An ironic examination of the founding years of our country. Historian Ellis guides us through the decisive issues of the nation's founding, and illuminates the emerging philosophies, shifting alliances, and personal and political foibles of our now iconic leaders. He explains how the idea of a strong federal government, championed by Washington, was eventually embraced by the American people, the majority of whom had to be won over. And he details the emergence of the two-party system--then a political novelty--which today stands as the founders' most enduring legacy. But Ellis is equally incisive about their failures, making clear how their inability to abolish slavery and to reach a just settlement with the Native Americans has played an equally important role in shaping our national character. Ellis strips the mythic veneer of the revolutionary generation to reveal men possessed of both brilliance and blindness.--From publisher description.
Originally published: London : Pearson Education, 2003.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [327]-360) and index.
Contents
1. Inner power : Lincoln's ambition and political vision, 1809-54 -- Ambition -- Political vision -- Moral crisis : 1854 -- The religious roots of moral power -- 2. The power of opinion : Lincoln : the Illinois public and the new political order, 1854-58 -- Lincoln, democratic politics and public opinion -- Illinois public opinion and the anti-Nebraska fusion movement -- The senatorial campaign of 1858 -- 3. The power of party : winning the presidency, 1858-60 -- Presidential ambition : Lincoln, his party and the road to the Decatur convention -- The Republican presidential nomination -- The 1860 presidential campaign : the power of a righteous party -- 4. Confronting the limits of power : from president-elect to war president, 1860-61 -- In the antechamber to power : holding the party line -- From Springfield to Sumter : building a united front -- Strategies for 'a people's war' -- 'What shall I do? The people are impatient ... ' -- 5. The purposes of power : evolving objectives, 1861-65 -- Reading the public -- 'Every indispensable means' : toward the Emancipation Proclamation -- Faith and purposes -- Faithfulness of purpose : emancipation, reconstruction and black citizenship -- 6. The instruments of power : coercion and voluntary mobilization, 1861-65 -- Coercion, repression and executive power -- Popular mobilization : the 'power of the right word' and the agency of party -- Popular mobilization : churches and philanthropic organizations -- The Union army as a moral force -- The election of 1864 : 'the second birth of our nation' -- 7. Conclusion : power in death -- Chronology of Lincoln's life.
Summary
A portrait of America's sixteenth president follows Lincoln's life and career during his rise to political power and his years in the White House, arguing that he looked beyond the political system to find support in his struggle to end slavery.
Young Center books in Anabaptist and Pietist studies
Notes
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents
Introduction : religion, religious minorities, and the American Civil War -- Politics and peoplehood in a restless republic -- Our country is at war -- Conscription, combat, and Virginia's "war of self-defense," 1861-1862 -- Negotiation and notoriety in Pennsylvania, 1862 -- Patterns of peace and patriotism in the Midwest -- The fighting comes north, 1862-1863 -- Thaddeus Stevens and Pennsylvania Mennonite politics -- Did Jesus Christ teach men war? -- Resistance and revenge in Virginia, 1863-1864 -- Burning the Shenandoah Valley -- Reconstructed nation, reconstructed peoplehood.
Part 1. A growing rivalry between the North and South, 1846-1854. The Mexican War, the Wilmot Proviso, and the election of 1848 ; The Compromise of 1850 ; The fugitive slave controversy, the election of 1852, and growing sectionalism -- Part 2. Southern successes, Northern anxieties, 1854-1857. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, bleeding Kansas, and the Republican Party ; The elction of 1856 and its aftermath -- Part 3. The Union comes apart, 1857-1861. Dred Scott, Kansas, and the events of 1858 ; John Brown's raid, party conventions, the election of 1860, and secession.
