hi everyone this lecture is about the initial uh foundational document of the United States uh the Constitution we're going to do a little history leading up to the American Revolution the Declaration of Independence and finally the Constitution and we're going to look broadly at some of the most important kind of rules and ideas in the Constitution and some of the compromises a lot of us have the idea that the constitution uh was just written with no politics involved no uh disagreements when actually there were many huge disagreements between people who were writing the Constitution who were drafting it and so there had to be a lot of compromises to make sure that as many people were on board with it as possible so first before we get to um the specific history of the Constitution let's just briefly look at uh the question of what is politics so there are two definitions here one uh uh a distinctive form of rule whereby people act together to conciliate diverse interests and values and to make public policies in the pursuit of common purposes so this one uh I interpret this as saying a little more that politics allows people to come together um right with very different ideas and interests about what they need or want but it it gives the possibility of coming together into a common purpose into a common kind of uh Focus or Direction the other uh definition here who gets what when and how another definition of politics one more focused on resources on um broadly defined so this could be resources like food and water there could also be something like free speech or uh justice and how does a society decide who in society gets which products or which resources how and when and so on which of these definitions make sense to you just take a second and think here politics regardless of the definition that makes most sense to you has a few things involved with it one politics is focused on the public part of our Lives those lives that we share uh when we walk out of our homes so private is a private life uh it's your personal relationships with people it's your privacy at home or in your room and this was this is what goes on your private life versus the public life um this is when you're sharing the world with other people so strangers so when you go to school when you go to work when you're driving down the street when you're at a concert uh or a religious service these are all public aspects of uh your life politics um even though many of us don't think this is possible today politics does offer both the possibility of conflict as well as cooperation a lot of us think it's just about conflict though so politics can lead for example to Unity among groups of people and allows uh what we call civilization Society to be created but politics does also lead to conflict and more so it kind of has this double-sided uh take to it and finally politics always involves building some kind of community a group of people in which uh there are included people and excluded people insiders and Outsiders and this doesn't always have to be a bad kind of division but there is always this kind of vision so for example if you're an American if you're in the United States of America then by definition everyone else in the world is not American they are from different nationalities different nation states so regardless of the definition you choose these three aspects are involved in anything we call politics so a little background in the philosophy of uh the birth of the United States of America the ideas that led to the American Revolution and the separation uh from Great Britain so it comes out this period we call the enlightenment uh between the 16th and 18th centuries in Western Europe so between the 1500s and the 1700s in which people started to um uh reject uh just given religious kinds of ideas about how the world worked or started to reject monarchical governments where there were kings queens royalty leading by Family bloodline and much more emphasis on humans being active parts of the world active agents in the world that we didn't have to rely on uh Elite Royal people or God to tell us what to do or how to understand the world that we should use our own reason we should use science uh to understand the world around us that we can exploit nature we can use Nature's resources uh to develop our societies and that we become aware of ourselves self-conscious almost this is almost a period where you could think human beings go from being teenagers to adults and so after the enlightenment period ends in the early 1700s these ideas spread all around the world including the United States and the questions that the enlightenment leaves us when it comes to politics specifically is how do we want to organize ourselves According to which ideals goals morals and fears do we want to organize our society again if we're not being given instructions from a religious background from from our God or from our king or queen then we have to come up with it ourselves uh what politics looks like what our society should look like so the historical foundations here of the United States um we should always remember we were uh the United States was originally 13 colonies originally part of the uh British Empire run by Great Britain in the map on your right here you see on the far right this kind of like almost uh pinkish Orange right this is the original uh land territory of the 13 colonies so even the colonies themselves weren't fully for a lot of them fully formed so Virginia Pennsylvania uh New York Georgia these were only partial uh parts of what they would grow into later and so it was just this very small group right of colonies uh they were part of the Empire that were uh essentially offshoots of British Society and for about 150 years American colonists viewed themselves as British people as members of the British Empire essentially as part of an extended family the British of the family the British Empire however by the 1770s a few historical events occurred specifically the end of the Seven Years War or what is often called in North America the French and Indian War in which Great Britain and France fought a series of Wars around the world including in America uh for control of territory and what we see here in this map here is what uh the United States look like um or at least sorry uh North America look like this isn't the United States yet at the end of that war in 1763 so remember the Declaration of Independence is 1776 so this is still years later but what you see is here like um coming out of the War the British Empire one but it's still um uh uh uh wrote up peace treaties peace agreements with both friends and Native American communities and what we see here is that one of the uh uh results of the peace treaty was What's called the Proclamation line of 1763 in which the British Empire agreed not to let colonists move any further west since those were still Native American communities Native American territory okay because of the War the British Empire spent a lot of money uh from their view defending the colonies from Native American communities and from the French Empire and so there were a lot of debts and so the British Empire also raised taxes on the American colonists the colonists however felt overtaxed especially since they did not feel they were getting essentially their money's worth they didn't see uh the worth of all these extra taxes since they didn't think they were getting more services from the British Empire the British Empire by the 1760s and 1770s was also starting to be interested in looking to end the Atlantic slave trade and ultimately end slavery itself while most of the colonies were very uh the economies including most of the societies were increasingly based on a slave economy so they were resistant to British efforts to end the slave trader Limited and all of this ultimately led to the formation of a new political and cultural Community what we call the United States of America uh and the United States was born in two ways one the Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783 and then the Declaration of Independence written in 1776 a kind of justification and explanation for why the colonies were breaking away from the British Empire once the war was pretty much finished uh the colonies wrote the first set of rules for how they were going to run their new country this first original uh set of rules was called The Articles of Confederation written in 1781 and uh in existence in power until 1789 viewed as a good start but has many problems your textbook goes into more detail here but by the late just within a few years of the Articles being written as soon as the war was over essentially in 1783 a lot of people realized that the Articles had to