56 results found for: town meeting
This article was first published in Green Mountain Noise, 2VR’s E-zine publication Ethan Allen, the unpredictable frontier rebel who rallied resistance to any person or power threatening […]
The answer? A Vermont public bank. 2VR has long supported independent financing for our once-and-future republic, and last year – 2014 – was a big one […]
Thanks to our friends at the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum and RETN for hosting 2VR as part of their annual Pecha Kucha night. Here’s a […]
Download PDF by Ron Miller Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence was launched in April 2005. It began as a 12-page “journal” published bimonthly on newsprint, eventually […]
IAN BALDWIN moved to Vermont from New York City in 1982. In 1984 Ian and his wife Margo founded Chelsea Green Publishing Company. In 2005 he […]
In his 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, author Robert Putnam ranked Vermont above all other states on his scale of “tolerance for gender, racial, and civil liberties.” At about the same time, political scientist Tom Rice ranked Vermont first among states on a “civil society” measure published in Publius, the leading professional journal of American federalism.
Few Americans are aware that Vermont, the fourteenth state admitted to the Union in 1791, was not a colony like the others; it was a preexisting independent republic spontaneously created by its residents who rejected the authority of neighboring colonies, particularly New York, which had the strongest claim to its territory. In its fourteen years of formal independence, beginning in 1777, it very nearly fulfilled the textbook image of a society created voluntarily by free persons living in the state of nature—a favorite motif of seventeeth and eighteenth century social-contract political philosophers. In the United States, Texas, California, and Hawaii also enjoyed periods as independent republics, but Vermont’s example reflects a greater equality of persons and resources. In the case of Vermont, in the face of a trend toward oligarchy in America—evident even in the eighteenth century—an egalitarian democratic community for a time found almost complete realization.
Republic: A system of government in which the people hold sovereign power and elect representatives who exercise that power. It contrasts, on the one hand, with a pure democracy, in which the people or community as an organized whole wield the sovereign power of government, and on the other with the rule of one person (such as a king, emperor, czar, or sultan).
—Black’s Law Dictionary, abridged seventh edition.
Here’s an easy question to invite you into my meanderings: How many times did the first Vermont Republic begin a war? None? Bingo. Okay, there are huge differences between the world of the late eighteenth century and the post-9/11 twenty-first-century world. But there are similarities as well, and it is time to reexamine the role of U.S. states and their National Guard units in questions of war and peace, with special emphasis on wars of choice—wars that have no credible relationship to national defense.
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
— Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776
We present to you two thoughtful and considered diverging opinions on the Act 46 school board consolidation vote. ACT 46: Voting IN FAVOR – Eve Frankel; […]
In honor of January 2017 – Vermont Independence Month (as declared by the Vermont State Legislature) AND the 240th anniversary of the 1777 founding of the […]
You must be logged in to post a comment.