Summary
Voices from the Gathering Storm explains the dramatic change in thinking about the nature and value of the American Union from 1846 to1861 which impelled citizens from 11 southern states to declare independence and the remaining 22 states to fight the bloodiest war in the nation's history. This reader tells the story of seventeen Northerners and Southerners who lived through the critical fifteen years prior to the Civil War. In their letters and diaries, they describe in their own words what it was like to live during the sectional crisis and the coming of the war. [from the publisher]
The crucible of conflict -- 1. Background to the struggle : the federalist challenge and the origins of Pennsylvania's Jeffersonian conflict -- 2. The radicals emerge : "The European condition of society" and the promise of democracy -- 3. The quid challenge : political economy, politics, and the fault lines of conflict -- 4. The crucible of conflict : 1805 -- 5. "Perpetual motion--perpetual change--a boundless ocean without a shore" : the final meaning of democracy in Pennsylvania -- History and historiography.
Summary
"Pennsylvania Jeffersonians were the first American citizens to attempt to translate idealized speculations about democracy into a workable system of politics and governance. In doing so, they revealed key assumptions that united other national citizens regarding democracy and the conditions necessary for its survival. In particular, they assumed that democracy required economic autonomy and a strong measure of economic as well as political equality among citizens. This strong egalitarian theme was, however, challenged by Pennsylvania's precociously capitalistic economy and the nation's dynamic economic development in general, forcing the Jeffersonians to confront the reality that economic and social equality would have to take a back seat to free market forces.".
"Shankman's exploration of the Pennsylvania experience reveals how democracy arose in America, how it came to accommodate capitalism, at the same time marginalizing egalitarian assumptions and dreams. A work of intellectual and political history, his study also mirrors the aspirations, fears, hatreds, dreams, generous impulses, noble strivings, selfish cant, and enormous capacity to imagine of those who first tried to translate the blueprint for democracy into a tested foundation for the nation's future."--BOOK JACKET.
"Forever Free project : Peter O. Almond & Stephen B. Brier, senior producers ; Christine Doudna, editor."
Originally published: Knopf, 2005.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-244) and index.
Contents
The peculiar institution -- True likenesses -- Forever free -- Re-visions of war -- The meanings of freedom -- Altered relations -- An American crisis -- The tocsin of freedom -- On the offensive -- The facts of reconstruction -- Countersigns -- The abandonment of reconstruction -- Jim Crow -- The unfinished revolution.
Summary
Draws on a wide range of documents to offer a new interpretation of the Emancipation and Reconstruction years and the lasting impact they had on the nation's history.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-267) and index.
Summary
From the moment of Lincoln's death on April 15, 1865, until Andrew Johnson, his replacement, formally announced postwar plans on May 29, the fate of the country hung in the balance. War had left the Republic strained almost beyond endurance. Johnson's ascendancy to the presidency seemed the killing stroke, even to the victorious North. A former slave owner from the border state of Tennessee, Johnson had been drunk at his inauguration as vice president; he was hated equally by the South and the North. Some Northerners were even convinced he had been part of the conspiracy behind Lincoln's assassination. Later, he escaped impeachment by a single vote. As Howard Means reveals in this revisionist account of Johnson's first six weeks in office, the new president faced almost insurmountable odds. Yet Johnson not only met but overcame them, preserving the Union for which so many had sacrificed their lives.--From publisher description.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 467-498) and index.
Contents
The newspaper-based political system of the nineteenth-century United States -- The printing trade in early American politics -- The two national Gazettes and the beginnings of newspaper politics -- Benjamin Franklin Bache and the price of partisanship -- The background and failure of the sedition Act -- Charles Holt's generation: from commercial printers to political professionals -- The expansion of the Republican newspaper network, 1798-1800 -- A presence in the public sphere: William Duane and the triumph of newspaper politics -- The new conventional wisdom: consolidating and expanding a newspaper-based political system -- The federalists strike back -- Improving on the Sedition Act: press freedom and political culture after 1800 -- The "tyranny of printers" in Jeffersonian Philadelphia -- Ordinary editors and everyday politics: how the system worked -- Newspaper editors and the reconstruction of party politics.
