The thesis of this study is that Christian Science was a manifestation of the unrest gripping the United States after the Civil War. The age in which the movement flowered was, at once, sordid and gilded, commercial and optimistic. The stormy way through which the new religion passed was, in a sense, the road upon which all new ideas and schemes are tried. Mrs. Eddy's vision was subjected to reasoned and irrational scrutiny for 40 years. In truth, Christian Science belonged only tenuously to a modern era. It reflected the prevailing optimism, progressivism, utopianism, and feminism of the...

An updated and expanded revision of a popular book published in 1981, American Political Trials examines the role of politicized criminal trials and impeachments in U.S. history from the early colonial era to the late 20th century. Each chapter focuses on a trial representative of a particular era in the American past. The emphasis is on cases that resulted from political persecution, but the book also shows how defendants have exploited the judicial process to advance their political objectives. All of the chapters appearing in the earlier book have been updated. In addition, the volume...

An examination of the settlement history of the alluvial bottomlands of the lower Mississippi Valley from 1880 to 1930, this study details how cotton-growers transformed the swamplands of northwestern Mississippi, northeastern Louisiana, northeastern Arkansas, and southern Missouri into cotton fields. Although these alluvial bottomlands contained the richest cotton soils in the American South, cotton-growers in the Southern bottomlands faced a host of environmental problems, including dense forests, seasonal floods, water-logged soils, poor transportation, malarial fevers and insect pests....

This book is a collection of nine essays examining the impact of World War II on the American people. The contributions range from macro studies (the ways corporations sought to recruit women into the work force) to micro studies (the impact of the war on working conditions in Indiana) to biography (the Congressional career of Margaret Chase Smith). Focusing as it does on the domestic scene, this study offers a comprehensive selection of the impact of the war on Americans, and the way it influenced concepts of gender, race, class, and ethnicity.

Andrew Jackson and those Tennesseans who, along with him, were a major force in Tennessee and American political life can best be understood by examining the political culture they all shared. The ten men studied here were the children or grandchildren of immigrants from either the Scottish lowlands or the north of Ireland. All experienced the rise from the yeoman/artisan class to that of landed gentry, and all displayed in their adult lives the influence of that move from one socioeconomic class to another. This view of Jackson and his closest friends suggests a view of these men's...

Using the New Social History method and examining nearly every document produced over the years covered, this study examines the growth of communities in the Upper Pee Dee region of the South Carolina backcountry in the 18th century. The study considers the emergence of a landed elite, slavery, and a mobile population, plus the disestablishment of the Anglican Church. Inhabitants of the Cheraws District had access to a river that flowed to the coast, allowing them to transport their agricultural produce to the market at Georgetown. This ease of transportation enabled the district to become...

Drawn from research in the manuscript records of the federal judiciary and the court reports of the Florida Supreme Court, this book examines how state and federal judges responded to the enforcement of local, state, and national prohibition in Florida. Upholding these measures often resulted in governmental encroachment on civil liberties; consequently, judges found themselves positioned to determine the scope of the liquor laws. As they balanced the rights of individuals with the power of the state, Florida judges acted independently of public opinion and based their rulings on precedent...

This book begins the comparative study of U.S. urban development during the first half of the 19th century. Breathtaking in its comprehensiveness, its survey and comparisons of early urban politics is without parallel. The study is based on a thorough examination of fifteen cities--Albany, Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Charleston, Cincinnati, Louisville, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Providence, St. Louis, and Washington. This group of cities--the fifteen largest in 1850--provides a good mix of northern and southern, eastern and western, old and new, and fast-...

The Eliot Tracts collects for the first time a series of 11 documents published in London between 1643 and 1671 that describe missionary work by the British among the Indians in New England. Written by John Eliot, Thomas Shepard, and other intellectual and political leaders among the colonists, these tracts constitute the most detailed and sustained record of missionary activity by the English in the New World in the first century of settlement. They are also one of our richest sources of ethnographic information about the Indians of Southern New England in the 17th century as recorded by...

Widely regarded as America's most important Chief Justice, John Marshall influenced our constitutional, political, and economic development as much as any American. He handed down landmark decisions on judicial review, federal-state relations, contracts, corporations, and commercial regulation during a thirty-four year tenure that encompassed five presidencies, a second war of independence, the demise of the first American party system, and the advent of Jacksonianism and market capitalism. This is the first interpretive study of Marshall's early life that emphasizes the formative...