Agrégation Externe : annales des sujets de leçon de civilisation

Un article de Wiki Agreg-Ink.

Cette page regroupe les sujets de leçon de civilisation à l'agrégation externe classés par ordre alphabétique depuis 2004.

Sommaire 1 Civilisation britannique 1.1 Années Wilson 1.2 BBC et le service public de l'audiovisuel 1.3 Débat sur l'abolition de l'esclavage 1.4 Décolonisation 1.5 Dévolution des pouvoirs à l'Ecosse et au pays de Galles 1.6 Ferguson 1.7 Glorieuse Révolution 1.8 Grande Famine en Irlande 1.9 Home Rule (1870-1914) 1.10 Locke 1.11 Milton 1.12 Morris 1.13 Parti libéral 1.14 Puritanisme 1.15 Relation spéciale (1945-1990) 1.16 Royal Academy 1.17 Royaume-Uni à l'épreuve de la crise (1970-1979) 1.18 Schisme d'Henri VIII 1.19 Voyages du capitaine Cook 1.20 Wollstonecraft 2 Civilisation américaine 2.1 Années Roosevelt 2.2 Antiesclavagisme (1776-1865) 2.3 Construction de l'Ouest américain (1865-1895) dans le cinéma hollywoodien 2.4 Contre-culture 2.5 Crime organisé à la ville et à l'écran 2.6 Démocratie américaine (1824-1848) 2.7 Droit de vote des femmes 2.8 Emerson 2.9 Empire de l'exécutif (L') 2.10 Federalist Papers (The) 2.11 Mencken 2.12 Olmsted 2.13 Présidence Obama 2.14 Républicains 2.15 Sud de l'après-Guerre de Sécession 2.16 Thomas Jefferson et l'ouest

Civilisation britannique

Années Wilson

• Révolution pendant les années Wilson (1964-1970)
• Les années Wilson : progrès social ou décadence ?
• "Democracy is breaking out all over." Cette affirmation de Barbara Castle (début 1969) à propos des syndicats vous semble-t-elle pouvoir s'appliquer à l'ensemble de la société britannique pendant les années Wilson ?
• La modernité dans les années 1960

BBC et le service public de l'audiovisuel

• The household
• The BBC and wars
• Interference
• Uniformity and variation
• The BBC and media bias
• Hegemony
• Citizenship
• The BBC and political balance
• Discuss the following statement : "The attacks on the supposed liberal or left-wing 'bias' of the BBC which emanated from the New Right, therefore, need to be understood as part and parcel of the broader contemporary attacks on the BBC over its funding and organisational structures." Tom Mills, The BBC: Myth of a Public Service, London, Verso, 2016, p. 113.
• Discuss the following statement: "Hitherto it had been assumed—apart from the occasional flurry over a programme—that Britain had ‘solved’ the problem of the political relations of broadcasting to Government, Parliament and the public. [...]. But some, with equal fervour, maintained that broadcasters were not challenging enough and were cowed by Government and vested interests to produce programmes which bolstered up the status quo and concealed how a better society could evolve." Annan Committee, Report of the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting, London, HMSO, 1977, p. 15.
• Discuss the following statement: "The cultural changes that the BBC underwent in the 1960s, the political significance of which have tended to be exaggerated, were partly attributable to the establishment of commercial television in 1955. Having lost its monopoly, the BBC was forced to innovate in order to restore its audience share and maintain its legitimacy." Tom Mills, The BBC: Myth of a Public Service, Verso, 2016.
• Discuss the following statement: "Broadcasting has unobstrusively contributed to the democratisation of everyday life, in public and private contexts, from its beginning to today." Paddy Scannell, "Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life, in Culture and Power, eds Scannell, Schessinger, Sparks, Sage Publications Ltd, 1992, p. 317-318.
• Discuss the following statement: "It would be wrong to suppose that the BBc exists on one side of a barrier and the public on the other. In fact there is no barrier. We and the people we serve are in a relationship so close that it is difficult to draw a clear boundary between us." BBC memorandum : the BBC and the public , 1975.
• Discuss the following statement: "By the 1960s, the principles of public service broadcasting had been accepted as those which should govern broadcasting in Britain, whatever organisational form it took, and from whatever source its finances came. [...] Yet public service broadcasting in the form which Reith and his disciples had given it never became fully institutionalised”. Tom Burns, The BBC: Public Institution and Private World, Palgrave Macmillan, 1977, p. 123.
• Discuss the following statement: "[Noel Newsome] became an evangelist for his new medium, believing the BBC had a vital role to play in the war effort; 'all news and views...must...serve the one real and fundamental, propagandist aim of helping us to win this war as rapidly as possible', he wrote in a memo in February 1940." Edward Stourton, Auntie’s War: The BBC During the Second World War, London, Penguin Random House, 2017, p. 168.

Débat sur l'abolition de l'esclavage

• The end of slavery in Britain: Parliament's or the people's victory?
• "[...] the more the character of the planters is raised, the lower is sunk and depressed the system; for it is a fact sworn to by the planters themselves, that, notwithstanding their merciful conduct, in ten years one-sixth of the whole population has perished not murdered by the planters, but murdered by the system. There is no instance, I am ready to admit, of unnecessary oppression, but there have been instances of necessary oppression; and the system is shewn to be so destructive to human life, that it ought to be abolished." (Mr. Fowell Buxton, in Report of the Debate in the House of Commons, on Friday, the 15th of April, 1831; on Mr. Fowell Buxton's motion to consider and adopt the best means for effecting the abolition of colonial slavery. Extracted from the Mirror of Parliament, Part LXXXIII [London, 1831, p. 7])
• “Anti-slavery provided the opportunity for elevating Britain by seizing the initiative and restoring the British belief that they, above all others, were a people wedded to liberty. After all, which institution seemed more violent and more thoroughly a denial of liberties than the Atlantic slave trade?”, James Walvin, Britain’s Slave Empire, Stroud: Tempus, 2007 (2000), 96
• [...] the more the character of the planters is raised, the lower is sunk and depressed the system; for it is a fact sworn to by the planters themselves, that, notwithstanding their merciful conduct, in ten years one-sixth of the whole population has perished not murdered by the planters, but murdered by the system. There is no instance, I am ready to admit, of unnecessary oppression, but there have been instances of necessary oppression; and the system is shewn to be so destructive to human life, that it ought to be abolished." Foxwell Buxton, April 1831
• "The story of the great humanitarian crusade has been frequently told and as frequently misunderstood. In one of the greatest propaganda movements of all times, the abolitionists had, before 1833, gone far beyond the bounds of British West Indian slavery. They had dreamed of the universal abolition of slavery and the slave trade. They had lobbied at the European Congresses from 1815 to 1820 in favor of an international ban on the slave trade, and were even prepared to go to war for abolition. They had urged the government not to recognize Brazil without an explicit promise to renounce the slave trade. Actually, however, their condemnation of slavery applied only to the Negro and only to the Negro in the British West Indies." Eric Williams
• "Slave emancipation triumphed where three factors favourable to such an outcome coalesced: (i) a political crisis marginalizing slaveholders and giving birth to a new type of state; (ii) the actuality or prospect of slave resistance or rebellion; (iii) social mobilisations encouraging the partisans of reform or revolution to rally popular sentiment with anti-slavery acts."

Décolonisation

• "Decolonization was not a process but a clutch of fitful activities and events, played out in conference rooms, acted out in protests mounted in city streets, fought over in jungles and mountains." Raymond F. Betts, Decolonization, New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 1.
• "The quintessential problem of the post-1964 period was no longer (except in certain outstanding instances) that of whether and how to decolonize, but rather how to graft the plethora of ‘new’ underdeveloped states into western interests." Robert Holland, European Decolonization, 1918-1981. An Introductory Survey, London: Macmillan, 1985, p.269.
• Internationalism and nationalism in British decolonisation (1919-1984)
• "Postwar imperial ideologies remained and remain progressivist and arrogantly ethnocentric; they did not and do not remain specifically colonial." F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler, "Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule", 1989

Dévolution des pouvoirs à l'Ecosse et au pays de Galles

• Regionalism and devolution
• Devolution and Britishness in the Old and New Labour
• Devolution: a means or an end?
• Comment on the following sentence : "Is Britain a nation-state (one nation and one state) as many politicians and citizens routinely suppose, or is it a union-state (one state uniting four nations, England, Scotland, Wales, and (part of) Ireland), or is it both (one state but five nations with Britain itself the overarching fifth nation)?" (Christopher Bryant, The Nations of Britain)
• Comment on David McCrone's judgment that "Great Britain is a state-nation masquerading as a nation-state."

Ferguson

• Discuss the following statement: “Ferguson was neither distrustful of wealth nor did he believe that it invariably retarded social virtue and a free society”. Ronald Hamowy, The Political Sociology of Freedom: Adam Ferguson and F.A. Hayek, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005, p. 83.
• The State of Nature in Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society
• The paradox of progress in Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society
• "Ferguson was well aware of the role of unintended consequences in the process of social change." Craig Smith, "Ferguson and the active Genius of Mankind" in Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature, edited by Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle, London: Pickering & Chatto, n° 4, 2008, p. 165
• Comment on the following statement: "Civil liberty was the great object of Ferguson's enterprise. And his design was offered to protect the people and their liberty from themselves." (Gary L. McDowell)
• "Ferguson was no revolutionary; he did not call for radical alterations or changes in the prevailing social structure or form of government, but for a change of heart, vigilance, and liberal sentiments, with which these are perfectly compatible." (introduction de An Essay on the History of Civil Society)

Glorieuse Révolution

• Discuss the following statement: “Was it [the Glorious Revolution] achieved by what might be termed the most successful confidence trick in British history? One thing is certain: William of Orange did not come over to England by popular demand. The thick smokescreen which became the Whig interpretation was put up very quickly to mask what had really happened.” Eveline Cruickshanks, The Glorious Revolution, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, p. 2.
• Discuss the following statement: “[...] though this [the Glorious Revolution] cannot be called a revolution by the people, [...] it can be described as a popular revolution.” Edward Vallance, The Glorious Revolution, 1688: Britain’s Fight for Liberty [2006], London: Abacus, 2007, p. 19.
• Discuss the following statement: “The most striking feature of the Glorious Revolution was its failure to effect any fundamental changes in the English Church or constitution. [...] The changes that came over the constitution between 1689 and 1714 did not originate directly in the legislation or pronouncements made in 1688-9, nor were they envisaged by the architects of the Glorious Revolution. They were instead the direct product of England’s involvement in a major European war.” Barry Coward, The Stuart Age. A History of England 1603-1714, London; New York: Longman, 1980, p. 312.
• Discuss the following statement: “By the Declaration of Right and the Bill of Rights the tenure of the Crown was made strictly conditional. [...] By this beneficent Revolution, the liberty of the subject and the power of Parliament were finally secured against the power of the Crown.” George Macaulay Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts [1904], London, 1960, p. 430.
• Discuss the following statement: “[...] there were practical and political reasons of obvious importance why the Glorious Revolution became so preeminently glorious for men of substantial property. This was a revolution both conceived and carried through by representatives of the propertied classes, and if it was not wholly in the interests of these classes that it was effected, it was not to be expected that those interests would be ignored in its aftermath.” Geoffrey Holmes, The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain, 1660-1722, London; New York: Longman, 1993, p. 278.
• Discuss the following statement: “1689 could both be seen as having changed quite a lot and as having altered very little – as a victory for popular sovereignty or as a miraculous deliverance wrought by God. The ability of the Glorious Revolution in England to appear all things to so many different types of people, of course, goes a considerable way towards explaining its success.” Tim Harris, Revolution. The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy 1685-1720, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007, p. 310.
• Discuss the following statement: “In a sense, the Glorious Revolution began as an attempt to vindicate Tory principles. Unfortunately for Tory Anglicans, things got out of hand, and they had to concede much more than they would have wanted (most obviously on the central issue of the transfer of the Crown). But they also salvaged much, so that the new regime was established upon principles which were much more conducive to Toryism than is normally thought.”

Tim Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts. Party Conflict in a Divided Society, 1660-1715, London: Longman, 1993, p. 119.

• Discuss the following statement: “What is [the Bill of Rights], but a bargain, which the parts of the government made with each other to divide powers, profits, and privileges? You shall have so much, and I will have the rest; and with respect to the nation, it said, for your share, You shall have the right of petitioning. This being the case, the bill of rights is more properly a bill of wrongs, and of insult.” Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, part II, London, 1792, p. 52.
• Discuss the following statement: "If James stretched his powers beyond conventional limits, he did so because he could not achieve his objectives without doing so. In accusing him of trying to establish absolutism, his contemporaries and later historians confused means with ends, treating James's abuses of power as a central rather than incidental feature of his rule." John Miller, James II (1978), New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 128.
• Dissenting and Resisting in the Glorious Revolution
• Violence and compromise in the British Isles, 1688-1691
• Religious Toleration in the Glorious Revolution
• Discuss the following statement: "By any reckoning, William's decision to invade England was s huge gamble - he was playing a high-stakes game that could very easily have ended in disaster both for him and for the Protestant interest in north-west Europe." Tim Harris, Revolution. The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685-1720, London: Penguin, 2007, p. 274.
• Discuss the following statement: "Mrs Thatcher claimed 'the GR' of 1688 as a great victory for democracy, with which in fact it had nothing to do. 1688 established the sovereignty of a Parliament which represented perhaps 10 % of the male population, and secured in power the Whig oligarchy..." Christopher Hill, The Guardian, July 15th 1989.

Grande Famine en Irlande

• "It is stated by many practical persons that the management of land under such circumstances becomes impossible, and that an enforcement of the most ordinary legal right is attended with personal risks to life and to property." House of Lords Colonization from Ireland, Report of the Select Committee, session 1847.
• "There was no conspiracy theory to destroy the Irish nation. The scale of the actual outlay to meet the famine and the expansion of the public relief system are in themselves impressive evidence that the state was by no means always indifferent to Irish needs". Robert Dudley Williams and Thomas Desmond Williams, The Great Irish Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845-52 [1956], ed. Cormac O'Grada. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994
• "The Christian duty of charity continued to dominate the actions of groups like the Quakers, but for many in Britain, philanthropic feelings existed alongside a strong desire to see the fundamental changes in Ireland they believed would prevent the need for continuous private generosity." Peter Gray, "The Triumph of Dogma: Ideology and Famine Relief", History Ireland, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer 1995), p. 29
• "... the British authorities could and did make choices, and those were all dictated by the ideologically-based conviction that centralisation of the Irish relief institutions and an open border policy was the best option to achieve the intertwined goals of ending the famine, restructuring [...] Irish society and making the Irish people pay for what was regarded as "their" crisis." Eric Vanhaute, Richard Paping, and Cormac O Grada, "The European subsistence crisis of 1845-1850: a Comparative Perspective" in E. Vanhaute, R. Paping and C. O Grada (eds), When the Potato Failed: Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845 -1850, Turnhout, Brepols, 2007, p.31.
• “The Poor Law appears to be thoroughly naturalized in Ireland. Your lordship would have been delighted to have heard it spoken of as I have done, and that by persons who did not know me, and who praised it as having been the salvation of the country, exclaiming ‘what should we have done without it!’” Sir George Nicholls to Lord John Russell, letter dated Dublin, 16th September 1853, quoted in Sir George Nicholls, A History of the Irish Poor Law, in connexion with the Condition of the People, first edition London: John Murray, 1856; this reprint New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967, p. 398
• The Irish Famine of 1847 had results, social and political, that constitute it one of the most important events in Irish history for more than two hundred years. It is impossible for anyone who knew the country previous to that period, and who has thoughtfully studied it since, to avoid the conclusion that so much has been destroyed, or so greatly changed, that the Ireland of old times will be seen no more.” Alexander Martin Sullivan, New Ireland, London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1877 (Alexander Martin Sullivan was the sole proprietor and editor of The Nation from 1855 to 1876.)
• “The introduction of the poor laws was followed at no distant interval by the fearful calamity of the Irish famine, a calamity which taught the proprietors what a terrible burthen a numerous tenantry might become. The abolition of the protective duty on corn introduced another element of disturbance in the arrangements of the Irish farms. Never had so many causes combined in so short a time to effect vital changes in the circumstances of the land occupiers of a country.”Isaac Butt, Land Tenure in Ireland; a plea for the Celtic race. Dublin: J. Falconer, 1866 (third edition)
• “The danger remains that much current and future scholarship on the Famine will make its mark in academic circles but not in the wider world where images of genocide will persist.” Mary Daly, ‘Revisionism and the Great Irish Famine’, in D. George Boyce & Alan O’Day (eds.), The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy, London: Routledge, (1996)
• The experience of the famine, both then and later, became inextricably linked with the question of the Union and its reality, even its viability.” D. George Boyce, Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The Search for Stability, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, revised ed. 2005, p. 126
• “The predominant academic view until the early 1990s was that while the official response to the Famine had often been shortsighted, nevertheless, the Famine was an unavoidable Malthusian catastrophe, a view underlying the contemporary official response.”Patrick Maume, “Irish political history: guidelines and reflections”, in M. McAuliffe, K. O’Donnell and L. Lane (eds), Palgrave Advances in Irish History, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 14
• Poverty and morality in the Great Irish Famine
• "Esquimaux and New Zealanders are more thrifty and industrious than these people who deserve to be left to their fate instead of the hardworking people of Englang being taxed for their support, but can we do so ? We shall be equally blamed for keeping them alive or letting them die and we have only to select between the censure of the Economists or the Philanthropists - which do you prefer?" Letter from Lord Clarendon to Lord John Russell, 10 Aug. 1847, quoted in Peter Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843-1850, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999, p.292
• Providence and the Great Famine
• Reform and revolution in the Great Irish Famine
• Philanthropy and the Great Irish Famine
• Entitlement and the Famine
• Silence during the Great Irish Famine

