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The Preamble of the U.S. Constitution—the document’s famous first fifty-two words— introduces everything that is to follow in the Constitution’s seven articles and twenty-seven amendments. It proclaims who is adopting this Constitution: “We the People of the United States.”.
Sep 28, 2022 · Today we will explore the evolution of the American funeral, and how funeral practices in the United States led to the creation of consumer protection laws that regulate goods and services in the death care industry.
- The Warnings of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin served as one of the foremost architects in structuring the Constitution, and while most of the Founders were congratulating one another on their remarkable charter of liberty, Benjamin Franklin injected this note of prophetic insight.
- The Warnings of George Washington. One of the most significant doctrines set forth in the Farewell Address was Washington's extremely insightful warning concerning the peril of allowing candidates to be nominated and national policies to be promoted by competing political parties.
- The Warning of John Adams. Among the warning voices of the Founders none was more forceful in proclaiming the need for a virtuous people to make the Constitution function than John Adams.
- The Warnings of Thomas Jefferson. During his two terms as President, Jefferson detected some evil and subversive trends which were luring the American people away from the original Constitution.
Aug 17, 2022 · In 2020, U.S. health care costs grew 9.7%, to $4.1 trillion, reaching about $12,530 per person. 1 At the same time, the United States lags far behind other high-income countries when it comes to both access to care and some health care outcomes. 2 As a result, policymakers and health care systems are facing increasing demands for more care at ...
- Overview
- Constitutional Convention
Constitution of the United States of America, the fundamental law of the U.S. federal system of government and a landmark document of the Western world. The oldest written national constitution in use, the Constitution defines the principal organs of government and their jurisdictions and the basic rights of citizens. (For a list of amendments to the U.S. Constitution, see below.)
Click here for the text of the Constitution of the United States of America.
The Constitution was written during the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by 55 delegates to a Constitutional Convention that was called ostensibly to amend the Articles of Confederation (1781–89), the country’s first written constitution. The Constitution was the product of political compromise after long and often rancorous debates over issues such as states’ rights, representation, and slavery. Delegates from small and large states disagreed over whether the number of representatives in the new federal legislature should be the same for each state—as was the case under the Articles of Confederation—or different depending on a state’s population (see New Jersey Plan and Virginia Plan). In addition, some delegates from Northern states sought to abolish slavery or, failing that, to make representation dependent on the size of a state’s free population. At the same time, some Southern delegates threatened to abandon the convention if their demands to keep slavery and the slave trade legal and to count slaves for representation purposes were not met. Eventually the framers resolved their disputes by adopting a proposal put forward by the Connecticut delegation. The Great Compromise, as it came to be known, created a bicameral legislature with a Senate, in which all states would be equally represented, and a House of Representatives, in which representation would be apportioned on the basis of a state’s free population plus three-fifths of its enslaved population. (The inclusion of the enslaved population was known separately as the three-fifths compromise.) A further compromise on slavery prohibited Congress from banning the importation of enslaved people until 1808 (Article I, Section 9). After all the disagreements were bridged, the new Constitution was signed by 39 delegates on September 17, 1787, and it was submitted for ratification to the 13 states on September 28.
In 1787–88, in an effort to persuade New York to ratify the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison published a series of essays on the Constitution and republican government in New York newspapers. Their work, written under the pseudonym “Publius” and collected and published in book form as The Federalist (1788), became a classic exposition and defense of the Constitution. In June 1788, after the Constitution had been ratified by nine states (as required by Article VII), Congress set March 4, 1789, as the date for the new government to commence proceedings (the first elections under the Constitution were held late in 1788). Because ratification in many states was contingent on the promised addition of a Bill of Rights, Congress proposed 12 amendments in September 1789; 10 were ratified by the states, and their adoption was certified on December 15, 1791. (One of the original 12 proposed amendments, which prohibited midterm changes in compensation for members of Congress, was ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-seventh Amendment. The last one, concerning the ratio of citizens per member of the House of Representatives, has never been adopted.)
Britannica Quiz
U.S. Constitutional History Quiz
The authors of the Constitution were heavily influenced by the country’s experience under the Articles of Confederation, which had attempted to retain as much independence and sovereignty for the states as possible and to assign to the central government only those nationally important functions that the states could not handle individually. But the events of the years 1781 to 1787, including the national government’s inability to act during Shays’s Rebellion (1786–87) in Massachusetts, showed that the Articles were unworkable because they deprived the national government of many essential powers, including direct taxation and the ability to regulate interstate commerce. It was hoped that the new Constitution would remedy this problem.
The framers of the Constitution were especially concerned with limiting the power of government and securing the liberty of citizens. The doctrine of legislative, executive, and judicial separation of powers, the checks and balances of each branch against the others, and the explicit guarantees of individual liberty were all designed to strike a balance between authority and liberty—the central purpose of American constitutional law.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Overview of Disease Burden in the United States. The National Institutes of Health defines disease burden as the impact of a health problem, as measured by prevalence, incidence, mortality, morbidity, extent of disability, financial cost, or other indicators.
May 1, 2021 · Eight healthcare reform paradigms were identified as influential precursors to VBH: Patient‐Centered Care Model, Patient‐Centered Medical Home, Population Health, Personalized Medicine, P4 Medicine, Precision Medicine, Managed Care, and Accountable Care.
