On line at 35 an hour

[Robert Sheridan]

Calvin Johnson wrote:

"... The C[onstitution] was once a weapon in a hard fought war, and if 
you do not know the battle you can not know its meaning.
 
Not only was it a weapon in a hard fought war, etc., it was the result 
not only of our own war for independence but of the 1688 English 
revolution (this is before the Act of Union which made it Great Britain, 
Scotland, and if I have the nomenclature correct, Northern Ireland), 
which Michael Barone calls _Our First Revolution; the Remarkable British 
Upheaval That Infpired America's Founding Fathers_.  At least that's the 
name of his excellent new volume (Crown Publishers, N.Y., 2007).  This 
is not the Civil War in which Charles II loses his head, but the 
so-called, by its partisans, Glorious Revolution, in which the Brits run 
off King James II (Catholic) and run in King William III, of Orange, the 
Netherlands, etc., (Protestant).  The resulting "settlement," occurring 
over a number of acts over a number of years, shaped Britain into 
something we recognize today.  The Irish don't like King Billy, of 
course, but the rest of the West is in his debt for many things 
including, on his watch, the relaxation of anti-Dissenter regulation 
(and anti-Catholic to some extent, but not as to succession), and the 
Anglo-Dutch and others alliance he put together to thwart Louis XIV's 
pan-European ambitions.

It's rare that you (I) see a concise yet sufficiently detailed 
explanation of a major aspect of British history as it has influenced 
our Constitutional history, much less such a nice, relevant one.  Three 
cheers for popular history by studious authors, and three more for Mr. 
Barone, a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report and many other credits.

Recommended, indeed.

Thanks for the nice lead-in, Calvin, I was looking for an opening.

rs
sfls

PS:  _To Rule the Waves; How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World_, 
by Arthur Herman, Harper-Perennial, NY, 2004/06, is the cite I omitted 
in a previous discussion on a point having to do with national support 
for the nation's economy using the nation's military, whether the basis 
of the economy is sugar, slaves, spices, gold or oil.  Seems fair to me...
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