Home Rule (1870-1914)

• The Home Rule debate and party politics (1870-1914)
• Home Rule and conciliation (1870-1914)
• Home rule and the crisis of the Liberal Party from 1870 to 1914
• Discuss the following statement: "[W]hile the Irish enjoyed less freedom they were likely, despite the modesty of their immediate claims, in the long run to demand more than their colonial contemporaries. Even their constitutional leaders talked not of concessions to be granted but of rights to be acknowledged. They deemed themselves to be the spokesmen not of colonists but of an ancient people." Nicolas Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969, p. 196.4
• Discuss the following statement: "In an era when so many in Ireland remained thoroughly ‘disaffected’ from the British polity, Irish nationalism was shaped by the evolution of the widening British imperial sphere and by Irish responses to it." Paul A. Townend, The Road to Home Rule. Anti-imperialism and the Irish National Movement, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2016, p. 8
• Discuss the following statement: "The alliance between Liberalism and the Home Rule movement which was formulated in 1886, and which lasted virtually until 1918, was perhaps a likely, but never an automatic denouement to the politicking of the early 1880s." Alvin Jackson, Home Rule. An Irish History 1800-2000, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, p. 58.
• Discuss the following statement: "Gladstone was a pragmatist who was convinced that the extension of responsible government to Ireland would strengthen rather than weaken the empire. He was equally determined to relieve the over-burdened Westminster Parliament and thus strengthen it for its imperial tasks." John Kendle,

Ireland and the Federal Solution. The Debate over the United Kingdom Constitution, 1870-1921, Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989, p. 41.

• Home Rule and Radicalism
• Discuss the following statement: In their quest for Home Rule, Irish parliamentary nationalists failed to apprehend the rise of Irish unionism and unionist discontent."
• Discuss the following statement: "In an age of emergent democracy, Home Rule pre-eminently brought into the public arena the problem of the respective rights of majorities and minorities." Alan O’Day, Irish Home Rule, 1867-1921, Manchester University Press, 1998, p. 3.
• Centre and margins
• Discuss the following statement: "Consider the lengths the Tories were prepared to go to between 1911 and 1914. [...] One historian has concluded, with a degree of bafflement, that the Conservative Party’s support for Ulster was based on 'something other than political manoeuvring and political calculation'. This is only partially correct, as it just so happened that the defence of the Union was an issue that was coincidentally both a vote winner and an ancient and fundamental Conservative totem." Daniel M. Jackson, Popular Opposition to Irish Home Rule in Edwardian Britain, Liverpool University Press, 2009, pp. 20-21.
• Discuss the following statement: "In speaking of Home Rule as threatening the Empire, its opponents did not assimilate the status of Ireland to that of Britain’s transoceanic colonies. Quite the reverse: they associated it with the integrity of the British state itself." Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire. Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture, Oxford: OUP, 2000, p. 65.

Locke

• La force de l'habitude dans Some Thoughts Concerning Education
• "Locke, with the general aim of producing a 'sound mind in a sound body' has more particularly in view the 'breeding' of a 'gentleman's son' rather than the rearing of heroes or saints." Basil Willey, The Seventeenth-Century Background, Penguin, 1962 (1934), p. 243.
• Trouve-t-on une philosophie de l'éducation dans Some Thoughts Concerning Education ?
• Les vertus de l'expérience dans Some Thoughts Concerning Education
• Conservatisme et innovations dans Some Thoughts Concerning Education
• The religious dimension in Some Thoughts Concerning Education
• Child's rights in Some Thoughts Concerning Education
• Teaching and good government in Some Thoughts Concerning Education
• Theory and practice in Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Milton

• Victoria Kahn : "(...) just as for Milton consent is not meaningful without the possibility of dissent, so the ability to transfer power to the sovereign is evidence of the power to revoke allegiance."
• Covenant and nation
• In her book The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution, Elizabeth Skerpan wrote: "Within his domestic audience, Milton repeatedly tries to exhort his readers to regeneration, never a state to be achieved passively or taken for granted. Believing regeneration possible for all, he cannot rhetorically close the door to any and still hope to persuade people to his cause". How may this statement help us understand both Areopagitica and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates?
• Freedom and knowledge in Milton's Areopagitica
• "[Milton] appears first as a regicide rather than as a republican." (Thomas N. Corns, 1995)
• Republic and Commonwealth in Areopagitica and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates

Morris

• Culture du peuple et culture de l'élite
• News from Nowhere : le mariage
• News from Nowhere : romantisme ou révolution ?
• Le point de vue masculin et condition féminine dans News from Nowhere
• Le mariage dans News from Nowhere

Parti libéral

• “Lloyd George’s attempt to perpetuate the politics of coalitionism and national unity [after the war] was ultimately doomed by developments external to the Coalition and by its disintegration from within”, David Powell, British Politics, 1910-1935: The Crisis of the Party System, London: Routledge, 2004, 90.
• The Liberal Party, 1906-1924: division and unity
• Discuss the following statement: “Unless Liberalism is to be sterilized for effective action, it is therefore manifest that Liberals must now ‘face the music’. We have to destroy the power of the Lords to kill, mutilate or unduly delay Liberal measures.” J.A. Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism: New Issues of Democracy, London: P.S. King and Son, 1909, p. 20.
• “The war and its aftermath uprooted the political world that Liberals had understood and substituted something which seemed by comparison brash, cheap and contemptible”. Michael Bentley, The Liberal Mind 1914-29, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 1.
• “[Lloyd George and Asquith] may be accused of dividing their party in its later years of decline. Equally clearly, together they generated the authority that transformed the fractious ranks of post-Gladstone Liberals for several years into an incomparable party of government.” Kenneth O. Morgan, “Asquith and Lloyd George: Architects or Assassins?”, p. 122-136 dans Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, volume 16.2, 2011, p. 136.
• "There are grounds for arguing that La-bour’s rise to power came about because it consciously moved to fill the vacuum left by the Liberal Party’s various acts of self-immolation."

Puritanisme

• Discuss the following statement: "Puritanism has no continuing history." Geoffrey Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government. Papers and Reviews 1946-1972, volume 2, Parliament/Political Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1974, p. 160.
• Discuss the following statement :"Thus it appears that the dominant religious culture of the Jacobean Church was not puritanism so much as the active alliance of conformist Calvinists and puritans." Kenneth Fincham, "Introduction' in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1993.
• Discuss the following statement :"Above all else, puritanism was a movement grounded in a highly distinctive cast of mind - or to use a more fashionable term, mentalité - which displayed itself in the individual puritan as a peculiarly severe yet vibrant spirituality, and within groups of puritans as a unique and dynamic religious culture."

Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, The Culture of English Puritanism.

• Discuss the following statement: "Puritanism is not best regarded as a distinctive or novel body of ideas or doctrines, held only by Puritans, but as a style of piety, a mode of behavior, a se of priorities, which contemporaries [...] were quite capable of recognizing when they saw them." Peter Lake, "Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson". Journal of British Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Apr., 1988), pp. 81-116.

