Chapter one for the NCTC American Government Class.

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23. Copyright © 2012 Cengage Learning BETTMANN/CORBIS Painting of George Washington and the Constitution’s drafters at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

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28. Copyright © 2012 Cengage Learning ARPL/HIP/THE IMAGE WORKS “I agree to this Constitution, with all of its faults, if they are such: because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered. I doubt too whether any convention we can obtain may be able to make a better constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me . . . to find this system approaching so near to perfection.” —Benjamin Franklin (1788)

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33. Copyright © 2012 Cengage Learning Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency in 2008 represented a new chapter in the history of diversity as a value in American political culture. AP PHOTO/RICK BOWMER

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37. Copyright © 2012 Cengage Learning One of the negative ads of the 2008 presidential campaign attacked Democratic candidate Barack Obama for his association with William Ayers, a co-founder of the Weather Underground, a radical 1960s anti-Vietnam War group that carried out bombings at the Capitol and the Pentagon. The Web video ad questioned Obama’s judgment for his association with Ayers, seen here in a 1980 photo entering the Criminal Courts Building in Chicago. Ayers, labelled as a terrorist in the ad, is now a college professor, and he and Obama served together on the board of a school reform organization in the mid-1990s. AP PHOTO/KNOBLOCK

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40. Copyright © 2012 Cengage Learning A young woman participates in a protest of the USA Patriot Act at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall in September 2003 MARILYN HUMPHRIES/THE IMAGE WORKS

41. Copyright © 2012 Cengage Learning Discussion of the “blue vs. red” political divisions in America ignores the possibility that there may actually be a “purple America,” as shown in this map from Time magazine. (Closely contested districts in 2004 are shown in purple; one-sided Republican districts are shown in red, and one-sided Democratic districts are shown in blue. ROBERT J. VANDERBEI, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

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46. Copyright © 2012 Cengage Learning The duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, which killed Hamilton, is perhaps one of the most famous and extreme instances of negativity in American politics. NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES