Bøger af Brent Tarter

This is the only modern comprehensive constitutional history of any state, and as a history of Virgina, it is one of the oldest and most complex. Virginia's state legislature is the Virginia General Assembly, which was established in July 1619, making it the oldest current lawmaking body in North America. Brent Tarter's Constitutional History of Virginia covers over three hundred years of Virginia's legislative policy, from colony to statehood, revealing its political and legal backstory. From the very beginning in 1606, when James I chartered the Virginia Company to establish a commercial outpost on the Atlantic coast of North America, through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the fundamental constitutions of the colony and state of Virginia have evolved and changed as the demographic, economic, political, and cultural characteristics of Virginia changed. Elements of the colonial constitution influenced the character of the state's first constitution in 1776, and changing relationships between the people and their government, as well as relationships between the state and federal governments, have influenced how the state's constitution has evolved. Tarter explores that evolution and taps into its relevance to the people who have lived and still live in Virginia.

In 1920, Virginia's General Assembly refused to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to grant women the vote. Virginia's suffragists lost. Or did they? When the thirty-sixth state ratified the amendment, women gained voting ri

Histories of Virginia have traditionally traced the same significant but narrow lines, overlooking whole swathes of human experience crucial to an understanding of the commonwealth. With this book, Brent Tarter presents a fresh, new interpretive narrative that incorporates the experiences of all residents of Virginia.

Many are aware that gerrymandering exists and suspect it plays a role in our elections, but its history goes far deeper, and its impacts are far greater, than most realize. In his latest book, Brent Tarter focuses on Virginia's long history of gerrymandering to uncover its immense influence on the state's politics and to provide perspective on how the practice impacts politics nationally.Offering the first in-depth historical study of gerrymanders in Virginia, Tarter exposes practices going back to nineteenth century and colonial times and explains how they protected land owners' and slave owners' interests. The consequences of redistricting and reapportionment in modern Virginia-in effect giving a partisan minority the upper hand in all public policy decisions-become much clearer in light of this history. Where the discussion of gerrymandering has typically emphasized political parties' control of Congress, Tarter focuses on the state legislatures that determine congressional district lines and, in most states, even those of their own districts. On the eve of the 2021 session of the General Assembly, which will redraw district lines for Virginia's state Senate and House of Delegates, as well as for the U.S. House of Representatives, Tarter's book provides an eye-opening investigation of gerrymandering and its pervasive effect on our local, state, and national politics and government.

From the formation of the first institutions of representative government and the use of slavery in the seventeenth century through the American Revolution, the Civil War, the civil rights movement, and into the twenty-first century, Virginia's history has been marked by obstacles to democratic change. In The Grandees of Government, Brent Tarter offers an extended commentary based in primary sources on how these undemocratic institutions and ideas arose, and how they were both perpetuated and challenged. Although much literature on American republicanism focuses on the writings of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, among others, Tarter reveals how their writings were in reality an expression of federalism, not of republican government. Within Virginia, Jefferson, Madison, and others such as John Taylor of Caroline and their contemporaries governed in ways that directly contradicted their statements about representative-and limited- government. Even the democratic rhetoric of the American Revolution worked surprisingly little immediate change in the political practices, institutions, and culture of Virginia. The counterrevolution of the 1880s culminated in the Constitution of 1902 that disfranchised the remainder of African Americans. Virginians who could vote reversed the democratic reforms embodied in the constitutions of 1851, 1864, and 1869, so that the antidemocratic Byrd organization could dominate Virginia's public life for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Offering a thorough reevaluation of the interrelationship between the words and actions of Virginia's political leaders, The Grandees of Government provides an entirely new interpretation of Virginia's political history.

In the lead-up to the Civil War, Virginia, like other southern states, amassed a large public debt while striving to improve transportation infrastructure and stimulate economic development. A Saga of the New South delves into the largely untold story of the decades-long postwar controversies over the repayment of that debt. The result is a major reinterpretation of late-nineteenth-century Virginia political history. The post-Civil War public debt controversy in Virginia reshaped the state's political landscape twice. First it created the conditions under which the Readjuster Party, a biracial coalition of radical reformers, seized control of the state government in 1879 and successfully refinanced the debt; then it gave rise to a counterrevolution that led the elitist Democratic Party to eighty years of dominance in the state's politics. Despite the Readjusters' victory in refinancing the debt and their increased spending for the popular new system of free public schools, the debt controversy generated a long train of legal disputes-at least eighty-five cases reached the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, and twenty-nine reached the Supreme Court of the United States. Through an in-depth look at these political and legal contests, A Saga of the New South sheds new light on the many obstacles that reformers faced in Virginia and the South after the Civil War.

The decision of the eventual Confederate states to secede from the Union set in motion perhaps the most dramatic chapter in American history, and one that has typically been told on a grand scale. In Daydreams and Nightmares, however, historian Brent Tarter shares the story of one Virginia family who found themselves in the middle of the secession debate and saw their world torn apart as the states chose sides and went to war.George Berlin was elected to serve as a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1861 as an opponent of secession, but he ultimately changed his vote. Later, when defending his decision in a speech in his hometown of Buckhannon, Upshur County, he had to flee for his safety as Union soldiers arrived. Berlin and his wife, Susan Holt Berlin, were separated for extended periods--both during the convention and, later, during the early years of the Civil War. The letters they exchanged tell a harrowing story of uncertainty and bring to life for the modern reader an extended family that encompassed both Confederate and Union sympathizers. This is in part a love story. It is also a story about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. Although unique in its vividly evoked details, the Berlins' story is representative of the drama endured by millions of Americans. Composed during the nightmare of civil war, the Berlins' remarkably articulate letters express the dreams of reunion and a secure future felt throughout the entire, severed nation. In this intimate, evocative, and often heartbreaking family story, we see up close the personal costs of our larger national history.A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War