be Rewritten and have a more permanent kind of set of rules what would become the Constitution so the Constitution ultimately is a document of compromise is a blueprint of what is allowed and not allowed the rule book for the United States of America so 1789 the Constitution comes into Force again the history here is really important so definitely check out the book if you haven't already and the co the Constitution sets out rules of relationships between a few different parts of this new country first laid out the rules for between different parts of relationships between the federal government here we're talking about the three branches of the federal government the Judiciary the executive and the legislative and we'll get more into that in the next few weeks the Constitution also wrote a set of rules about the relationships between the federal government and state governments what we call federalism which we'll also be discussing more the next few weeks and finally the Constitution covers the rules of the relationship between the federal government uh and state governments and its citizens so what is appropriate behavior for Citizens what is appropriate behavior for the government there's a lot of disagreement as I mentioned at the beginning on what these rules should be on what the Constitution should be when it was being written between 1786 and when it was finally drafted in final form and signed in 1789 and the question here that's interesting historically is given all this division this politics this disagreement on what should be in the Constitution how did they essentially come up with all these compromises uh was agreement found by 1789 so one debate when writing the Constitution was on the uh the question between order political order and Society societal order and individual rights on one hand every society needs some measure of stability of regularity we get this through laws we also get this through a common story about what we tell ourselves about who we are as Americans or Chinese citizens or Germans but having too much stability is not good having too many laws too many rules too many police for example can snuff out individual freedoms and get rid of diversity of thought diversity of background diversity of people but having too much on this side too can be imbalancing so too much Freedom too uh much individuality can mean chaos so every society has to balance between order and individual rights and what we have in the constitution in the first draft of 1789 is much more obsessed on order the rules the laws and not a lot on individual rights it's always an interesting thing to remember that it took two years for the Constitution to be changed and given 10 Amendments or ten changes what we call the Bill of Rights so that individuals would actually have new freedoms uh so that the government wouldn't be too powerful there was also a debate at this time when writing the Constitution between how centralized political power should be in the new government so the Articles of Confederation that first one was a confederation that's in the title this is a very loose organization of colonies or States what the Constitution did was create a federation so transitioning from a confederation to a federation a much tighter uh more organized uh set of uh States and groups and there were two groups of Americans at this time with two different ideas about how centralized power should be in the new Federation the new federal government so should the federal government have a lot of power write a very strong federal government that can make sure that things are correctly laid out these are the Federalists at the time so these are people who were in favor of political power being really centralized in a strong powerful federal government in Washington DC on the flip side Anti-Federalists were Americans who were very afraid of a very centralized government especially because they feared too much um uh infringement on individual freedoms individual rights these were called Anti-Federalists so to compromise between the this debate between these two extremes a few compromises were put in order first the creation about the executive and judicial branches so before uh the Constitution 1789 there was no president formally and there was no court system so adding these two branches then also separate so in addition to creating two more branches so we have three branches now you give each of those branches a different set of powers what we call separation of powers and then we also come up with what's called checks and balances where each of the branches have certain powers and freedoms but those powers and freedoms are limited are checked by the other two they're balanced by the other two branches so one about branch of the government doesn't get too powerful the constitution in order to kind of uh um compromise here between centralized and decentralized Power also talked about the relationship between the federal and state governments here we'll talk more in the next few weeks but essentially the federal government is superior to state governments but both federal and state governments have certain powers rights and responsibilities Federal Government powers are called enumerated powers in the Constitution these are listed in the textbook and state government powers are called reserved powers so throughout these compromises um the idea was that power could still be created and centralized in a federal government but not too much there was still a balance to it there was still a limit on it and finally for this lecture some other compromises uh when it comes to States and population in Congress representation in the Senate and the house today is usually based on we think population however different states have wildly different populations so at the time a state like Rhode Island and New York very different populations today would be California and Wyoming or Texas and Nebraska so one side wanted it to be just on population so these were large states with huge populations so that they would have more representation states with less population one in every state had the same amount of representation so the more populated states wouldn't have too much power here what was um developed was the Great Compromise so here the creation about the house and the Senate the house here is based on representation so California for example has much more representation a higher population than Wyoming but in the Senate every state has the same level of representation every state has two State uh two senators so California has two senators and so does Wyoming this is called the Great Compromise finally a compromise that is often forgotten about but was very important uh it's a very dark compromise and one that we are very much historically debating I think even today which was called The Three-Fifths Compromise this was a compromise between states that were anti-slavery at the time and colonies and states that were pro-slavery that had legal slavery that their economies were based on the forced labor of human beings so the compromise here was again with representation in Congress if states were going to base a representation at least partially in the house on population slave states wanted to count their slave enslaved populations as representation as part of their population so they would get more representation let's say for South Carolina or Georgia or Virginia in Congress however this did not mean that these enslaved people would get political representation themselves only their bodies would be counted so that the states they lived in would get more power in Congress anti-slave States states where slavery had already been outlawed were against this so therefore there was a compromise a really dark one in which enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of one person three-fifths of a whole human being and that three-fifths would go to that state's representation uh that population in the house so slave states would get extra power in Congress through these populations but not have to give any rights any representation to these enslaved people they were only using their bodies and only counted them as partial people so the Constitution a very important document uh the textbook has a lot more details so definitely check out that chapter this week um but not all the compromises are good ones not all compromises are good and I think we see with something like the Three-Fifths Compromise definitely was not a good compromise it was not a moral one the other compromise is like the Great Compromise really important and foundational still at the heart of how the United States runs today looking forward to hearing your thoughts this week on this topic and talk to you all soon