Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - 19th Century

Ryan P. Jordan explores the limits of religious dissent in antebellum America, and reminds us of the difficulties facing reformers who tried peacefully to end slavery. In the years before the Civil War, the Society of Friends opposed the abolitionist campaign for an immediate end to slavery and considered abolitionists within the church as heterodox radicals seeking to destroy civil and religious liberty. In response, many Quaker abolitionists began to build "comeouter" institutions where social and legal inequalities could be freely discussed, and where church members could fuse religious...

A narrative account of the survey of almost 1,000 professional historians on what constitutes a successful performance in the presidency, this survey tells us almost as much about the thinking and biases of historians as it does about the nature of the American presidency.

Besides comparing past presidential polls and constructing a ranking list of the nation's chief executives, this study examines why historians rate presidents the way they do, and it analyzes those qualities and traits historians look for in a successful president. It also delimits what constitutes a failing...

Americans of the early Republic valued the art of eloquence, upholding the ideal that an impassioned, intelligent, and moral speaker will provide essential truths to a democratic audience. Drawing on nonfiction prose of the 1830s-1850s--especially orations, lectures, and addresses--James Perrin Warren sketches a cultural history of the reforming power of language.

Antebellum America truly defined itself as a culture of eloquence. This disposition could be seen in the creation of new cultural spaces, such as the lyceum and popular lecture system, for speakers who were then measured...

While a reporter at Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, James Redpath developed a strong curiosity about slavery and decided that he would travel south "to see slavery with my own eyes." Redpath interviewed slaves, recorded their opinions, and collected these letters into book form, publishing them in 1859 as The Roving Editor. While some historians over the years have utilized Redpath's book, many have treated it as merely another travel account of the antebellum South, dismissing the interviews as the fabrication of a radical abolitionist.

John R. McKivigan has...

Historians have long recognized the influence of Darwinism and German idealism on late Victorian intellectual discourse. In Positivist Republic, Gillis Harp argues that, in America, Auguste Comte's positivism constituted another formative influence--one that has not been fully appreciated. In fact, according to Harp, Comtean positivism was critical to the transformation of Anglo-American social and political thought during the last third of the nineteenth century.

Harp identifies a thread of Comtean ideas running through the writings of Lester F. Ward, Edward Bellamy,...

First published in 1979, this volume offers students and teachers a unique view of American history prior to the Civil War. Distinguished historian David Brion Davis has chosen a diverse array of primary sources that show the actual concerns, hopes, fears, and understandings of ordinary antebellum Americans. He places these sources within a clear interpretive narrative that brings the documents to life and highlights themes that social and cultural historians have brought to our attention in recent years. Beginning with the family and the issue of socialization and influence, the units...

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...

By piecing together diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and rare privately printed memoirs, the author has created a story which tells how America's ragtag navy--composed mainly of converted yachts, steamers and tugboats--was able to fight and win against the more powerful Spanish gunboats. The naval battles fought in places like Santiago, Cardenas, Cienfuegos, Manzanillo, Port Nipe, Guantanamo, San Juan, Guanica, and Ponce come alive in this book. The stories of the brave little ships that fought these battles--with names like the Gloucester and the Yosemite--at times against overwhelming odds,...

The Southern ratification debate on the 14th Amendment was a part of the bitter, decade-long struggle to reconstruct and later redeem the South. This book makes clear that amidst all the conflict and cacophony of the period, the commands of the 14th Amendment were widely and uniformly understood. The three great clauses of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment were intended both to guarantee everyone the fundamental rights of citizenship and personhood and to nationalize the protection of those rights within the federal structure ordained by the Constitution. That means that the states were to...

Whether newly-freed slaves could be trusted to own firearms was in great dispute in 1866, and the ramifications of this issue reverberate in today's gun-control debate. This is the only comprehensive study ever published on the intent of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment and of Reconstruction-era civil rights legislation to protect the right to keep and bear arms. Indeed, this is the most detailed study ever published about the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment to incorporate and to protect from state violation any of the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, even including free...

Conceived during Thomas Jefferson's junket in Paris, Thomas Woodson was Jefferson's first child by Sally Hemings. He was banished from Monticello at the age of 12, after a journalist exposed Jefferson's relationship with his young slave. A President in the Family traces Thomas Woodson's subsequent journey from Virginia to Ohio where Thomas and wife Jemima, a former slave, would raise a productive and ambitious family.

Their eldest son Lewis, author of the famous Augustine letters, would carry on the family tradition of education, leadership, and public service. A...

Religious, political, social, and health reform earmarked the Progressive Era. The era's health reform movement--like today's clean living movement--saw campaigns against alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and sexuality. It included crusades for exercise, vegetarian diets, and alternative health care and concerns about eugenics and new diseases. Covering the years leading up to the Progressive Era through the 1920s, this book provides entries on the central figures, events, crusades, legislation, publications and terms of the health reform movements, while a detailed timeline ties health reform to...

Manifest Destiny, as a term for westward expansion, was not used until the 1840s. Its predecessor was the Doctrine of Discovery, a legal tradition by which Europeans and Americans laid legal claim to the land of the indigenous people that they discovered. In the United States, the British colonists who had recently become Americans were competing with the English, French, and Spanish for control of lands west of the Mississippi. Who would be the discoverers of the Indians and their lands, the United States or the European countries? We know the answer, of course, but in this book, Miller...

This book is a narrative history of the thirty-year struggle to outlaw slavery, starting with the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1834 and extending until the abolition of slavery in the United States at the end of the Civil War.

The core of the book consists of two sections: 1) the 20-year political struggle to restrict slavery through a succession of anti-extensionist parties starting in 1840 with the founding of the Liberty Party, extending through the Free Soil Party (1848-54) and ending with Abraham Lincoln being elected president as a Republican on the same basic...

Cow People records the fading memories of a bygone Texas, the reminiscences of the cow people themselves. These are the Texans of the don't-fence-me-in era, their faces pinched by years of squinting into the desert glare, tanned by the sun and coarsened by the dust of the Chisholm Trail. Their stories are often raucous but just as often quiet as hot plains under a pale Texan sky.

A native Texan, J. Frank Dobie had an inborn knowledge of the men and customs of the trail camps. Cattlemen were as various as the country was big. Ab Blocker was a tall, quiet man who belonged...

These are the chronicles of the trail drivers of Texas--those rugged men and, sometimes, women who drove cattle and horses up the trails from Texas to northern markets in the late 1800s. Gleaned from members of the Old Time Trail Drivers' Association, these hundreds of real-life stories--some humorous, some chilling, some rambling, all interesting--form an invaluable cornerstone to the literature, history, and folklore of Texas and the West. First published in the 1920s and reissued by the University of Texas Press in 1985, this classic work is now available in a handsome paperback edition...

The Texas Longhorn made more history than any other breed of cattle the world has known. These wiry, intractable beasts were themselves pioneers in a harsh land, moving elementally with drouth, grass, Arctic blizzards, and burning winds. Their story is the bedrock on which the history of the cow country of America is founded.

J. Frank Dobie was a tale spinner who appreciated the proper place of legend and folklore in history. In The Longhorns, he tells of the Spanish conquistadors, who brought their cattle with them; of ranching in the turbulent colonial times; of the...