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In 2005 hopes for closer European integration were dealt a potentially fatal blow when French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed new European Union constitution. Going beyond the instant analysis of journalists, which placed blame for the failed vote on the two nations’ internal politics, Democracy Needs Dispute examines a collection of media accounts of European policy debates to argue that the problem with the EU is its relative lack of vibrant political conflict. Democracy Needs Dispute offers both up-to-date analysis and a rich theoretical understanding of the problems facing further efforts at European integration.

On May 10, 1776, the Second Continental Congress sitting in Philadelphia adopted a Resolution which set in motion a round of constitution making in the colonies, several of which soon declared themselves sovereign states and severed all remaining ties to the British Crown. In forming these written constitutions, the delegates to the state conventions were forced to address the issue of church-state relations. Each colony had unique and differing
traditions of church-state relations rooted in the colony’s peoples, their country of origin, and religion.

This definitive volume, comprising twenty-one original essays by eminent historians and political scientists, is a comprehensive state-by-state account of disestablishment in the original thirteen states, as well as a look at similar events in the soon-to-be-admitted states of Vermont, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Also considered are disestablishment in Ohio (the first state admitted from the Northwest Territory), Louisiana and Missouri (the first states admitted from the Louisiana Purchase), and Florida (wrestled from Spain under U.S. pressure). The volume makes a unique scholarly contribution by recounting in detail the process of disestablishment in each of the colonies, as well as religion’s constitutional and legal place in the new states of the federal republic.

This is the fifth and final volume documenting New York State's ratification of the Constitution. This particular volume includes the complete record of the state ratifying convention. In addition to the official journal and the proceedings and debates of the convention, the volume contains many documents never before published, including the voluminous notes of the secretary of the convention and several of the convention delegates, the correspondence of delegates and spectators at the convention, and the rich newspaper commentaries describing the day-by-day events in the convention. For the first time, historians will be able to see how the New York convention - dominated by a two-thirds majority of Antifederalists - came to adopt the Constitution. This documentary series is a research tool of remarkable power, an unrivaled work for historical and legal scholars, librarians, and students of the Constitution.

This is the first of three volumes documenting Rhode Island's public and private debates about the Constitution. This documentary series is a research tool of remarkable power, an unrivaled reference work for historical and legal scholars, librarians, and students of the Constitution. The volumes are encyclopedic, consisting of manuscript and printed documents-contemporary newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets-compiled from hundreds  of sources, copiously annotated, thoroughly indexed, and often accompanied  by microfiche supplements.  Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen has noted that The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution series "will be of enduring value centuries hence" and described it as "one of the most interesting documentary publications we have ever had."  The American Bar Association Journal has stated, "Each new volume now fills another vital part of the mosaic of national history."