Relation spéciale (1945-1990)

• "Because the Prime Minister has now made Britain totally dependent on the United States for the supply and maintenance of its strategic nuclear missiles and for the testing of its warheads, Britain is totally incapable of standing up to that great power on any major issue of defence or foreign policy. I suggest that that is something that should disturb Conservative members as much as it disturbs us." Denis Healey, Sgadow Foreign Secretary, speaking in a House of Commons defence debate, 28 October 1987, Hansard (Commons), Volume 121, col. 326-7.
• Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
• "The real question is whether in fact the British did too well out of the American connection, whether the privileged access they enjoyed to the policy-making machinery, as to American intelligence and military technology, did not exact a higher price than London was willing to admit." Peter Mangold, Success and Failure in British Foreign Policy - Evaluating the Record, 1900-2000, Oxford: Palgrave, 2002, p. 92.
• Relation "spéciale" : relation paradoxale ?
• "Relation spéciale" et Pax Americana

Royal Academy

• La fondation de la Royal Academy a-t-elle sonné le glas du mécénat des aristocrates ?
• L'école anglaise de paysage

Royaume-Uni à l'épreuve de la crise (1970-1979)

• Discuss the following statement: "I make one final point. It is sometimes said that the British people are not living within their means and need to be taught a sharp lesson about the reality of our condition. But on present policies we shall be living within our means by late 1977 or early 1978. Meanwhile the British people are enduring 1.5 million unemployed, a loss of potential production on an enormous scale, and an actual fall in their real standard of living. There is no canon of morality or economics of social democracy which demands from them a further and needless sacrifice." Memorandum by the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Anthony Crosland, economic strategy - the IMF, Cabinet Papers, November 29, 1976.
• The crisis of the two-party model in the UK in the 1970s
• Radicals and moderates in 1970s Britain
• Discuss the following statement: “The Winter of Discontent does, indeed, represent and constitute a genuine crisis of the British state and of Keynesianism as an economic paradigm, but, perhaps like all state crises, it was a manufactured or constructed crisis. [...] That it was seen as a crisis – and a crisis of Keynesianism and an overextended state held to ransom by the unions specifically – gives the Winter of Discontent its enduring significance”. Colin Hay, “The Winter of Discontent Thirty Years On”, The Political Quarterly, vol. 80, nº 4 (2009), p.550-551.
• Discuss the following statement: “The bitter and intense industrial disputes of the autumn and winter of 1978/9 helped change the course of British politics.” BBC News, "Winter of Discontent 30 Years On", 6 September 2007, http://news.bbc.co.u...ess/7598647.stm
• Discuss the following statement: “[T]he Scotland and Wales Acts were born, not out of a principled belief in the dispersal of power from Whitehall, but from expediency. [...] Nor did Labour ever seek to secure the wider degree of political support necessary for a constitutional scheme of such magnitude. [...] The scheme itself was an impossible one to defend, and indeed few attempted to defend it.” Vernon Bogdanor (Professor of Politics and Government), ‘The Defeat of Devolution’, The Spectator, 10 March 1979. Reproduced in Lindsay Paterson, A Diverse Assembly. The Debate on a Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh University Press, 1998, p. 132-133.
• Discuss the following statement: “[W]e must push ahead and develop plans for further participation, freely negotiated, and have greater mutual understanding from the start across the negotiating table, which should improve the climate for negotiations. This means better communications and constant effort by trade unions and managements alike, in explaining to employees the true facts of economic life on which responsible negotiations will be undertaken on their behalf. This process of explanation must be carried on not merely in times of crisis, when we are on the edge of a precipice, but in good times, in bad times and continuously. To my mind, this is the first absolute essential.” Viscount Rochdale (Conservative), House of Lords Hansard, Collective Bargaining, April 10, 1978, vol 390, cc409-410 (debate cc357-442).
• Discuss the following statement: “For just as the moral reforms of the 1960s were closely associated with a particular political approach, so the moral conservatism represented by Mrs Whitehouse, while eschewing overt political commitment, was fully complicit with a political approach which by the end of the 1970s had achieved a precarious hegemony. Sir Keith Joseph, representing the new conservatism, could, without any sense of incongruity, advise his supporters to ‘take inspiration from that remarkable woman’”. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: the regulation of sexuality since 1800, London, Longman (1981), 2nd edition 1989, p. 278.
• Discuss the following statement: “[...] May 1979 was less of a boundary between two political worlds than is commonly accepted. General elections, like the beginnings and ends of decades, are rarely as decisive as they seem.” Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out. What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies, London, Faber & Faber, 2009, p. 517.
• Discuss the following statement: “The collapse of the Heath Government, and the failure of the Conservatives in the first 1974 election, gave a great stimulus to radical right criticisms of the policies of all governments since 1945, including the Heath one.” Arthur Marwick, A History of the Modern British Isles 1914-1999, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000, p. 267.

Schisme d'Henri VIII

• "Henricianism was not simply a call to England ti disown Rome's jurisdiction but, in its largest terms, a promise of radical and necessary renewal of the whole commonwealth." J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, Methuen, 1968, p.327.
• La nation, l'Etat, l'Eglise et la monarchie, acteurs du schisme
• La résistance au schisme
• Conservateurs et réformateurs de 1527 à 1549
• Pragmatisme et dogmatisme dans la Réforme henricienne
• "So far from attempting to build a despotism in England, Thomas Cromwell was that country’s first parliamentary statesman." (G.R.Elton, England under the Tudors, 1955)
• Le schisme et la politique étrangère de l'Angleterre (1521-1540)
• “ I am very sorry to know and hear, how unreverently that most precious jewel the word of God is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern, contrary to the true meaning and doctrine of the same. ” (Henry VIII’s speech to Parliament, December 1545, in Edward Hall, Henry VIII, 1548.)
• “ The [Henrician] Reformation is part of the laymen’s revolution. For centuries the Church had dominated every part of the nation’s life, even its military activity. Now the laymen were determined to bring that domination to an end. ” (Stephen Neill, Anglicanism, 1958, p. 34.)
• “ The piecemeal Reformation was a peaceful Reformation. ” (Christopher Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, 1987.)
• “ The English Reformation was emphatically a political revolution, and its author King Henry VIII resisted, for a time ferociously, many of the religious consequences which accompanied the legal changes everywhere else in Europe. ” (Owen Chadwick, The Reformation, 1964.)
• “ The Henrician Reformation and the creation of the royal supremacy turned the Church in England (…) into the Church of England. ” (G.R. Elton, England under the Tudors, 1955.)
• "The Reformation did not produce a Protestant England: it produced a divided England." (Christopher Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, 1987.)
• La Réforme henricienne : un catholicisme sans le pape ?
• Via media et raison d’Etat
• Henri VIII et la raison d'Etat
• Henri VIII et la propagande

Voyages du capitaine Cook

• Perceptions and interpretations
• Frames and patterns in James Cook, The Journals
• Curiosity
• Savageness and civilization
• Rules and power
• "from what I have said ... happy in not knowing the use of them (p. 174)"
• Discuss the following statement: "The journals give us a view from outside. But the view from inside is important : without it we miss a very large part of the significance of the voyages in history. For what they did was to discover not merely island but people, and the crisis in development was overwhelmingly due to the impact of western European society, as represented in Cook and his successors, with its necessary limitations of understanding and foresight, on another society - mature indeed and fairly balanced in itself, but as necessarily doomed from the moment the sails of the voyager appeared in the horizon." The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, ed.J. C. Beaglehole, Cambridge: CUP, 1955. Vol. 1: The Voyage of the Endeavour, 1768-1771, p. clxxii.
• Discuss the following statement: "During our short stay in this Sound I have observed that this Second Visit of ours hath not mended the morals of the Natives of either Sex, [...] such are the consequences of a commerce with Europeans and what is still more to our Shame civilized Christians, we debauch their Morals already too prone to vice and we interduce among them wants and perhaps diseases which they never before knew and which serves only to disturb that happy tranquillity they and their fore Fathers had injoy’d.” James COOK, The Journals, ed. Philip EDWARDS [1999], Penguin Classics, 2003, pp. 276-277.
• Discuss the following statement: "The captain of a voyage of discovery, a de facto scientist, and the writer of an official document, Cook was also an icon, a symbol of Britain and its representative in the Pacific. This construction was made possible in part by that first-person narration, which, by ostensibly allowing readers to see the New World through his eyes, encouraged them to identify both personally and nationally with the project of his voyages." N.E. CURRIE, Constructing Colonial Discourse: Captain Cook at Nootka Sound, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005, p. 40.
• Discuss the following statement: "To all these great qualities Captain Cook added the amiable virtues. That it was impossible for any one to excel him in humanity, is apparent from his treatment of his men through all the voyages, and from his behaviour to the natives of the countries which were discovered by him. The health, the convenience and, as far as it could be admitted, the enjoyment of the seamen, were the constant objects of his attention; and he was anxiously solicitous to ameliorate the condition of the inhabitants of the several islabds and places he visited". Andrew Kippis, A Narrative of the Voyages Eound the World Performed by Captain James Cook. With an Account of his Life, during the Previous and Intervening Periods (1788), London:Scott, Webster and Geary, 1842.
• Discuss the following statement: "[...] it was their very richness and ambiguity that makes the voyages so absorbing, even two hundred and fifty years later. The fact that the morality of cross-cultural contact was so much debated at the time – indeed, it was sometimes agonized over in voyage journals composed in the immediate aftermath of tense meetings or violence – accentuates the richness and the contemporary salience of these stories." Nicholas THOMAS [2003], Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook, Penguin Books, 2018, p. 18.

