Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - General

This in-depth study draws on never-before-published early personal correspondence and interviews to trace Richard Hofstadter's early career from his family's background in Poland and Germany through his childhood, high school, and training years at the University of Buffalo and Columbia University. The political and educational influences of these years are introduced, as well as their effect on his writings. Hofstadter's development as a historian and the important influences which formed the basis for his orientation toward history and which served to integrate all his work into one...

John H. Schroeder chronicles the expansion of the American Navy's peacetime role in developing the nation's overseas commercial empire during the thirty years before the Civil War. He demonstrates how the rapid acceleration of American commercial activity around the world increased pressure on the Navy to meet new economic and political demands. He analyzes how the Navy's haphazard development in the antebellum years paralleled and interacted with commercial activity, and how the end result impacted dramatically on the economic development of the United States.

From William Penn's treaty with the Indians, to the suffering of troops at Valley Forge, the gallantry at Gettysburg, and the early development of the petroleum industry, Pennsylvania has often been at center stage in the evolution of the nation. Yet despite this record, the historical literature on the state is not as well known as that of many other states. This volume will remedy that deficiency by assessing the vast wealth of materials on the political, social, economic, and cultural development of the Keystone State. In a series of historiographical chapters, each devoted to a...

While newly liberated American blacks were relatively free to participate in the nation's political life during the decade following the Civil War, with the end of Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal protection, constitutional guarantees quickly were curtailed. In this analysis of the beginnings of black political development, Beatty examines the aftermath of Reconstruction through the eyes of a people who found their rights, liberties, and hopes stalemated in a revolution gone backward.

Long before Americans were imbued with the sense of a national past, local antiquarians and amateur historians wrote about the people, places, and happenings that were closest to their hearts, creating in the process a historical record of incalculable value. This gold mine of information and commentary is often overlooked by today's scholars. Russo's book puts us in touch with the historical consciousness of the American people and the once-paramount concern for the particular, the concrete, and the familiar.

Few figures in American history are accorded greater honor than the military commander at the head of his troops. This study identifies and recounts the careers of those men who have given their lives while serving as general officers from the beginnings of our nation's military history to the present day. In addition to offering profiles of American military heroes, the study also provides a basis for consideration of some of the ways in which military leadership techniques have changed over the years.

Biographical information for each general officer includes year of birth, branch of...

While the attempt to understand Americanness in terms of our beliefs and mentality is all too familiar, Blair's approach to the origins of American culture opens up previously unexplored perspectives. Focusing on the uniquely American tendency to organize cultural artifacts out of component parts rather than structured wholes, he looks at the emergence of this phenomenon as it has affected cultural domains as diverse as manufacturing, architecture, education, and jazz. The significance of modularity opens new perspectives on American culture as a whole.

With a growing interest in ethnicity, there has also been an increasing interest in the study of material culture, as a means of explicating traditional and popular culture. Moreover, the decades leading up to the Columbian Quincentenary have been marked by the establishment of new Italian American museums, cultural centers, and archival collections. This timely publication, the fourth in Greenwood's series of Material Culture Directories, complements existing Italian American and Italian Canadian bibliographies and guides to collections by focusing on material culture and photographic...

This book is a history of the United States Consular Service, an unheralded, but significant element in the promotion of American commerce and influence abroad from the Revolution onward. A group of relatively minor officials, appointed by the vagaries of political patronage and virtually ignored by successive Secretaries of State, American consuls were established in most major foreign ports and trading centers early in the history of the Republic. Consular officers were major players in America's overseas presence because of their special responsibility for seamen and shipping. They were...

A sweeping overview of the American peasantry: the largely sharecrop cultivators who, in Seavoy's analysis, rejected the labor norms of commercial agriculture. About equal numbers of black and white sharecroppers chose to practice subsistence cultivation in order to minimize agricultural labor. The study begins with pre-Civil War slave plantations and the landless white peasants who migrated to North America to escape full-time paid labor in Britain. Seavoy then describes and analyzes the operation of the postbellum sharecrop system and related Back Caste System; the different origins of...

Many books, both popular and scholarly, have examined racism in the United States, but this unique volume is the first to examine the existence of anti-racism in the first two hundred years of U.S. history. Herbert Aptheker challenges the view that racism was universally accepted by whites. His book thoroughly debunks the myth that white people never cared about the plight of African-Americans until just before the outbreak of the Civil War.

Covering the period from the 1600s through the 1860s, Aptheker begins with a short introduction and a questioning of racism's pervasiveness, taking...

With California's passage of the Save Our State Initiative in 1994, fear of aliens has once again appeared in U.S. legislative history. Since 1790, congressional legislation on federal immigration and naturalization policy has been harsh on Asian immigrants, although less so since 1965. This documentary history covers all major immigration laws passed by Congress since 1790. The volume opens with an overview of the basis on which Congress has restricted Asian immigration. It then includes discussions of particular immigration legislation, showing the significance to Asian Americans and the...

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was an extraordinary military leader and one of the most controversial figures in American history. An enormous amout of literature has accumulated about his career, which spanned most of the 20th century. General MacArthur is the subject of this first comprehensive assessment and survey of all of the writings by ad about him. Publication coincides and reflects the formal commemoration of the 50th anniversary of World War II. A short biographical essay and chronology set the stage for the historiographical critique, which is organized topically and...

This book spans more than 200 years of U.S. diplomatic history. Its geographical scope widens along with the expanding interests of America itself, from initial exclusive concern with the empires of Europe, to the emerging nations of Latin America, to the commercial opportunities and geopolitical concerns of Asia and Africa. The ambassadors chosen for inclusion reflect these historical changes in American foreign relations. Organized alphabetically, the biographies present an implicit account of the evolution of the U.S. diplomatic service, from its founding and early principles through...

The first bibliography to systematically list the numerous articles describing archives and manuscript collections in the United States, this volume includes over 2,200 titles. It goes beyond the continental United States, including articles describing foreign archives that hold records and manuscripts documenting U.S. history and also incorporating articles about archives and manuscript holdings in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and other U.S. Trust Territories. The book is multidisciplinary, containing entries from art, theatre, film and television, business, education, history,...

From Hannah Adams, born in 1755, to Vicki Ruiz, born in 1955, this book profiles some 200 women historians. Between Hannah Adams, who began compiling historical information while working as a bobbin lace weaver, and Vicki Ruiz, a third generation Chicana hailed for pioneering inclusive multicultural women's history, the reader will encounter women of diverse backgrounds, motivations, and accomplishments. They come from a variety of occupations, including public history, academia, archival work, and popular history writing and a variety of fields, including biography, art history, military...

Nations and other political entities are inadequate bases for studying the human past, because the other aspects of human life are not organized along the same lines as these political entities. All communities, including local ones, are amoeba-like, changing size and shape as we observe and probe them. Historians can improve the way they generalize about the past by tailoring their conclusions to the actual evidence they use. By using an array of historical questions of interest to scholars in all of the humanistically oriented disciplines, historians can offer more profound...