The Generation Of The United States - 4076 Words

The Generation 1) Ellis sees the founding of the United States as phenomenal because the U.S. brought together people of all different factions and beliefs in order to overthrow the reigning regime. He also believes it is phenomenal because the United States was able to survive and become a nation that was brought up upon an argument between state and federal sovereignty. In addition, to fight in the revolution and win against Britain’s best army and navy, the U.S. had to carve its own path with unprecedented steps. Dues to the challenges the republic faced and overcame, the founding of the United States is truly phenomenal in Ellis’s eyes. 2) When Ellis writes about the need to see farsighted when looking at the founding of our country,†¦show more content†¦Those who saw nearsighted felt that America had no sense of national unity, and nothing to bring them together except for the common wish to separate from Britain. 4) Combining the opposite perspectives that Ellis writes about on the founding of our country, the central paradox of the revolutionary era is created. This paradox is that despite the massive advantages America had provided by â€Å"geographic isolation† and â€Å"bountiful natural resources,† the points used to justify the separation from England are the same reasons that overwhelmed the government leaders who would oversee the new population and unify the 13 sovereign states. 5) Critics of the Constitutional Convention highlight many of the same faults in the convention. One of these criticisms is that the convention was only to revise the Articles of Confederation not to replace them. In addition, the meetings of the Convention were held in secrecy and the matters discussed stayed private from majority of the average citizens. The reason behind this was because the fifty-five delegates were a group of elites that were hardly a good representation of the population as a whole. Another criticism was that the southern delegates abused these meetings by using them to obtain assurances that slavery would not be abolished in the south. 6) The first major liability of the United States was that no one had ever established a