National Society Daughters of the American Revolution,
Date of Publication
c2008.
Physical Description
vi, 854 p. ill., facsims., maps ; 29 cm.
Notes
Includes bibliography (p. 761-812) and index.
Contents
The northern states -- The South -- Miscellaneous naval and military records -- Foreign allies -- West Indies -- Appendices. Map of the enslaved population, 1790 Census ; Documenting the color of participants in the American Revolution ; Names as clues to finding forgotten patriots ; The numbers of minority participants in the Revolution.
edited and introduced, and with a new pref. by Mario M. Cuomo and Harold Holzer ; with essays by Gabor S. Boritt ... [et al.] ; afterword by Frank J. Williams.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [165]-207) and index.
Summary
"Sweet Land of Liberty reawakens the Revolution in Northampton County ( PA.) with sketches of men and women caught up in it. Seldom is this story told from the vantage point of common folks, let alone those in the backcountry. In Fox's hands, we see in these individuals an altogether more disturbing Revolution than we have ever reckoned with before...Fox's account will startle many readers for whom the Revolution symbolizes the high-minded pursuit of liberty... When the Revolution broke out, militias took control. Frontier justice replaced the rule of law as zealous patriots preoccupied themselves not with fighting the British but with seizing local political power and persecuting their pacifist neighbors."
American migrations, 1765-1799 : the lives, times, and families of colonial Americans who remained loyal to the British Crown before, during, and after the Revolutionary War, as related in their own words and through their correspondence
Conflict and community on the eve of revolution -- Why they fought -- Identity and the military community -- The meaning of the war against the British -- Race and violence on the frontier -- Civil War and the contest for community -- The memory of the American Revolution.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 289-292) and index.
Summary
"Measuring America is the fascinating, provocative, and eye-opening story of why America has ended up with its unique system of weights and measures -the American Customary System, unlike any other in the world- and how this has profoundly shaped our country and culture. In the process, Measuring America reveals the colossal power contained inside the acres and miles, ounces and pounds, that we use every day without ever realizing their significance. " [from the publisher]
Clifton and Shirley Caldwell Texas heritage series ; no. 10
Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. [179]-206) and index.
Contents
Galveston Tri-Weekly News introduction to the Note-Book -- 1. The Battle below New Orleans -- 2. Ship Island, the Pearl River, and Lake Pontchartrain -- 3. Pensacola -- 4. New Orleans -- 5. The Mississippi River -- 6. Baton Rouge, Plaquemine, and Donaldsonville -- 7. The Return to Pensacola and Ship Island -- 8. The Capture of Galveston -- 9. Matagorda Bay -- 10. The Battle of Galveston -- 11. The Capture of U.S.S. Hatteras -- 12. A New Commander -- 13. Mississippi Sound -- 14. The Swamps of Louisiana -- 15. Butte a la Rose -- 16. Mobile Bay -- 17. The Return to the Teche Country -- 18. The Battle of Sabine Pass -- 19. Letters from Prison.
Summary
Information about the inner workings and day-to-day life aboard U.S. Naval vessels patrolling the Gulf of Mexico and the major river systems of the Trans-Mississippi.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [179]-218) and index.
Contents
Theater, nation, and state in early America -- Cato and company : a genealogy of performance -- Free-born poeples : the politics of professional theater in early America -- A school for patriots : colonial college theater -- Bellicose letters : propaganda plays of the Revolution -- Epilogue : Post-revolutionary patriotism and the American theater.
Summary
Performing Patriotism examines the role of theatrical performance and printed drama in the development of early American political culture. Building on the eighteenth-century commonplace that the theater could be a school for public virtue, Jason Shaffer illustrates the connections between the popularity of theatrical performances in eighteenth-century British North America and the British and American national identities that colonial and Revolutionary Americans espoused. The result is a wide-ranging survey of eighteenth-century American theater history and print culture. [from the publisher]
