Conventions Books

This is an excellent history of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs in Washington, D.C. It provides insight into the behind-the-scenes workings of this important agency. Every Baptist should read this book.

This was a great book. How awesome to know more info. about the BJC. Most Baptists don't know all of this stuff. Thanks Ms. Parry!!!

Max Farrand takes the reader day by day through the butcher shop on the second floor of Independence Hall. Hear Alexander Hamilton wax eloquent on the virtues of monarchy! Hear Madison expound on the need for the Congress to have the power to "veto" any state law it considered "unconstitutional"! Hear Geo. Washington describe his main course at Dr. Franklin's table! Hear the great thoughts and ideas of countless men now obscure. You cannot claim to have any library of consequence on American History without these three volumes and the excellent supplement. The real deal.

I am rereading these after many years. In working my way through these volumes, I realized that these books require some preparation on the part of the reader. I thought I would therefore tell you exactly what these books are and make some suggestions for preparing to read them. As will become clear when I explain what they are, for me to critique them would be presumptuous and odd.
WHAT THESE BOOKS ARE:
Max Farrand published the first 3 volume edition in 1911. He took all the available records from participants in the Constitutional Convention that were known at that time and published them together. These include the official journal of the Convention (kept by the Convention's secretary, William Jackson), James Madison's Notes on the Federal Convention, Robert Yates' Secret Proceedings and Debates of the Convention..., along with notes or papers written by Rufus King, James McHenry, William Pierce, William Patterson, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Pinckney, George Mason, and the Committee of Detail. These are arranged in a day by day format. So that on May 29th, the day that Edmund Randolph presented the Virginia Plan, we read the enteries for that day in the Journal, by Madison, by Yates, by McHenry and by Patterson. And so on until we reach the end of Volume 1 on July 13th. Volume 2 completes the Convention. Volume 3 and 4 provide supplementary material such as letters of the individual delegates, the various plans presented to the Convention, etc.
Volume 4 was added by Farrand in his 1937 edition and includes material discovered between 1911 and 1937. The whole set was reprinted for the Constitutional Bicentennial.
SUGGESTIONS FOR READING THESE VOLUMES:
1. Buy them all before you start reading the first. Or, at least, buy Volume 3 before you start reading Volume 1. There are too many references to readings in Volume 3. You need to be able to read the Virginian, the Pinckney and the Patterson Plans. You will also want to read the day by day correspondence. I recommend that you read a days entry in Volume 1 and then read whatever enteries are there for those days in Volume 3 and 4.
2. It is probably a good idea to do some preparatory reading. Farrand himself wrote a good narrative of the Convention. There are many others. Try to choose one that doesn't just indulge in hagiography. M.E. Bradford wrote A Worthy Company which is short biographies of all the delegates. Very useful. I also suggest reading some good intellectual histories of the Convention. I just finished reading McDonald's Novus Ordo Seclorum. McDonald is as opinionated as always but he is also very learned and no one writes about the Constitution without opinion. You can choose among Bailyn, Woods, Appleby, Banning, Pocock, Adair and many others for this sort of stuff. (I suggest you try to read somebody whose political bent you don't agree with. I did that purposely with McDonald. That way you might actually catch a whiff of your opponent's ideas when you read the Convention notes. Just a suggestion.)
3. Read these documents with organizing themes in mind. For example:
a. Small states versus large states.
b. Slave states versus less slave states. I have forgotten the exact number but I believe that in 1787 there were either only one or two states were slavery was illegal. I trust someone will write me with the correct information. In any case, it is fascinating to listen to all the ways the delegates talk about slavery without using the word. Not in their personal notes but definitely in their public utterences.
c. Democracy versus Aristocracy.
d. Liberalism versus Republicanism.
And so on. I am sure that all of you can suggest many more. Choose several and watch the ways your themes interrelate in one person or more during the course of that summer in Philedelphia.
I owe this idea to McDonald. He has obviously read his copy of Farrand many times with several different themes in mind. In Novus Ordo Seclorum, McDonald has an altogether brilliant section on Madison's constitutional theories (pp 204-209 of the paperback edition) which he concludes by pointing out that Madison may not have had as much influence on the finished document as people normally think. McDonald notes that on the seventy-one specific proposals that Madison moved, seconded or spoke on, he lost 40 times (pp. 208-9). Obviously, McDonald read his copy once keeping track of who won on what issue. You got to love the guy for that.
Anyway, those are my suggestions. It may seem like a lot of work. It is. But it seems to me that one thing that almost all of us (radical, liberal, conservative, libertarian) have lost sight of is that the Founders expected citizens to be participants. To give up a little for the greater good, to take some time to make the right choices, to be involved. To me that implies working a little to understand our history so that I am better able to participate in our democracy. That's my crazy idea and I am sticking with it.

What an outstanding job of capturing the detail and programs of the National Conventions. A definite treasure of Republican history.

I FOUND THIS TO BE THE MOST COMPLETE AND FACINATING DESCRIPTIONS AND GUIDE TO THIS MEMORABILIA POSSIBLE. A DEFINITIVE WORK!!!!

We used this book for a month for a course in distributed AI. This books provides a comprehensible structure to multiagent negotiations by identifying three different kinds of domains (task oriented, state oriented, and worth oriented), and describe negotiation protocols and give their important properties. Wherever needed, the authors make the connection to game theory. This is a solid base to recent papers and books on multiagent negotiations, and also to build your own MAS using negotiation protocols of varying levels of complexities.

We used this book for a month for a course in distributed AI. This books provide a comprehensible structure to multiagent negotiations by identifying three different kinds of domains (task oriented, state oriented, and worth oriented), and describe negotiation protocols and give their important properties. Wherever needed, the authors make the connection to game theory. This is a solid base to recent papers and books on multiagent negotiations, and also to build your own MAS using negotiation protocols of varying levels of complexities.

Not just for missionaries, but also for any person concerned for historic Baptist principles of individual freedom, local church autonomy, priesthood of the believer, etc...this book is a welcomed contribution to Baptist understanding. If you feel uninformed concerning the controversy in the Southern Baptist Convention over the past couple of decades, the authors of this book speak from a broad range of experience and expertise to provide the troubling history and theology behind the "Fundamentalist Takeover." This volume is especially helpful for those wishing to gain a clearer understanding of the role of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 in the current politics of the Southern Baptist Convention. To read this book is to read the testimony of several of the most respected voices in moderate Baptist life. Highly recommended!

The book is a short compilation of essays on why missionaries shouldn't sign the 2000 BFM. This is a biased work definitely siding with those who disagree with the fundamentalist leadership and current direction of the SBC. I found the essays interesting and helped me see the greater controversy brewing in the SBC. The views expressed are more out of concern then judgment of other brothers and sisters in the faith. They want the reader to know why they are disagreeing with the leadership. I wouldn't call this book heresy or written by simple-minded liberals either. The authors have had positions of authority in missions and have experience on the mission field. Just because we disagree at times doesn't mean we should persecute our brothers in faith.

If you want to know why there is so much fuss about these folks over doctrinal issues and creeds then I recommend this book.

Read a moving book about a man who tenaciously stood in the face of liberal theology and upheld the Bible as God's inerrant Word. He has been called the greatest American Pastor of the twentieth century, and I whole-heartedly agree. I was a young Christian when I read this book, and it propelled my spiritual growth and inspired me to hunger for the presence and power of God in my life. I highly recommend it to anyone searching for answers about how God can touch and use a life to do great things.

Fine story of how God called and used this man to pastor one of America's largest churches -- First Baptist in Dallas.

Having lived there and hearing much of what this church and fine man of God were about, this is certainly an informative look at a man of God who believes God's Word and stood up for it in the face of odds against, e.g. everyone else was fleeing the inner city for the suburbs, not Criswell and First Baptist.

Certainly motivational for Christians of all persuasions to stand firm on God's promises, which have there yes, there amen, in Christ crucified.

A superb and thought-provoking revisit of the 2004 Republican National Convention from the perspective of one photographer who attempted to unify the protest markings in lower Manhattan. This often clever chronicle of the visible protest that spontaneously wallpapered Manhattan is a great reminder of the power of symbols, words and photography. This was the real story that week.

All too often the so called "liberal media" (Corporate Media, actually) only showed the television audience scenes of distorted shouting and brief shots of the swelling protesters without giving the scene the proper context- without so much as an opinion voiced that went beyond a few edited words. The media were in New York, they just did a terrible job of representing the feelings of the people- more often we were subjected to the opinions/propaganda of GOP operatives from out of state, people far away from actual terror threats and the consequences of the Bush agenda.

These posters are terrific. Buy the book and judge for yourself- talk about it.

Matthew Kraus displays great talent in both photographic design and photo journalism. Celebrating the creative outrage of the art community in the East Village of New York, Kraus offers the world some vivid images of a disturbing time in American politics.

This powerful yet understated book demonstrates in pictures what cannot be adequately expressed by any other means. These are pictures that not only speak louder than words, they scream for attention. Sticker Shock documents a cry for sanity in an America torn apart by political polarisation and in a world reeling from the brutality of the Bush administration.

To discuss Sticker Shock further would rob the book of its full impact. These pictures need to be seen first hand to be heard and felt properly. I urge you to get your copy and make up your own mind. After all, this is a book about freedom of speech, thought and expression.

David Lawson
Author and Journalist
London U.K.

Colloquially speaking, the main thesis of this book is that the Constitution of the United States was ratified by those who "voted their pocketbook." This has been claimed before in both popular culture and by the historian Charles Beard in his books written in the early years of the twentieth century. What sets this book apart from Beard's work however is that the author attempts, and succeeds to a large degree, to justify his claims with a rigorous statistical study. For those with the appropriate mathematical background and interest in the subject matter will find the book fascinating, even though at times the reader can get lost in the details. Absent for the most part though, and this is refreshing, is excessive moralizing by the author, for such would make the book irritating to some, with a consequent loss in readership.

The main mathematical tool used is logistic regression, which it is fair to say is the most popular tool among economists, even though at times it strains credulity to apply it in some situations that they do. This book could even be used by statistics instructors as a source of more challenging problems in logistic regression. Overall the author is convincing in his use of this tool, and therefore the conclusions of the book are difficult to counter if one accepts logistic regression as being a viable tool. It certainly is in other contexts, such as finance and biological modeling.

If one investigates the economic history of the United States after the war of independence it is not surprising to hear that Americans at the time were fed up with the loose conglomeration of states under the Articles of Confederation. Being financed essentially by paper money by the Continental Congress this currency suffered dramatic depreciation in value as the war dragged on. Some economic historians have estimated that $449 million dollars were issued during this time by the Continental Congress and the states, with none of it bearing interest. Certainly this situation motivated many at the time to seek a hard-money policy, and their attitudes are reflected in their votes for the ratification of the Constitution, as the author shows clearly in this work. To allow the states to issue paper money by fiat would be an anathema to those who lived through it during the war, and its prohibition in the Constitution would thus be a very desirable goal.

The Constitution of the United States is thus a product of the attitudes and interests of those who framed it and voted to adopt it. But their intentions, whether economic or otherwise, are in the final analysis irrelevant since only its social, moral, and legal efficacies are important. If the Constitution is an umbrella of freedom and sound justice for all of its citizens then it does not matter what the intentions of its founders are. If it is not, it should be altered, and it does not matter what the intentions are of those who alter it. The primary value of studying intentions is to shed light on the attitudes of the citizens at the time, and how they reacted to the absence of British rule after the war. No longer a part of the world market system via the British mercantile system, and having a government that could not pay the interest on domestic and foreign debt, they sought out a new alliance, a new government, to ameliorate their dire situation. Their efforts were in retrospect successful, and the government they invented has done a fair job since then.

"In To Form a More Perfect Union, Robert A. McGuire attempts to provide the first solid modern analysis to quantify the impact of the personal economic interests of the Founding Fathers on the structure and content of the U.S. Constitution. Readers familiar with the literature in this area will immediately, and correctly, associate this book with Charles A. Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, [1913] 1935). In that book, Beard concludes that the delegates' personal interests shaped their behavior with respect to the drafting and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. His hypothesis was generally accepted until the 1950s, when most scholars began to question the analysis. An onslaught of counterevidence came during the 1950s and early 1960s, and today most academics believe that Beard's original interpretation was too narrow and that the general political philosophies of the Founding Fathers had greater importance in determining the nature and contents of the U.S. Constitution.

"McGuire essentially resurrects Beard's hypothesis and offers substantial evidence in favor of the view that the Founding Fathers' personal interests had a significant influence on the process of constitutional design and ratification. In light of the substantial body of empirical evidence this book provides, it is likely to bring the personal interest view back into widespread acceptance among academics. Although McGuire draws some of the analysis presented in the book from his previously published journal articles, at least half of what he offers is new and original. What makes the book so compelling is the use of today's significantly better empirical methodology to analyze data, in contrast to the techniques available during the 1950s, when the counterevidence to Beard's hypothesis was presented.

"Readers searching for a middle ground in the debate over whether personal self-interest shaped the U.S. Constitution will find refuge in this book. McGuire repeatedly makes clear that these personal interests were relevant at the margin in the Founding Fathers' decision calculus and that many other factors (such as general political philosophy) influenced these individuals' overall behavior. Among the most compelling findings: (1) personal interests played a bigger role in the specific content of the U.S. Constitution than in the document's overall design; and (2) the framers' debt holdings and slave ownership and the degree of commercialization in their local communities are significantly correlated with their observed behavior and, hence, with the content of the constitution they produced....

"One of the book's strengths is the amount of underlying background data and statistics provided. For example, McGuire includes tables that show not only each individual delegate's vote on an issue (the data used for the dependent variable), but also the predicted probability of a yes vote for that delegate from the estimated logistic regression model. As anyone who has estimated a logistic regression model knows, it is possible for these models to fit well overall but still do a poor job of predicting individual votes. Throughout the book, however, McGuire provides the evidence necessary to comfort readers worried about such potential problems. The book's main weakness is that at times it becomes rather lengthy and dull, but this aspect is simply a cost of being thorough, which is necessary in this case because of the controversial nature of the theory being tested.

"For the great number of readers who are likely to use the results of the book as a single-sentence footnote or reference in their own research, the eleven-page prologue provides all of the background and summary information necessary to make an informed citation of the work. The remaining three hundred or so pages merely fill in the sufficient details to support these conclusions. In that sense, the book reminds me somewhat of Bjorn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

"Had I been a reviewer for the book prior to its publication, the only suggestion I might have offered to improve it would have been for the author to include a fuller discussion of the debate surrounding the adequacy and structure of the document that preceded the U.S. Constitution, the Articles of Confederation.... Had McGuire presented this discussion, he would have provided a fitting framework in which to view the Founding Fathers' choices as marginal institutional changes relative to the existing constitutional order.

"To Form a More Perfect Union undoubtedly will elicit additional research in this highly debated area of constitutional research. Future research will benefit from the 122 pages of raw data and empirical results provided as appendix material. McGuire's book most likely will meet with a better initial acceptance than Beard's book received (it was banned from high school libraries in Seattle and condemned by President Taft and by the president of Beard's own university).

"One important implication of McGuire's book is that the condition of a Rawlsian `veil of ignorance,' putatively necessary to produce a `just' social contract, is not and cannot be satisfied in reality. Any constitution or social contract will be shaped by its designers' individual self-interests. Modern public-choice scholars who favor theories based on the premise of methodological individualism will find comforting reassurance as they read To Form a More Perfect Union."

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Excerpted from a review by Russell S. Sobel in "The Independent Review," Winter 2004.

You have to believe this writer. There's an honest, no-axe-to-grind, started-out-neutral-but-changed-his-mind, quality about his account that has the ring of truth. Lots of fascinating sidebars about Southern Baptist history, including the account of a young ministerial student from Mercer College named John Birch.

First pro-conservative book published about the SBC turnaround, & I doubt there'll be a better one.

This book, (along with the others in the series), is the most exhaustive, even-handed, and thoroughly researched account of the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention that I have found anywhere. If you think you know everything about the Conservative movement in the SBC, read this series and see what you missed! Every Southern Baptist and, I believe, every Christian, should read this and the complete series from cover-to-cover. A thoroughly excellent resource and a must have for your personal library.

How would you like your children to have a _memorable_ birthday party, one where giant mechanized rodents weren't screaming at the tops of their lungs? A party where you're not being nickel and dimed to death for more money to play the games? And do I _need_ to mention the food?

Help is here if you live the the Baltimore Maryland area. For instance, there is the Cloisters Children's Museum, a beautiful stone castle in Brooklandville, Maryland. If you have a winter child's birthday party scheduled there, you can even have a roaring fire inthe fireplace. Try _that_at MacDonalds.

Or maybe your child is a baseball fan - you can check out the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Baseball Center. Of course, it has all sorts of info on the Babe as well as other aspects of baseball history. This could be a good place to take your softball team for the end of season party.

Perhaps you are looking for a special place to get married in the Maryland area, You could check out Brice House, in Annapolis Maryland. It's a beautiful mansion for that special day. Or maybe you'd like something that has a view - you could tie the knot at the Glass Pavillion at Johns Hopkins University.

These places and many more are covered in this detailed book that offers addresses and phone numbers as well as prices and photos of the locations. If you want to plan an even in the Baltimore Maryland area or perhaps check out what this wonderful area has to offer, this is the book for you.

I have read Ford's other book, Unique Meeting Places in the Greater Washington Area, and this book serves as a great compliment to those wanting more options. It is just as detailed, well organized, and helpful, with the added bonus of containing lesser-known sites that may be perfect for your special event!