NEH banner

Funded Projects Query Form
One match

Grant number like: FT-52179-04

Query elapsed time: 0.029 sec

1
Page size:
 1 items in 1 pages
 
1
Page size:
 1 items in 1 pages
Frederic Joseph Baumgartner
Virginia Tech (Blacksburg, VA 24061-2000)

FT-52179-04
Summer Stipends
Research Programs

Totals:
$5,000 (approved)
$5,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2004 – 8/31/2004

Declaring War and Making Peace in Early Modern Europe

A noteworthy recent trend is the disappearance of formal declarations of war and peace treaties. Many Americans argue that this has abrogated the US Constitution, which delegates declaring war to Congress. The goal of this project is to examine the history of declaring war and making peace in the Early Modern era to the time when the Constitution was written in order to understand what its framers had in mind when they gave the power to declare war to Congress. In the Middle Ages, declaring war and signing peace treaties were highly ritualistic acts, but by the seventeenth century they had changed considerably. A key issue is determining how and when the medieval practices gave way to the usage that the Constitution's authors had in mind when it was written.