Deadlines #2

Literature: Essay 1500 words                  Thursday 25th February
History: Essay 2000 words                      Monday 14th March

Planning 'Supreme Court - is it problematic to have an unelected body have so much power?'

• no - subjected by checks from congress and president
• yes - Roe vs. Wade (1973), court declared women had the constitutional right for abortion, case of Baker vs. Carr (1962) illustrated ability of court to interpret constitutional principles broadly
• yes - gerrymandering - where it opposes fifteenth amendment of voting equal rights, term denies this by disadvantageous, artificial creation of electoral boundaries = therefore, due to liberal interpretation of constitution supreme court established new political principle 

"the court has systematically done its best to undermine everything they care about for the past 40 years" - Larry Kramer, constitutional historian - 

The Supreme Court’s Power Has Become Excessive, The New York Times

 Do same-sex couples think they had no rights before the Supreme Court spoke, and have rights after only because five justices said so? 

fundamental law of the land, made by “We, the People,” depends on the ideologically driven whims of five lawyers? 

There is a place for judicial review in constitutional democracy, just not for judicial supremacy.

 idea that the justices have final say over the meaning of our Constitution — that once they have spoken, no matter what they say, our only recourse is the nearly impossible task of amending the Constitution or waiting for some of them to change their minds or die or retire — ought to offend anyone who believes in democratic government.

 myth: that the court needs this overweening power to protect minorities. Yes, the court has occasionally done so, but much more often it has done the opposite. Time and time again, we have seen it take political movements and legislation to get rights and make them secure. Virtually no progress was made on race, after all, until Congress enacted the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 — laws the Supreme Court has been working hard for years to weaken and destroy. That the people who wrote and ratified our Constitution wanted or expected the court to have such power is a fairy tale. They emphatically did not fight a revolution to replace a monarchy with an oligarchy. 

Politics Exam Questions

1. Presidental power - whether dependent on individual presidents?
2. US congress - why is it hard to get get things passed through congress?
3. Supreme Court - is it problematic to have an unelected body with so much power?
4. Federalism and its development since the 60s.
5. Recent election results - why congressional and presidential elections have been so different?
6. Media influence in presidential elections  across the whole campaign.
7. Interest groups - how they operate, pluralism. Positive? Negative?
8. Foreign policy - how it gets created?

Focus on two questions:

3. Supreme Court - is it problematic to have an unelected body with so much power?

• you should ask whether it's unelected and unaccountable
• how problematic is it
• is it valuable or is it too powerful in terms of it being 9 people
• MUST talk about why it is problematic first

8. Foreign policy - how it gets created?

Preparation for History Essay

Title: Why did non-slave holding white people in the South support slavery?

Paragraph 1:

•  If new states could not be slave states = only a matter of time before the South’s clout in Congress would fade = abolitionists would be ascendant = and the South’s “peculiar institution” – the right to own human beings as property – would be in peril.
• Abraham Lincoln's election as president = opposition to the expansion of slavery into the territories; Southern politicians were clear about that. 
• South of 1860 
• 4 million enslaved human beings lived in the south, and they touched every aspect of the region’s social, political, and economic life. 
• Slaves did not just work on plantations.  In cities such as Charleston, they cleaned the streets, toiled as bricklayers, carpenters, blacksmiths, bakers, and laborers.  They worked as dockhands and stevedores, grew and sold produce, purchased goods and carted them back to their masters’ homes where they cooked the meals, cleaned, raised the children, and tended to the daily chores.  
• “Charleston looks more like a Negro country than a country settled by white people,” a visitor remarked.
• Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850
• As Southerners became increasingly isolated, they reacted by becoming more strident in defending slavery. P2
• Controlling the slave population was a matter of concern for all Whites, whether they owned slaves or not. 
• comitted to preventing rebellion

Preparation for Literature Essay

Title: Examine the interplay between ideas and experience in Emily Dickinson's poetry.

‘Dickinson’s poetry expresses her struggles with her faith, with her father, with mortality, and with the challenges of being a woman and a poet.’ (Wendy Martin, The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (2002), p. 1) = Conclusion

Thematic nature of Dickinson's poetry:

• poetic style and significance of Christianity 
• books, women writers and Feminism
• 'sensational' literature and the theme of death
• temperance and the celebration of Nature and Life

Paragraph 1:

• Dickinson had made fun of the possibility "In Adam's fall / We sinned all" in the  New England Primer 1690 by writing a letter to Judge Lord, "because the dogma of Orginal Sin never figured strongly in her own religious consciousness and because her love for Jesus rested on a sense of shared suffering rather than belief in forensic justice" (Emily Dickinson and Philosophy)
• "Dickinson seems to have been drawn to the more literary and symbolic approaches...mytho-poetic insights offered by the century's most theologically "scientific" approach to scripture." (ibd.)
• Dickinson responded; "No Moses there can be" (Fr521) & identified Eden as a "a legend - dimly told" (Fr378)
• 1847 College Rebellion; "“They thought it queer I didn’t rise. I thought a lie would be queerer”, she is being true to herself, she isn't identifying herself as a follower, distinguishing to ideals and standards of the prejudice society, Christianity is a sham
• Puritanism and Transcendentalism had great influence over her poetry.
•  Lived in an age defined by the struggle to reconcile traditional Christian beliefs with newly emerging scientific concepts
• Brought up in a Calvinist household, the young Emily Dickinson attended religious services with her family at the village meetinghouse, Amherst's First Congregational Church
• #324, c. 1860 and #1545

Paragraph 2:

• ‘My mother does not care for thought, and … he [father] buys me many Books—but begs me not to read them—because he fears they joggle the Mind. They [parents and siblings] are religious, except me. (from The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Biblo & Tannen Publishers, 1971), p. 239)
• Dickinson’s definition of poetry: ‘If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.’(from ‘Emily Dickinson’s Letters’, by T.W. Higginson, Atlantic Monthly 1891) 
• ruptured traditional writing style
• introspective
• George Whicher; "Perhaps as a poet [Dickinson] could find the fulfillment she had missed as a woman" (page 45 - 1952 This was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson)
• Adrienne Rich; "she was determined to survive, to use her powers" (page 34 - Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson) 
• #199c. 1860 & #269 1861

Paragraph 3:

• #699 1863, #280 1861 & #822 1864
• Dickinson was enthralled by the grotesque and shocking details of death e.g. 'Girls kills herself, sends bullet to her head' headlines in the newspaper during this era
• For Dickinson, the crucial religious question was the survival of the soul after death. 
• ejected absolutely the idea of man's innate depravity; she favored the Emersonian partial reversal of Puritanism that conceived greatness of soul as the source of immortality.

Paragraph 4:

• #214 1860, 656 & 1732

Deadlines

Literature: Essay 2500 words, 30%                                            Monday 11th January 2016

History: Essay 2500 words, 30%                                            Friday 15th January 2016

Government and Politics: 2 hour examination, 50%              Tuesday 19th January 2016