Motivation in History: Charles Beard and the Founding Fathers

Essay by karlrUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, November 2004

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Throughout history there are all kinds of historians that describe about our history and how we got to where we are. Charles Beard is a unique historian because he talks about the motives on our history event by not just any event. This issue created a lot of debate on what Charles Beard believed and that is the motives of the Founding Fathers.

Charles Beard published An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States on whether the Constitution's backers simply concerned for the nation or were they interested in protecting their own material interest. He also describes that questioning the motives of the Constitution's supporters, it also demonstrated how important our interpretations of the past could be.

The supporters of the Constitution before made the Articles of Confederation. The Article of Confederation was designed for the States to have the power and to have a weak central government, but it produced some problems.

Money capital suffered under the Articles of Confederation, the lack of securities for American products and investments into the foreign market. Also under the Article of Confederation the government was not paying the interest on its debt from the war, which crippled the country. He made these arguments to back his thesis on that the supporters of the Constitution was looking for their interest and not entirely the nations interest.

After Charles Beard published this thesis, made a dispute against other historians.

These historians do not believe Charles Beard's thesis and try to disprove his thoughts and prove that the supports did not write the Constitution for their own interest. In a chart, which shows the Delegates that were at the Constitution Convention. The Delegates on this chart are people having public security holdings, who are people from all different backgrounds. The Delegates mostly...