Wollstonecraft

• La modernité chez Mary Wollstonecraft
• Mary Wollstonecraft, auteur puritain
• Maternité et citoyenneté dans A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• Ordre et décadence dans A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• Dans sa dédicace à M. Talleyrand-Périgord, Mary Wollestonecraft déclare : "Independence (is) the basis of every virtue". Commentez cette affirmation.
• "If the sexes be really in a steta of warfare..." (ch. VII, p. 203) : la guerre des sexes dans A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Civilisation américaine

Années Roosevelt

• Discuss the following statement: “Enough help had been given to enough people to make Roosevelt a hero to millions, but the same system that had brought depression and crisis—the system of waste, of inequality, of concern for profit over human need— remained.” Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, New York: Harper Collins, 2005 (1980), pp. 403-4.
• Centralization in the Roosevelt years.
• Discuss the following statement: “Above all, the New Deal gave to countless Americans who had never had much of it a sense of security, and with it a sense of having a stake in their country. And it did it all without shredding the American Constitution or sundering the American people.” David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 379.
• Discuss the following statement: “Most obviously, the liberalization of the Democratic Party under Roosevelt and the New Deal realignment led to the development of a modern welfare state and a transition from legislative to executive-oriented legislation.” Sidney M. Milkis, “Roosevelt and the Transcendence of Partisan Politics”, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 100, No. 3 Autumn 1985,p. 498.
• Discuss the following statement: “In making a state of procedures that organized political life at home, and in creating an assertive state that crusaded almost without limit for American power and values, the New Deal proved to be a rejuvenating triumph.” Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, New York: Liveright, 2013, p. 475.
• Discuss the following statement: “Principal legacies of the New Deal have been a massive expansion of government power and loss of liberty.” Jim Powell, FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and his New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003, p. xiv.
• Discuss the following statement: “By using the new materials of social justice we have undertaken to erect on the old foundations a more enduring structure for the better use of future generations.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937.
• Discuss the following statement: “As wartime commander in chief, Roosevelt could exert power over the American economy and society transcending any he had previously wielded, even in the first heady days of the New Deal.” James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: the Soldier of Freedom, New York: Harcourt, 1970, p. 417.
• Discuss the following statement: “From an ideological standpoint, the New Deal was illogical. But from a political standpoint it was marvelous. Its very inconsistency facilitated its appeal to a broad range of otherwise mutually hostile groups.” Thomas K. McCraw, “The New Deal and the Mixed Economy,” in Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated. Harvard Sitkoff, ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985,p. 63.
• Inter-partisan conflict in the Roosevelt years.
• Innovation in the Roosevelt years.
• "One of the most lasting contributions was to open up the political process to previously excluded groups of interests and voters. As such, historians often speak of a New deal for blacks or labor, or various ethnic groups. Equally, there was a New Deal for women." Susan Ware, "Women and the New Deal", in Fifty Years Ltaer: The New Deal Evaluated, 1985.
• "The truth is that the experimentatlism of the new deal was an ineffective mess that further tangled the knot of the great depression. After years of unprecedented economic intervention by Roosevelt, competition was stifled, investment plummeted, restrictive cartelization abounded, industrial production stagnated, and budget deficit skyrocketed. Wage controls and new union contracts limited the number of workers private-sector employers could hire, leaving unemployment to hover around 20%." Jay Wiley, "The Nex Deal Myth", American Thinker, October 31st 2010.

Antiesclavagisme (1776-1865)

• The language of rights in antislavery and abolitionist writings and arguments from 1776 to 1865
• Antislavery sentiments, 1776-1865
• Compromise in antislavery and abolitionist writings and arguments from 1776 to 1865
• Unity and division
• Blood in antislavery and abolitionist writings and arguments from 1776 to 1865
• Principles and pragmatism
• Discuss the following statement: “Abolitionism was born with the American republic. It did not fade until the nation’s near-death experience of the Civil War. Yet while abolitionists worked consistently to destroy slavery and racial injustice in these years, their strategy and tactics constantly evolved. The era between the American Revolution and the 1830s was the first great period of transformation. What began as an elite abolitionist movement in Pennsylvania during the post Revolutionary period yielded to an egalitarian movement based in Massachusetts during the early 1830s.” Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002, p. 2.
• Discuss the following statement: “Black abolitionism existed as a distinct phenomenon in the years before the Civil War, with its own institutions and concerns. African Americans made antiracism, at a programmatic as well as intellectual level, an essential part of the abolitionist project. They remained instrumental in developing movement strategy and ideology, taking on the burden of redefining the white man's democracy.” Manisha Sinha, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition , New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016, p. 338.
• Discuss the following statement: “In the history of reform few slogans have brought forth such confusion and controversy as “immediate emancipation.” To the general public in the 1830’s the phrase meant simply the abolition of Negro slavery without delay or preparation. But the word “immediate” may denote something other than a closeness in time; to many abolitionists it signified a rejection of intermediate agencies or conditions, a directness or forthrightness in action or decision.”

David Brion Davis, “The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought,” in John R. McKivigan (ed.), Abolitionism and American Reform, New York: Garland Publishing, 1999, p. 1.

• Discuss the following statement: “The great debate among American abolitionists prior to the Civil War centered upon the question of the proper method of ending slavery. How was a movement with negligible support outside of the northern states to abolish an institution that existed in the southern states?” Stanley C. Harrold, Jr., “The Southern Strategy of the Liberty Party,” in John R. McKivigan, Abolitionism and American Politics and Government, New York: Garland Publishing, 1999, p. 33.
• Discuss the following statement: “The abolitionist crusade began during the first administration of Andrew Jackson with a declaration of holy war against slavery, and it ended nearly thirty-five years later when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” John L. Thomas, “The Abolitionist Crusade,” in Slavery Attacked: the Abolitionist Crusade, Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965, p. 1.
• Discuss the following statement: " 'Abolitionism' is a more specific term than 'antislavery,' and no doubt it should be confined to the doctrine that slavery must be abolished, as opposed to the argue [...] for a greater flexibility of language, which would recognize that abolitionists thought of themselves as 'antislavery people,' and which would draw distinctions according to historical context, rather than relying on abstract and changeless categories." David Brion Davis, "Antislavery or Abolition?", Reviews in American History, volume 1, n° 1, 1973, p. 97-98.
• Discuss the following statement: "All abolitionists were radicals when it came to slavery and race." Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016, p. 256.
• Discuss the following statement: "Abolitionism was a religious movement, emerging from the ferment of evangelical Protestantism, psychologically akin to other reforms — women’s rights, temperance, and pacifism — which agitated the spirits of the Northern middle classes during the three decades before the Civil War. Its philosophy was essentially a theology, its technique similar to the techniques of revivalism, its agencies the church congregations of the towns." Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948, p. 142.

