Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Jul
Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
If the federal government could not pass taxes and could not raise revenue, it would fail.
It was an essential moment because it was a demonstration that the nation could indeed survive and do what it needed to to exist on the world stage.
The real losers in this situation were the native nations that had been allies with Spain or allies with France.
They still retained a lot of their own power.
They're both their military power and their economic powers.
But there was a sense by some that it was only a matter of time before white settlers started to encroach on their land.
There was a recognition of this great generation was no longer with us.
And in the 1820s, the first of a series of battles over the future of slavery started to crop up.
And so there was a lot of anxiety and fear about what the future of the nation was going to be.
And how was the loss of this generation and its leadership and its stewardship going to affect the future of the nation?
We see an explosion of the cult of the founding generation after the Civil War.
And that's where you start to see this almost worship of figures like Washington and Benjamin Franklin and the other people who had led the nation.
So in the 1870s, in the 1970s, or when the nation is in a particularly tense moment, it is helpful for a lot of people to have this touchstone that they can refer to as either something that is calming or as a justification for their actions.
Other people played a really important role and supported those efforts, supported those work, whether it was getting the word out to neighbors or sewing uniforms or assisting with diplomacy, that women and people of color and a much broader range of what we would think of as Americans were supporting
part of this process.
I think if we want to use more accurate terminology, there are two options.
One, if we're talking about the Constitution and the example set out to us by the first generation, then framers is most accurate because those were the people in the room that were actually crafting the language on the text.
If we're talking about the people that fought in the war, the founding generation is, I think, most accurate because that does encompass all of the people that were alive at that point and their various roles, whether they were conflicting or supporting or central to the project.
That is actually a much more inspirational story because it suggests that flawed people doing the very best that they can, can create something extraordinary, can inspire future generations in both in the United States and in nations across the world to create extraordinary things and to never give up trying to create something better or to improve what they already have.
It is much less impressive to me if we think of them as these demigod figures, because then of course you expect extraordinary heroics from godlike figures.
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