H.W. Brands | Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster
Recorded November 13, 2018
“Master storyteller” (Christian Science Monitor) H. W. Brands was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his bestselling biographies of Benjamin Franklin (The First American) and Franklin Roosevelt (Traitor to His Class). Exploring such diverse subjects as Aaron Burr, Ronald Reagan, the California gold rush, Andrew Jackson, the Vietnam War, and Bill Gates, his more than two dozen books “weave together keen political history with anecdote and marvelous sense of place” (The Boston Globe). Brands returns with the story of the early 19th--century political giants who took up the daunting challenge of completing the constitutional work begun by the Founding Fathers.
Пікірлер: 20
2:33 Woah, he's David Copperfield
I like to listen to H.W. Brands.
Very well spoken! I look forward to reading the book and pondering the current political sitautions through the historicity of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster's political motivations and actions.
this guy would be a good Lincoln imposter
This isn't the first book about Clay, Calhoun,and Webster as a group. The Great Triumvirate by Merrill D. Peterson was published in 1988. Read it as a companion to this book. The biography about me is titled "David Wilmot, Free-Soiler: A Biography of the Great Advocate of the Wilmot Proviso" by Charles Going.
1:01:50 The signs of a great prescient thinker!
Though this video entertainment is entitled, "Heirs of the Founders...", we, US citizens today, are certainly not the heirs of the founders. Clay, Calhoun, and Webster may have been, but this is a far different country from what they received. They received a representative republic, though the representation was limited to propertied whites in most cases. One may say with much reason that the same is true now, but there is a difference. In our day, there are corporations, and in 1886 the Constitution was was turned inside out by a SCOTUS clerk who read the 14th amendment as breathing personhood into the collective Pinocchio of corporations. One may suppose from the silence of his employers, the honorable justices of the Court, that he was speaking for them and was ready to "take the heat" if there had been any. There does not seem to have been any. That decision bore its poisonous fruit, and we are not heirs of the founders. We are the subjects, not of a king but of an oligarchy who own the controlling shares of our corporations. As far as war-making is concerned, we might just as well be the subjects of a martial king because the Constitution has been shown powerless to prevent an almost unbroken sequence of wars pursued by this country, certainly since the end of WW2. We are certainly not the heirs of a country which the founders had hoped would avoid the wars produced by the power of kings. More can be added to that observation.
When Prof Brands addresses very recent Presidents, Bush II and Obama, he makes excuses for what was done by them and their administrations with regard to making war, committing aggression, and condoning torture and even the denial of rights dating back to the Magna Carta. Though I enjoyed his discussions on the first 200 years of US history, I am greatly disappointed by his failure to condemn US presidents who, as Noam Chomsky writes, are indictable war criminals by the standards the US employed to try the NAZIs at Nuremberg from 1947-49.
talk about Donald Trump and Rockefeller also as Morgan, and that the elected officials of the country were the ones that people had chosen
Is that hair on purpose?
Hair
Could you imagine how amazing this man would be if he could make it even ONE speech without taking cheap shots at Trump? If I wanted a betamale to insert opinions on today’s politics, I’d turn on MSNBC and listen to Brand’s disgraced colleague Jon Meacham.
@GH-oi2jf
2 жыл бұрын
No amount of shots at Trump, cheap or otherwise, is too many. He is a fascist and a threat to the Republic.
@jhgust
2 жыл бұрын
Time to take your pills.