Construction de l'Ouest américain (1865-1895) dans le cinéma hollywoodien

• (In)equality in American Westerns
• Regeneration through violence in Hollywood Westerns
• American Wars and the Western
• Manifest Destiny in Hollywood westerns
• The West: a land of opportunity?
• Discuss the following statement: "“The Western’s Indian does not stand in the way of American progress so much as he stands in the way of the coming-to-be of the American.” Armando J. Prats, Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002, p. 10.
• Discuss the following statement: “[S]ince the Western offers itself as a myth of American origins, it implies that its violence is an essential and necessary part of the process through which American society was established and through which its democratic values are defended and enforced.” Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America [1992], Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998, p. 352.
• “Indians are repressed in Westerns – there but not there – in the same way women are. And when they do appear they are even more unreal. At least women in Westerns are not played by men.” Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p.9.
• Discuss the following statement: “For me, the Western is essentially defined by setting. I refer here not so much to a particular geographic setting like the Rocky Mountains or the Great Plains, but to a symbolic setting representing the boundary between order and chaos, between tradition and newness.” John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel, Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999, p. 9.
• Discuss the following statement: “As America’s foundation ritual, the Western projects a formalized vision of the nation’s infinite possibilities and limitless vistas, thus serving to “naturalize” the policies of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny.” Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System, New York: Random House, 1981, p. 47.
• Discuss the following statement: “It seems to me that the cattle town experience points toward a remarkable truth: despite all the mythologizing, violent fatalities in the Old West tended to be rare rather than common. Does that mean it was a wholesome tranquil place? Probably not. But it was clearly a safer – and one heck of a lot saner – West than ever dreamt of in our national imagination.” Robert R. Dykstra, “Field Notes: Overdosing on Dodge City,” Western Historical Quarterly, 27, Winter 1996, in Clyde A. Milner II, Anne M. Butler & David Rich Lewis, Major Problems in the History of the American West: Documents and Essays, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997, p. 221.
• Discuss the following statement: ‘Trying to grasp the enormous human complexity of the American West is not easy under any circumstances, and the effort to reduce a tangle of many-sided encounters to a world defined by a frontier line only makes a tough task even tougher.’ (Patricia Nelson Limerick, ‘The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century’, in James R. Grossman (ed.), The Frontier in American Culture, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994, p. 73.)
• Discuss the following statement: "If [the western] has always been a revisionist genre it has not, until relatively recently, wanted to announce itself as such". Alexandra Keller, "Generic Subversion as Counterhistory: Mario Van Peeble's Posse", in Janet Walker (ed.), Westerns: Films Through History, New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 31.
• Discuss the following statement: The mythic West imagined by Americans has shaped the West of history just as the West of history has helped create the West Americans have imagined." Richard White, It's your Misfortune and None of my Own: A New History of the American West, 1991, p. 616.
• Discuss the following statement: "The Western myth has taken the historical setting and shaped it into a model of the present, which states in concrete images the conceptual conflicts of modern America and resolves them through types of action. The western land, particularly the visual images of its landscape, is an integral part of the understanding and resolution of these conflicts; if the myth is to succeed as a myth, the land must take on these meanings." Will Wright, Six-Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975, p. 190.
• Discuss the following statement: "... one of the things the Western is always about is America rewriting and reinterpreting her own past, however honestly or dishonestly it may be done.” Philip French, Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre and Western Revisited, Manchester: Carcanet, revised and expanded edition 2005 [1973], p. 13.

Contre-culture

• Discuss the following statement: “To start with a banality: a lot happened in the 1960s. And the historiography of the era has come to mirror that banal observation. The Sixties had become a capacious subject, so much so that, I have come to think, we have lost the “Sixties” in writing about the Sixties.” David Farber, review of Robert Cohen’s Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), in Reviews in American History 39 (2011), pp. 712-717.
• Sexual Politics in the counterculture.
• Analysez et discutez la citation suivante : “The 1960s [...] legitimized civil disobedience as a tactic on the part of loyal citizens excluded from the conventional channels of power and social change.” John P. Diggins, “Civil disobedience in American political thought”, in Luther S. Luedtke (ed.), Making America. The Society and Culture of the United States, Washington: USIA, 1987, p. 353.
• "Everyone knows about the peace, love, grass and groovy music but the counterculture was always more complicated – edgier, darker, and more tied to the dominant culture – than most anyone at the time could see." Alice Echols. Shaky Ground, the Sixties and its Aftershocks, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 18.
• Discuss the following statement: “The counterculture was a way of life, a community, an infrastructure, and even an economy, not just a few lifestyle accoutrements like long hair and an occasional toke on illegal substances.” David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams, America in the 1960s, New York: Hill and Wang, 1994, p. 169.
• Discuss the following statement: "To one side, there is the mind-blowing bohemianism of the beats and hippies; to the other, the hard-headed political activism of the student New Left. Are these not in reality two separate and antithetical developments [...]?" T. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (1968)
• Discuss the following statement : "The counterculture of the young tried to combine two impulses at once - the libertarian and the spiritual." Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987)
• By the time Johnson had become Kennedy's vice presiden he was a moderate advocate of civil rights But once President, he became more thoroughly committed to the struggle, in part because he believed that ending legal discrimination and racism in the US would assure his place among the greatest leaders in American history. Lyndon Johnson, unlike John F. Kennedy, recognized that the civil rights issue was the moral issue facing the nation." David Farber.

Crime organisé à la ville et à l'écran

• Héroïsme et opportunité
• Le crime organisé : un phénomène américain ?

Démocratie américaine (1824-1848)

• Coalitions
• Disunion
• Discuss the following statement: "It may be proper to remark, that about this period I began to learn that in America the word improvement, which, in England, means making things better, signifies, in that country, an augmentation in the number of houses and people, and above all, in the amount of acres of cleared land. It is laid down by the Americans as an admitted maxim , to doubt the solidity of which never enters any man's head for an instant, that a rapid increase of population, is to all intents and purposes, tantamount to an increase of national greatness and power, as well as an increase of individual happiness and prosperity. " Basil Hall, Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828.
• Discuss the following statement: “White racism defined the boundaries of republicanism and justified the problematic empathy developing between urban egalitarians and planter oligarchs in the South.” Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, London, New York, Verso, 2003

[1990], p. 127.

• Discuss the following statement: "For some historians, civil society was the most democratic aspect of the Jacksonian era, functioning [...] as the “stage on which men and women, rich and poor, black and white publicly contested for authority and power”. Seth ROCKMAN, "Jacksonian America", dans Eric FONER et Lisa McGIRR (ed.), American History Now, Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2011, p. 55
• Discuss the following statement: "The election of 1828 proved a pivotal one; it marked the end of one kind of politics and the beginning of another. [...] In 1828, the incumbent, Adams, had boldly based his campaign on a national economic program. The challenger, Jackson, had run on a combination of personal popularity, organization, and the evocation of symbolism. The Jackson campaign, while claiming to be anti-politics, had in practice created a new and far more potent political machinery.” Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 283.
• Discuss the following statement: "A free, confederated, self-governed republic on a continental scale — this was Manifest Destiny. It was republicanism resting on a base of confederated states.” Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History. A Reinterpretation, Cambridge (Massachusetts): Harvard University Press, 1995, [1963], p. 29.
• Discuss the following statement: "Jackson's veto challenged a tradition that went back to the Revolution, of circumscribing executive authority and regarding the legislative branch as the true embodiment of the public will. Abandoning his predecessors' deference to Congress, Jackson cast himself as the whole people's sole defender against the mere jumble of special interests represented by congressmen. To Jackson's supporters the veto was a rallying cry; to critics it seemed both a stunning affirmation of unbridled executive power and limitless invitation to class war." Daniel Feller, "The Bank War", Julian Zelizer (ed.), The American Congress: The Building of Democracy, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004, p. 159-160.
• Discuss the following statement: "The aspiration to make citizens informed, virtuous and self-governing flourished alongside a conviction that only a portion of those living in the United States could meet these lofty standards." Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 35.
• Discuss the following statement :"The Democratic party, as the party of the laboring classes, was beginning to split into two wings. Some friends of labor, like Bancroft and Van Buren, felt that the 'people', though misled in 1840, were fundamentally sound, and could be relied on most of the time to back a democratic policy. [...] Others, however, like Brownson commenced to regard 'people as an inchoate mass which would probably follow the side with the loudest songs and the biggest torchlight processions. The real proponents of democracy, they believed, were a small group who would often have to save the people in spite of themselves. The majoritarian Democrats clustered around Van Buren as their candidate for 1844. The minoritarians, accepting the logic of a Southern alliance, turned to Calhoun." Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1945.

Droit de vote des femmes

• Emancipation
• Discuss the following statement: "Feminist history must face the reality: although most suffragists were feminists, many of the white ones were also racists. Insitutionalized racism in the United States was and continues to be a national phenomenon, rooted deeply in the history of the nation. Race prejudice was not limited to just southern suffragists." Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920, 1998.
• Discuss the following statement: "Yet distinctive as this history may have been, it always ran alongside and frequently intersected with other currents in the chronicle of suffrage. [...] To some degree, this interlacing was inherent and structural. Women, after all, were not a socially segregated group; they were black and white, rich and poor, foreign-born and native. But the links between the evolution of suffrage for women and for men also were shaped by more contingent events: by the rhythms of social change, the dynamics of partisan politics, and the accidents of historical timing." Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, New York: Basic Books, 2000, p. 173.
• Discuss the following statement: “[Rather] than contrasting enlightened suffragists and their misguided opponents, I contend that women activists on both sides of the suffrage issue pursued political self-interest.” Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood, Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997, p.6
• Discuss the following statement: “[T]heories of evolution linked civilization and sexual difference in such a way that calling for change in woman’s sphere seemed to threaten the advancement of whites’ civilization. The problem facing postbellum white suffragists, then, was how to argue that the franchise would alter woman’s sphere but not diminish whites’ sexual differences or endanger their civilization.” Louise Michelle Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 57
• Discuss the following statement: "Over the course of the nineteenth century, voting itself increasingly replaced property, racial heritage, and class standing as the primary marker of citizenship. Perhaps it was this change, as well as all the talk about married women's right to property, that forced growing numbers of Americans to begin to picture an electorate that included the female citizen." Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: a Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005, p. 164.
• Discuss the following statement: "A seventy-five-year marathon through the very core of American history, the suffrage movement brought half the American people into the body politic, gave them fundamental rights, and recognized their existence as individuals above and beyond immersion in family roles. It opened the road women would need to travel to gain genuine political power." Ellen Carol Dubois, Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote, 2020, p. 1.
• Discuss the following statement: "Leading white suffragists could have seen how flaccid the Fifteenth Amendment turned out to be in protecting black men's votes [...]. Yet, even as the shortcomings of the Fifteenth Amendment became clear over the 1880s and 1890s, neither Stanton nor Anthony , nor any other suffragists, sought to revise the text of the proposed federal amendment. They left it modeled on the Fifteenth Amendment, even as that amendment crumbled before them." Lisa Tetrault in "Interchange: Womn's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote", Journal of American History, volume 106, n° 103, December 2019, p. 683.
• Discuss the following statement :"Seneca Falls initiated a crescendo of activism, based on the conviction that women, too, were citizens of the Unites States, and that they, too, had every right to "life,liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman's Rights Convention, University of Illinois Press, 2004, p. 11.

