Lecture Suggestions above mentions the cliché about vigilance and liberty. The First Amendment is a case in point. Is religion in danger as a result of the current interpretation of the Establishment Clause? Is religious freedom in danger if the current interpretation is revised? What was the purpose of the Establishment Clause? Ask three students to report on the three questions in a brief statement. See Leonard W. Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment (second edition; revised, 1994), and Robert S. Alley, The Supreme Court on Church and State (1988).

Arguments about the Second Amendment also are concerned about vigilance and liberty. How broad is the right to bear arms? Have some students investigate in the Tennessee Law Review's spring 1995 issue, "Second Amendment Symposium Issue." See also Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (1994).

The Additional Instructional Suggestions section for Chapter 6 suggests short questions for students to answer, perhaps as a prelude to class discussion. Here are several more:

1. What is a bank? Discussion of Hamilton and the Bank of the United States usually assumes that students know what a bank's functions are. This may not always be the case. Ask two students to provide an adequate definition. Do so before a lecture on the Hamilton program. Consult Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (1957), and Paul B. Trescott, Financing American Enterprise: The Story of Commercial Banking (1982).
2. Why two parties? This is a rather more difficult question, and the answer may be partly speculative. But the development of political parties despite the earnest objections of the framers requires that the matter be considered. See John F. Hoadley, Origins of American Political Parties, 1789-1803 (1986), and John H. Aldrich, Why Parties?: The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in the United States (1995). Students should also see Federalist No. 10.
3. What was so terrible about XYZ? Paying some money to grease the wheels of progress may not be the most ethical way of doing business, but it was not then nor is it now absent from ordinary national practices. Why did the Americans get so upset? See William Stinchcombe, The XYZ Affair (1980).
4. What are interposition and nullification? Are these not reasonable doctrines for a sovereign state that has no recourse against a monolithic national government? Why did Virginia and Kentucky stand alone? Ask the students for citations.
5. Are liberty and republicanism compatible? Does not liberty contain within it the capacity to reject a republic? A suggestive essay on the dilemma of educating for self-determination while educating to preserve the republic is David Tyack, "Forming the National Character: Paradox in the Educational Thought of the Revolutionary Generation," in David Tyack, editor, Turning Points in American Educational History (1967).