7 founding fathers is great man theroy BS, there were 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress, 55 delegates attended the Constitutional Convention.
The 2nd Continental Congress created the Declaration of Independence, the Constitutional Convention wrote the United States Constitution. Those two documents were the founding documents of the United States, along with the Articles of Confederacy. They separated the American colonies from the British Empire, and established the United States of America as it’s owne country and government.
Anyone trying to pick 7 of the 100+ people that helped create those documents and elevate them as “The Founding Fathers” is probably trying to push an agenda, probably one that relies on picking and choosing writings from “The Founders”.
I’m not trying to push an agenda. I don’t know what you mean by “picking and choosing writings”. I’m still not sure exactly what you’re saying.
If you’re saying there are no such thing as “founding fathers”, I think that’s just wrong in the sense that the myth of the founding fathers is a part of American culture and is taught in American schools. There is no “founding father” gene or element, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
If you’re saying all the people who were delegates at those conventions are equally “founding fathers” because they helped forge the documents, then sure, I can respect that opinion. But some of those delegates undoubtedly played a significantly larger role in early American history than others (including the creation of those documents!). Hence why we learn about a select few of them, and not all ~100 (although I guess that would also be impractical in a school setting). The specific number 7 is a bit arbitrary, but ~10 were a lot more important than the rest.
Paywalled articles are still openly available if you politely email the researcher. While we should strive to have no barrier, if you can’t afford to publish openly those who need the research can still acquire it under the table. Having research unpublished because the researchers could not afford to pay the fee is worse than having the research published in a closed journal.
I’ve gotten a few dozen papers from closed journals that way, and I’ve never been told no.
Also, if you are starting your career, it’s ridiculous to ask you to pay for open access. At least in the third world, you can barely eat with your money.
I’ve never considered that since I’m in cybersecurity, so the oldest paper I’ve seen that is from the late 80s. The majority is from the mid 90s onwards though, and due to the fast moving nature of the field anything that is old enough to have a dead author is likely out of date.
mander.xyz
Active