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Prof. Maier, who died recently, was an outstanding historian. Her AMERICAN SCRIPTURE is the very best book on the Declaration of Independence, for example. Besides that, she told me that she admired M.E. Bradford, which means she was not the kind of partisan historian one sees too often these days.

However, RATIFICATION is a disappointment. I don’t know why. When the book came out, I read it and wrote to her via e-mail that I didn’t understand how she had missed the point that I highlighted in “Edmund Randolph and Virginia Constitutionalism,” a 2004 article in the scholarly journal THE REVIEW OF POLITICS: that Governor Randolph repeatedly assured the Virginia Ratification Convention that the new Congress would have only the powers “expressly” granted by the Constitution. She told me she had read my article and had no explanation why she hadn’t addressed the point.

More glaringly, she also omitted discussion of George Nicholas’s assurances in the same convention that Virginia would be one of thirteen parties to a compact and would be able to secede in case the Federal Government abused its powers. I looked forward to her discussion of this, and I found … nothing.

These points both directly contradict what John Marshall said in MCCULLOCH V. MARYLAND, perhaps the most important Supreme Court decision in history. Randolph and Nicholas weren’t just any Joes, but two of the three leading Federalist orators in the most important state’s ratification convention — one of them the Old Dominion’s governor and the sponsor in the Philadelphia Convention of the Virginia Plan. Maier’s completely ignoring this material is … perplexing.

For detailed accounts of this, see my VIRGINIA’S AMERICAN REVOLUTION and JAMES MADISON AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA. Maier’s book is a good book for a general outline of the ratification contest, but I’m afraid it’s not the kind of slam-dunk I hoped it would be. I’d start with my two books and Robert Rutland’s THE ORDEAL OF THE CONSTITUTION.

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It was also sold as more democratic. Under the old selection, the story went, elites selected senators in secret. Far better to have the people do it.

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You’re welcome.

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St. Athanasius’s LIFE OF ANTHONY says that St. Anthony headed out into the desert because of the influx of wealthy pseudo-Christians into the Church in the wake of St. Constantine’s conversion. Soon enough, many other people followed him, and the monastic tradition was born. We find in the homilies of St. John Chrysostom in Constantinople decades later criticism of women who came to church services wearing fortunes dangling from their ears; St. John believed there were better uses for that wealth with poor people in the streets.

Accommodating war was a difficult question for the Church. St. Constantine himself apparently waited to be baptized on his deathbed because he believed that a prince likely would have to do things inconsistent with his understanding of a Christian. Also at Constantinople, St. Symeon the New Theologian wrote in the 11th century that Christians should avoid political power, because it was bound to corrupt them. In Russia, according to the Primary Chronicle, St. Vladimir followed his conversion of his kingdom to Christianity with abolition of capital punishment. The Chronicle says the bishops soon went to him and begged that he restore it, because crime was proliferating. In medieval Constantinople, soldiers who killed even in defensive wars were required to do years’ penance before receiving the Divine Gifts again. The Kievan Grand Prince Vladimir Monomach demonstrated a powerful sense of his spiritual obligations in his letter to his sons, and this attitude runs through the history of Russia in particular. For example, the 19th-century emperors Nicholas I and Alexander II devoted themselves to constant travel around their gigantic empire in service to the nation. Nicholas supposedly took care personally to ensure that attendees at the divine services stood in the right place, lit candles at the right time, etc. Constantly.

As far as the doctrine of the Church goes, it happens that I wrote a brief article in THE GREEK ORTHODOX THEOLOGICAL REVIEW about 15 years ago on Eusebius’s treatment of the historic role of the emperor/saint Constantine in his historiography. The Church never required one to subscribe to Eusebius’s view of history, but one certainly sees it reflected in writings of Orthodox churchmen through the medieval period and down nearly to our time. The famous Imperial Russian notion of Moscow as “Third Rome” (“Two Romes have fallen, Moscow is the third, and a fourth there shall never be”) captures it. So does Orthodox recognition of numerous Christian princes — Constantine, Theodosius, Justinian, Vladimir, Alexander II, Nicholas II, Alexander Nevsky, and others — as saints.