Emerson

• "The lessons of these days is the vulgarity of wealth."

Empire de l'exécutif (L')

• "The reinvigoration of the written checks in the American Constitution depended on the reinvigoration of the unwritten checks in American society". Discuss this appraisal offered by Arthur M. Schlesinger in the concluding section of his 1973 The Imperial Presidency.
• "The bottom line, then, is that the Constitution's incomplete contract sets up a governing structure that virtually invites presidential imperialism. Presidents, especially in modern times, are motivated to seek power. And because the Constitution does not say precisely what the proper boundaries of their power are, and because their hold on the executive functions of government gives them pivotal advantages in the political struggle, they have strong incentives to push for expanded authority by moving into grey areas of the law, asserting their rights and exercising them, whether or not the other actors, particularly in Congress, happen to agree." Terry M. Moe and William G. Howell "Unilateral Action and Presidential Power", Presidential Studies Quarterly 29, N°4, December 1999.
• "In the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co.v Sawyer Supreme court decision of 1952, Justice Jackson wrote: "I have no illusion that any decision by this Court can keep power in the hands of Congress if it is not wise and timely in meeting its problems. A crisis that challenges the President equally, or perhaps primarily, challenges Congress. If not good law, there was worldly wisdom in the maxim attributed to Napoleon that 'The tools belong to the man who can use them'. We may say that power to legislate for emergencies belongs in the hands of Congress, but only Congress itself can prevent power from slipping though its fingers."
• The Reagan Presidency: restoration, renovation, revolution?
• "presidents are set too far above the people to be at one with them" (Bruce Miroff, 2006)
• "Some people used to complain about what they called an 'imperial presidency' but now the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. We have not an imperial presidency but an imperiled presidency » (G. Ford, New York Times, November 10, 1980)
• "[...] improvements in Congress are not the same as reverses for the presidency » (Thomas E. Cronin, "A resurgent Congress and the Imperial Presidency", Political Science Quarterly, 95, 1980, p. 216.)
• The president's 'legislative leadership'

Federalist Papers (The)

• “The Federalist then was able to claim that the Constitution of 1787 was ‘republican,’ by changing the concept of republicanism from notions of smallness and personal citizenparticipation into an idea of ‘responsibility’ of elected magistrates, into an idea of personal accountability for all actions committed in office, into an idea of government somehow representative and responsible in all of its parts, not just in its legislature.” Patrick Riley, “Martin Diamond’s View of ‘The Federalist’”, Publius, Vol. 8, No. 3, Dimensions of the Democratic Republic: A Memorial to Martin Diamond (Summer, 1978), p.94.
• Pragmatism in The Federalist Papers
• “To the Federalists, the move for a new central government became the ultimate act of the entire Revolutionary era; it was both a progressive attempt to salvage the Revolution in the face of its imminent failure and a reactionary effort to restrain its excesses.” Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969, p.475.
• Division in The Federalist Papers
• Representation in The Federalist Papers
• In his book devoted to the revolutionary generation in the US, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Baily, wrote: "In the end they found themselves fulfilling their original goals by creating ower, on new principles, not by destroying it." How may this statement apply to The Federalist Papers?
• Authority in The Federalist Papers
• How can the following statement apply to Publius and The Federalist?: "His hope was for a sufficient amount of civic virtue, in large part constructed from a mix of self-interest, ambition, and reason, distributed among some adequate part of the population to serve as both recruiting ground and restraint on leadership. In an important sense, it is mediated civic virtue among the citizenry and among those who seek power, office, and fame that is the critical prerequisite of leadership." David R. Weaver, "Leadership, Locke, and the Federalist".

Mencken

• Mencken: the sage of Baltimore
• Mencken sociologue
• H.L. Mencken : un réactionnaire ?
• L'américanisme de Mencken
• "H.L. Mencken's philosophy […] in all its elements is thoroughly American. He represents the old order of sentimental individualism, with its suspicion of government, its faith in personal effort, its optimistic good humor. As he himself has shown, that spirit has waned in America under the pressure of industrialism, so that, as its extant spokesman he has an air of novelty, which frightens his more stupid opponents but actually explains his appeal to his more intelligent countrymen."

Olmsted

• Nation, Union and Landscape in Frederick Law Olmsted’s thought and action.
• Discuss the following statement: “[...] Olmsted’s parks seemed to offer an attractive remedy for the dangerous problem of discontent among the urban masses. In contrast with other reforms put forward by the gentry, they visibly affected the everyday habits of large numbers of people. By providing pleasant and uplifting outlets in the narrow lives of city-dwellers, they promised a measure of social tranquillity”. Geoffrey Blodgett, “Frederick Law Olmsted: Landscape Architecture as Conservative Reform”, Journal of American History, Vol. 62, No. 4, March 1976, p. 877.
• Discuss the following statement: “Olmsted’s great urban, pastoral-style public parks, from Louisville to Buffalo, from Boston to Brooklyn, stand as living monuments to and embodiment of the idealist proposition that there is a pre-established harmony between the forms of nature and the human heart and mind and that proper character formation as well as individual and collective human happiness are dependent upon that synergism.” George L. Scheper, “The Reformist Vision of Frederick Law Olmsted and the Poetics of Park Design”, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3, September 1989, p. 372.
• Discuss the following statement: “One of the great ills of modern society, [Olmsted] argued, is a nervous disability caused by the stress of urban life and exacerbated by the artificiality of the city environment. The most effective antidote to this sickness, he was convinced, was a certain kind of scenery. The purpose of the urban park (as opposed to the whole range of other kinds of public recreation grounds that he designed) was to provide the scenery that most effectively counteracts and cures this nervous affliction.” Charles E. Beveridge and Carolyn F. Hoffman, “Introduction” in Charles E. Beveridge and Carolyn F. Hoffman (eds.), The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Supplementary Series, volume I, The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1997, pp. 5-6.
• Democracy, progress and parks in Frederick Law Olmsted’s thought and action.
• "Thus without means are taken by government to withhold them from the grasp of individuals, all places favorable in scenery to the recreation of the mind and body will be closed against the great body of the people. For the same reason that the water of rivers should be guarded against private appropriation and the use of it for the purpose of navigation and otherwise protected against obstruction, portions of natural scenery may therefore properly be guarded and cared for by Government. To simply reserve them from monopoly by individuals, however, it will be obvious, is not all that is necessary. It is necessary that they should be laid open to the use of the body of the people." Frederick Law Olmsted, Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report (1865)
• "As a park maker, environmentalist, and abolitionist, Olmsted helped shape modern America" - Justin Martin, Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted, Abolitionist, Conservationist, and Designer of Central Park, 2011, p.4.
• "Parks have plainly not come as the direct result of any of the inventions or discoveries of the century. They are not, with us, simply an improvement on what we had before growing out of a general advace of the arts applicable to them. It is not evident that the movement was taken up in any country from any other however it may have been influenced or accelerated. It did not run lie a fashion It would seem rather to have been a common, spontaneous movement of that sort which we conveniently refer to the "Genius of Civilisation." Frederick Law Olmsted, "A Consideration of the Justifying Value of a Public Park", 1881.

