Word: text
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...text makes clear who decides those interests. The Communist Party, whose members include 6.7% of the nation's 282 million people, is the "leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system." That mandate is so broad the document does not even mention the groups that really run the country: the 14-member Politburo and the 307-strong Central Committee...
...first, adopted in July 1918, attempted to lay out the structure of the Soviet government without even mentioning the Communist Party. The 1924 constitution, which formally recognized the creation of the multinational Soviet Union, gave individual states the right to secede -- a fiction that remains in the current text. The 1936 revision, known as the Stalin constitution, theoretically expanded personal freedoms at a time when the dictator's Great Terror was sweeping the country. The current version was adopted in 1977. One of its key changes: the right to sue the state, which has seldom been exercised but which Party...
Many communities around the country will present their own lectures and hold debates. In North Dakota, for example, the text of the Constitution is being read in halls across the state, with results that are somewhat surprising; after one reading in Bismarck, an insurance salesman became so excited that he closed his office, went home, sat his wife down and read her the whole thing...
Like any earthly matter, the Constitution has three forms: the solid text of the framers, the more fluid interpretation of the courts and a sort of glowing gas perceived by the public. That last Constitution, misquoted, rhapsodized over and construed to endorse the passions of the moment, is the subject of this imaginative book by a Pulitzer-prizewinning Cornell University historian, Michael Kammen. Kammen rummages through two centuries of sources, including news clippings, speeches, textbooks and public opinion polls, to gauge how Americans have regarded their own charter of government...
...house he occupies is as strange as he is, at once balanced and perilous, like a house of cards. The basic text of the Constitution is the main building, a symmetrical 18th century structure grounded in the Enlightenment principles of reason, optimism, order and a wariness of emotion and passion. The Constitution's architects, all fundamentally British Enlightenment minds, sought to build a home that Americans could live in without toppling it by placing their impulses above their rationality. To these men, who grew up on Swift, Hume, Locke and Pope, stability and moderation were not only practical measures...