There once were parish churches in Western Europe named for St. Constantine too. It has been over a decade since I paid much attention to these questions, so I don’t recall whether they still bear his name. (I don’t mean only at Ravenna.) This tradition was of course a casualty of events at Rome beginning in 800. From St. Constantine’s day, or, if you want, from Eusebius’s, the eastern Church saw “symphonia” as normal. Only in the west, with the abnormal experience of being conquered away from the Empire by barbarians in the 6th century, did the bishops come to insist on independence of the emperor. Of course, either approach can be problematic.

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In general, Western Civ. has included pagan Greece but excluded the Eastern Roman Empire, Russia, and other Orthodox lands. It has been a Catholic/Protestant construct.

Even the term “Byzantine Empire” is symbolic of this. St. Constantine moved his empire’s capital to Constantinople in AD 330. He was a Roman, born in York, England (my mother’s family’s home), and he spoke Latin. He named his new capital “New Rome,” but the people soon called it “Konstantinoupoli” (“Constantine’s City”). They didn’t call themselves Byzantines, ever. In fact, I knew a Hellenophone woman who died within the last decade at age 93. She immigrated from Asian Turkey over 70 years ago, and she told me that in the Greek-speaking village where she was born a subject of the Sultan, the Greek-speaking people still called themselves “Romaioi” (“Romans”)– over 500 years after the Turks’ conquest of New Rome in 1453! Today’s Greeks see the use of the term “Byzantine” as intended to deny them their heritage, which they see as Roman. (Western Europeans and Americans commonly think of Greece as descended from ancient Athens, but Greeks don’t; they think of Istanbul as their captive capital, and of the Roman era — 330-1453 — as their history’s highlight.)

The Papal Claims rest in part on the legitimacy of a pope’s decision in the 8th century to name a Frankish illiterate “emperor.” Besides that dagger to the heart of Christian unity, which was in a sense extorted from the pope, the Franks also imposed the filioque–ultimately the issue over which the papacy would break with the Orthodox — on the papacy. It is from that date that the Carolingian kingdom is “Holy Roman,” the actual Roman Empire merely “Byzantine.”

Although the Varangians were Scandinavian, their Kievan Rus’ lies outside “Western Civ.” in the standard account as well. Why? They accepted Christianity from New Rome, not from old, in their vernacular, not in Latin, with leavened bread in the liturgy, not unleavened, and so on.

The standard account of the Crusades omits the conquest of Orthodox bishoprics in the east, establishment of Crusader bishoprics (which remain there today) alongside the indigenous Orthodox ones in Jerusalem, Antioch, etc. This isn’t important in “Western Civ.,” which is in general an account of the Roman papacy’s cultural and religious dependencies, from the point of view of the Roman bishopric, even now, long since the secularization of modern times set in. This is why even educated American Christians seem to think that the Middle East today is a sea of Muslims with a Jewish island in the middle–and nary a Christian in sight. When roused to care about events in that area, it is usually because of an attack either on Americans or on Israel. (Certainly Israeli bulldozing of 4th-century Christian cemeteries, undermining of medieval churches, etc., does not hit American Christians’ radar.) Right here in Liberty Classroom’s forums, a subscriber named “Charles Martel” objects to the use of the word “Palestine” as a geographic designation! Absent the Muslim conquest of the Middle East, the place would still be three Christian provinces with names based on “Palestine,” and the historic Charles Martel’s significance lies in having prevented Muslims from conquering France. How ironic is that?

This is the way people in Orthodox lands understand these events. These matters are all alive in their consciousness. Even this past week, Russian president Vladimir Putin (named for the prince who converted Russia to Orthodoxy) told the Saudis that he would grant their request to build a mosque in Moscow when they granted his request to build an Orthodox cathedral in Mecca. Of course, the Saudis will never grant such a request, as Putin well knew. He will also never grant the request for a mosque in Moscow. I suppose that in this, he is un-Western, at last.

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When it was part of a Christian empire, Palestine was ultimately divided into three provinces, each with “Palestina” in its name. Use of “Palestine” is resisted currently by many who wish to obfuscate the historicity of Christian people in that area.

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Other than accepting a proposal with a course outline, Tom had essentially no input regarding the content of either of two courses in the creation of which I was involved. “America to 1877” was his idea, and “American Constitutional History” was mine, unless my aging mind betrays me. I’m currently creating a course called “The American Revolution,” which I conceived in response to his asking me what course I’d like to do next; his input into that one has been the same: signing a contract including an outline written by me (this time solo instead of jointly with Brion McClanahan).

