroad. The crown was increasingly threatening colonists' right to self-governance, but not everyone agreed about how and when to rebel. Radicals pushed change forward, but political moderate John Hancock, and others like him, offered stability to the revolutionary movement and had a profound influence on pivotal events, including authorizing the Declaration of Independence and ratifying the Constitution.
Moderation is a contested concept that, with surprisingly few exceptions, has been absent
Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott assesses the geopolitical challenge that China poses in the Indo-Pacific and how Western countries should respond. While no one can judge whether the chance of an assault on Taiwan is 50% or 10%, he warns the danger is high enough for serious countries to plan. The natural tendency for democracies to assume business-as-usual amounts to sleepwalking into crisis.
The American Civil War brought catastrophic costs to our nation and wrought serious internal changes. In addition to the staggering loss of life, the war erased billions of dollars of wealth and disrupted conventional patterns of life. However, these descriptions miss the most fundamental significance of the war - that it preserved the nation so that democracies could defend themselves against internal instability.
What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities.