English Title Liberal Went Ahead: Numerous commentators believe that the public emphasis on Nationalism, identity and popular sovereignty hinders international cooperation and contributes to the crisis of the liberal international order, a claim that seems never-ending (LIO). How come populist governments persist in participating in regional and international organizations?
This section explores populist foreign policy’s tendency toward institutional collaboration and the implications for the LIO. Populist politicians from three continents former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, current Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte are compared in terms of regional cooperation policies. A growing populist “script” for regional cooperation is revealed in the research, which relies on ideas of popular sovereignty. Populist leaders can challenge the LIO and established international organizations without resorting to unilateral nationalism by incorporating regional cooperation into their political plans.
The Puritans’ thundering sermons to sinners in the pews and enslaved Africans’ writings about their life to document their identity and mobilize sympathetic readers are just a few examples of early American literature that is deeply related to its audience. In early American literature schools, the relationship between the speaker, the subject, and the listener is a major issue of discussion. “The hearer,” as Aristotle defined him in his 350 BCE “Treatise on Rhetoric,” must be either a judge or an observer and must decide the speech’s purpose and object,” he said.
The Liberal Arts Must Be Modernized
If we want students, parents, legislators, and the general public to appreciate what we’re doing again, we can’t just keep doing what we’ve been doing passively. According to Laura L. Behring, Tuesday, the 16th of October in the year of our Lord! Early American literature made me realize how fast we might forget our audience when a position we already agree with comes to mind. For example, consider the resounding calls from the national and international community to place more importance on the liberal arts in the United States.
Liberal education advocates had assumed they were speaking to a specific group, but it dawned on me that wasn’t true. It was definitely not me, as my credentials as an English professor and top academic officer of a liberal arts college make it clear that I am committed to the institution’s mission. Isn’t it possible, though, that I was mistakenly assuming that I was the target audience? Why should colleges and universities provide more than only vocational training to their students, but also help them develop their capacity for lifelong learning? My own classes, rather than “colleges and institutions,” maybe the best place to achieve my goals.
I revised my early American literature course after asking myself these issues. Students will read works by authors they may remember from high school such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass, as well as works by European explorers and colonizers who enslaved Africans. As an educator, I wanted my pupils to understand the importance of studying early American literature and how it can help them think critically about today’s most pressing concerns.
Migration, family, borders, civilizations, and homelands
Migration, family, borders, civilizations, and homelands; religious influences; commercial enterprises; race and ethnicity in American society; and political differences were all addressed by early American authors. Scientific research and truth and falsity were also addressed in their discussion. Today, we’re thinking about the same things. Although it may sound counterintuitive to say so now, I wanted to rethink my course and make it more focused on “modern early American literature” in order for my current students to find themselves and their beliefs reflected in texts that often seem so far away in time and space.
Both of these things happened at once. Students were asked to not only focus on the works’ core principles but also to find a connection to something else they were learning, reading, or seeing in American society. Students came to appreciate the advantages of this strategy after some consideration. “You see how the present comes to be if you grasp all you can about the past,” said one. “Perhaps you have the ability to glimpse into the future.” According to another, “What is 2018 without 1492, 1630, 1776 or 1865?” is a rhetorical question.
Connecting the Dots
Both national and state-level political-religious links were cited frequently, as was their apparent intertwinedness in contemporary events. Even as they were reading the latest headlines, my students were able to identify philosophical precedents and approaches to current events in early American literature. We’d break up our literature talks to speak about the connections between the past and the present and how our theoretical methods differed from those of history or political science. It astonished some of my students to learn that long-held American beliefs, like their own, have origins dating back hundreds of years.
It’s “a lot easier to think of Ben Franklin as an actual person, rather than simply a smart dude who bought a kite,” as one student put it, hearing directly from the main texts of “those who actually lived during the eras.” It was in this writing assignment that students received the second opportunity to evaluate the importance of early American literature. A “Dear American public…” manifesto was what I requested them to write. This semester we’ve studied American literature produced by both U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens, books that are hundreds of years old and generations removed from us today in terms of time and culture—and perhaps even in philosophy and temperament.
American literature and Current events
I was asked to produce a manifesto saying that early American literature was irrelevant, and I thought that was great if they had a strong opinion on the matter. ‘ I told the students that I was intrigued by their ability to draw connections between early American literature and current events. Interestingly, no students argued that the subject matter was of no interest to them. Many people (even those you know) today dismiss literature as a waste of time, an antiquated kind of education that doesn’t benefit the reader in any way (you). Tell the pundits that they are wrong. For this, you will compose a manifesto, a public proclamation of why studying early American literature is relevant now,”
Thoughts like John Locke and Montesquieu have traditionally been linked to liberalism, which is a belief in freedom and equality, democracy, and human rights, and constitutionally restricting the monarchy’s power, asserting legislative supremacy, and passing the Bill of Rights. As John Locke put it in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain in 1776 laid the liberal foundations of the young republic by declaring that “all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among these lives, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.
After a few years, the French Revolution destroyed the hereditary nobility and granted universal male suffrage to the first state in history to do so, under the slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity.” Both liberalism and human rights can trace their roots back to the 1789 French Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights. As a result of the Enlightenment’s intellectual advancement, the belief in absolute monarchy and established religion was dethroned throughout Europe, Latin America, and North America, among other places.