I think that I proposed a course outline to Brion McClanahan for “American Constitutional History” and he made two or three changes to it. We didn’t communicate much beyond that, except perhaps for an e-mail or two to the effect of “Are you going to cover this topic in Lecture X?” I ended up re-recording a couple of “America to 1877” lectures because, whether through technological problems or because of my incompetence, they cut off early. “American Constitutional History” was more of a pain in the, uh, neck because Camtasia gave me fits; only at the end of the process did the people who make the software tell me that version 7 was incompatible with the latest version of Windows. Argh.

How’s that for inside baseball?

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An interesting monetarist take on this general question is Robert Bork’s THE ANTITRUST PARADOX. In general, it shows that rapacious monopoly in a free market is a myth–and that antitrust law is counter-productive.

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I agree with Tom’s advice here and in the linked essay entirely, with one caveat: you should shoot for as many publications as you can. I had three peer-reviewed articles in grad school and one more on the way, and I had a few classmates who had more than one each. It can be done; just keep your nose to the grindstone.

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I would always do the assigned reading. Maybe you’ll disagree with it, but that’s what your teacher will expect you to know, and it will stand you in good stead even if you only want to be able to critique it later.

A minor shouldn’t drive your selection of a college unless it’s very obscure and you’re fixed on it.

Is your point that you think you want to be a historian of Germanic cultures? That’s a bit far down the road; I counsel seeking a good undergraduate education before coming to that kind of decision. Who knows: you may decide in college that academia isn’t for you, that you don’t really care about Bavaria, or for some other reason you were mistaken at this point.

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A few things, John:

1) Congress passed the Force Bill. Yes, Jackson asked for it, but he couldn’t order it. Interestingly, Calhoun and his allies went and stood in an antechamber as the Senate voted, so the only “Nay” vote came from Virginia’s Senator John Tyler, Jr., who used his speech explaining the vote as a farewell to the Democratic Party. Within a decade, he’d be a Whig president–with Democratic principles.

2) That depends how you define “confrontation.” At Ole Miss in 1962, the controversy over admitting James Meredith to the school led to widespread violence evocative of events many decades earlier; the Federal Government warned Mississippi’s governor that he risked a jailing if he didn’t toe the line. Ultimately, he caved and Meredith became Ole Miss’s first black undergraduate. Five years earlier, at Little Rock, the governor decided to disallow local authorities to integrate Central High School; President Eisenhower responded by sending in the 101st Airborne Division to force them in. If by “nullification” you mean “flouting federal law/court order,” then these scenarios fall into the category you inquired about.

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Yes, they did. The best book on this subject is J.C.D. Clark’s THE LANGUAGE OF LIBERTY, which I reviewed in MODERN AGE many years ago. That review has been reprinted here:

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2012/08/millennial-america.html

I also recommend the recent biography of Roger Sherman by Mark David Hall, which I reviewed here:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/constitutional-calvinist/

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I recommend Morgan & Morgan on the general subject of the Stamp Act. They make the point that the Stamp Act was devised to hit a narrower portion of the population: people who printed papers, filed in court, bought land, etc.

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The first blacks known to have lived in the English colonies arrived at Jamestown in what is now Virginia in 1619. As indentured servants, they were free. I assign students in my university course in “America to 1877” the book MYNE OWNE GROUND by Breen & Innes. That book is about free blacks on the Eastern Shore in 17th-century Virginia. Its brevity and the relative obscurity of the information make it quite a bracing text for them. Those people always had been free, and the book tells the story of how slavery became legal in Virginia. I think that story will surprise you.

No, there weren’t any particularly “notable” ones in 17th-century Virginia, if by “notable” you mean men of letters, architects, statesmen, etc. It wasn’t long before Virginia adopted slave law assuming that most blacks would be slaves, whites free.

There were always free blacks in all the colonies, from the time there were any blacks in each of the colonies. That’s true even for South Carolina. The literature on the subject is vast. The most famous on the part of it that you’re interested in is Jordan’s BLACK CONFEDERATES AND AFRO-YANKEES IN CIVIL WAR VIRGINIA.

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Yes, as well as the law of treaties and probate law. It doesn’t seem to have come up in this context because no one has ever made the argument that there wasn’t a common understanding in the way I described above.

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