Présidence Obama

• Reconstruction
• A transformative presidency?
• Imperialism
• Compromised
• Distrust
• Authority and legitimacy
• Barack Obama and the Constitution
• "Discuss the following statement: "Barack Obama came to office with a large agenda. His most important proposals required congressional approval, and the White House moved aggressively to obtain it." George C Edwards, Overreach: Leadership in the Obama Presidency.
• Discuss the following statement: "To a considerable extent the Obama administration has replayed the debates of the Clinton years over how much a centrist Democratic administration that is liberal on some issues should be able to accomplish in a nation that self-identifies as 20 percent liberal or progressive, 30 percent conservative, and 40 percent moderate." Gary J. Dorrien, The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective, Rowman & Littlefield, 2012, p. 9.
• Discuss the following statement: "Obama projected an idealized version of America’s promise of economic opportunity through hard work, of a sense of belonging transcending racial and class divisions, and of social solidarity enhanced by enlightened government intervention.” Anne Daguerre, Obama’s Welfare Legacy: An Assessment of US Anti-poverty Policies, Bristol: Policy Press, 2017, p. 3.
• Discuss the following statement: "“Obama’s greatest misstep was born directly out of his greatest insight. Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal. And yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition’s resolve to destroy him." Ta-Nehisi Coates, "My President Was Black", The Atlantic, January/February 2017.
• Discuss the following statement: "Tonight the President made more promises that sound good, but won’t solve the problems actually facing Americans. We want you to have a better life. The President wants that too. But we part ways when it comes to how to make that happen." Cathy McMorris Rodgers, State of the Union response by the Republican Party, January 28, 2014.
• Discuss the following statement: "Still, some of Obama's critics misread him in saying that he has no strategy whatsoever. If we define grand strategy a little more loosely, and perhaps more realistically, then we see that President Obama does indeed have a kind of implicit grand strategy, and that he has pursued it quite consistently since entering the Oval Office, whatever the twists and turns. That strategy, I suggest, is one of overarching American retrenchment and accommodation internationally, in large part to allow the president to focus on securing liberal policy legacies at home." Colin Dueck, The Obama Doctrine: American Grand Strategy Today, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 2.
• Discuss the following statement: "In light of Obama’s promises to restore America's image and moral standing, the WikiLeaks release of secret cables, the draconian handling of the matter, added to the revelations of massive levels of surveillance of American citizens by the NSA, is severely damaging to the Obama myth of change and America's reputation as the 'land of the free'." Inderjeet Parmar, "Obama, WikiLeaks, and American power" in Inderjeet Parmar, Linda B. Miller, and Mark Ledwidge (eds.), Obama and the World, Routledge, 2nd Edition, 2014, p. 257.
• Discuss the following statement: "Those hoping that Obama’s presidency would begin to moderate the extreme partisan tensions of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush years and perhaps even bring about greater economic equality have been disappointed. The harsh reality is that for all its historic significance, Obama’s presidency has done little to reduce the country’s underlying racial, political, and economic divisions." Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America, 2016, p. 3.
• Discuss the following statement: "bama as president refuses to be too constrained by traditionalist American Constitutional, political, and religious beliefs and practices. His is not a presidency dedicated to securing natural rights or to preserving the Constitutional system precisely as the Founders understood it. He instead is a pragmatic proponent of contemporary conceptions of deliberative democracy. As such, he prefers compromised, moderate reforms to radical change." Roger M. Smith, "The Constitutional Philosophy of Barack Obama: Democratic Pragmatism and Religious Commitment", Social Science Quarterly, December 2012, vol. 93, n° 5, Special Issue: "Social, Economic, and Political Transition in America: Retrospective on the 'Era of Obama'", Wiley, p. 1268.

Républicains

• Republicans and the Welfare State (1952-2008)
• The grassroots and the elite
• Culture Warriors
• Republicans and Civil Rights
• Discuss the following statement: "In talking about his domestic initiatives with me, Nixon insisted that all of them reflected his own background and association with the progressive wing of the Republican party. Aside from the improbability of such an assertion, his domestic reforms were far from conservative by Republican or Democratic standards." Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered, New York, Basic Books, 1994, p. 19.
• Discuss the following statement: "Because of their confrontation with the civil rights movement, white southern conservatives were forced to abandon their traditional, populist, and often strakly racist demagogueryand instead craft a new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedoms, and individualism. This modern conservatism proved to be both subtler and stronger than the politics that preceded it and helped southern conservatives dominate the Republican Party and, through it, national politics as well." Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 6.
• Discuss the following statement: "Conservatives' successes, to be sure, were due in no small part to liberalism's foundering on the shoals of race, economic discontent, and its own internal contradictions. But just as significantly, conservatives' ability to build a powerful movement enabled them to pick up the pieces and profit politically from liberal failures." Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 5.
• Discuss the following statement: "There is perhaps no stronger validation of [George H.W.] Bush's emphasis on incremental policy development than the experiences of the Republican Congress elected in 1994. The conservative wing of the GOP had its "revolution", replete with a large-scale agenda to change the nation's policy direction. However, [...] the Republicans ran into the predictable barriers of an incrementalist policy system. In rejecting the nature of the policy system and trying to work against it, they minimized their influence and ultimately found themselves on the political defensive and heavily divided." Ryan Barilleaux & Mark J. Rozell, Power and Prudence: The Presidency of George H.W. Bush, Texas A&M University Press, College Station, 2004, p. 10.
• Discuss the following statement: "The compassionate conservatives were quite conscious of conservatism's shortcomings. They worried about the sense of indifference their allies often conveyed toward the poor and to the social pain the budget cuts they championed might create." E.J. Dionne Jr., Why the Right Went Wrong. Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2016, p. 162.
• Discuss the following statement: "Eisenhower hoped that by enunciating "borad and liberal objectives,"advancing moderate improvements in social programs, and establishing a reputation (and above all a record)for fostering a thriving economy, he could (if he could preserve an untroubled international environment) reconstitute the electoral base of his party. "Twentieth Century Republicanism," he hoped, would deprive the Democrats of their corner on the "common man," especially if his own "broad and liberal" Republican programs (and his personal appeal) helped bring young, attractive leaders into the party - leaders who would modernize the party's organizational procedures as well as its policy stance." Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency. Eisenhower as Leader, New York, Basic Books, 1982, p. 51-52.
• Discuss the following statement: "In the contemporary conservative vision of history, Reagan dramatically shrank government and earned the public's everlasting affection and gratitude in return. Big Government persists after Reagan, Reagan's contemporary admirers admit, but ony because liberals and Washington elites have used government programs to buy off the public's votes and used allies in the media to cloak their unpopular policies." Jonathan Darman, Landslide. LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America, New York, Random House, 2015, p. 373.
• Disscuss the following statement: "The bitter split at the 1964 convention as well as Goldwater's disastrous defeat persuaded party leaders to seek a candidate who could both unite the party and win a national election. They considered Reagan too conservative to obtain a national following and Rockefeller too liberal to hold the party together. That left Nixon, the man of the middle, and the convention's choice to challenge the Democrats for the presidency." Dennis Wainstock, Election Year 1968. The Turning Point. New York: Enigma Books, 2012, p. 114.
• Conservative Media. Discuss.
• The GOP and the silent majority
• Discuss the following statement: "When the Republicans recaptured both houses of Congress in 94 for the first time since 52, they did not construct their Senate and House majorities in the old-fashioned way... The novel feature of the Republicans' 94 breakthrough was its national character. Republicans won majorities of House and Senate seats in both the North and the South... and their new southern majorities were vital to the Republicans' national victories." Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 2.

Sud de l'après-Guerre de Sécession

• “One reads the truer deeper facts of reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men.” W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, New York: S. AL Russell, 1935), p.728
• "Of the Reconstruction of the Southern States, from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy, had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well the effort, we would be living today in a different world. The attempt to make black men American citizens was in a certain sense all a failure, but a splendid failure." W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America
• Violence in the South after the Civil War.
• Analysez et discutez : “Rather than simply emphasizing conservatism and continuity, a coherent portrait of Reconstruction must take into account the subtle dialectic of continuity and change in economic, social, and political relations as the nation adjusted to emancipation.” Eric Foner, “Reconstruction Revisited,” Reviews in American History, Vol. 10, December 1982, p. 87.
• “Rather than passive victims of the action of others or simply a ‘problem’ confronting white society, blacks were active agents in the making of the Reconstruction.” Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, New York: Harper and Row, 1988, xxiv
• Re-visions of Reconstruction
• "“It is, indeed, one of the great ironies of American history that when the nation freed the slaves, it also freed racism."

Thomas Jefferson et l'ouest

• L'expédition de Lewis et Clark : une épopée américaine ?
• L'expédition Lewis et Clark constitue-t-elle, selon l'expression de Bruce Ackerman, 'a constitutional moment' ?
• Est-ce que l'expédition de Lewis et Clark a donné un nouveau sens au mot Liberté ?
• The Lewis and Clark Expedition: a new phase in the American process of imperialistic expansion?
• The Lewis and Clark expedition as a celebration of American multiculturalism
• Lewis and Clark: diplomats or warriors?