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American Zion

Eran Shalev

The Bible has always been an integral part of American political culture. Yet in the years before the Civil War, it was the Old Testament, not the New Testament, that pervaded political rhetoric. ... More

The Bible has always been an integral part of American political culture. Yet in the years before the Civil War, it was the Old Testament, not the New Testament, that pervaded political rhetoric. From Revolutionary times through about 1830, numerous American politicians, commentators, ministers, and laymen depicted their young nation as a new, God-chosen Israel and relied on the Old Testament for political guidance. This book closely examines how this powerful predilection for Old Testament narratives and rhetoric in early America shaped a wide range of debates and cultural discussions—from republican ideology, constitutional interpretation, southern slavery, and, more generally, the meaning of American nationalism to speculations on the origins of American Indians and to the emergence of Mormonism. The author argues that the effort to shape the United States as a biblical nation reflected conflicting attitudes within the culture—proudly boastful on the one hand but uncertain about its abilities and ultimate destiny on the other. This book explores the meaning and lasting effects of the idea of the United States as a new Israel, and sheds new light on our understanding of the nation's origins and culture during the founding and antebellum decades.Less

Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling

Benjamin N Lawrance

The lives of six African children, ages nine to sixteen, were forever altered by the revolt aboard the Cuban schooner La Amistad in 1839. Like their adult companions, all were captured in Africa and ... More

The lives of six African children, ages nine to sixteen, were forever altered by the revolt aboard the Cuban schooner La Amistad in 1839. Like their adult companions, all were captured in Africa and illegally sold as slaves. In this fascinating revisionist history, the author reconstructs six entwined stories and brings them to the forefront of the Amistad conflict. Through eyewitness testimonies, court records, and the children's own letters, the author recounts how their lives were inextricably interwoven by the historic drama, and casts new light on illegal nineteenth-century transatlantic slave smuggling.Less

The Beecher Sisters

Barbara A. White

This book is a joint biography of the famous Beecher sisters, who lived and worked in nineteenth-century America. Daughters of the well-known evangelist Lyman Beecher, the three sisters, who were not ... More

This book is a joint biography of the famous Beecher sisters, who lived and worked in nineteenth-century America. Daughters of the well-known evangelist Lyman Beecher, the three sisters, who were not allowed to follow their father and seven brothers to college and into the ministry, all had successful careers at a time when few women entered the public sphere. Catharine Beecher, who became a pioneer educator, founded the Hartford Female Seminary in the 1820s, devoted her life to improving women's schooling, and wrote some thirty books on education, religion, and health. Harriet Beecher Stowe became world famous in 1852 as the author of the explosive anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and went on to write a series of novels about New England, initiating the women's tradition of local-color realism in the United States. The youngest Beecher sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, devoted herself to her husband and children until middle age. After the Civil War, she began to speak out on women's rights and quickly found herself a leader in the movement. Isabella was a friend and colleague of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. In her suffrage work, she became associated with the flamboyant feminist Victoria Woodhull, also known as Mrs. Satan.Less

Before L.A.: Race, Space, and Municipal Power in Los Angeles, 1781-1894

David Samuel Torres-Rouff

This book expands borderlands history by examining the past and original urban infrastructure of one of America's most prominent cities; its social, spatial, and racial divides and boundaries; and ... More

This book expands borderlands history by examining the past and original urban infrastructure of one of America's most prominent cities; its social, spatial, and racial divides and boundaries; and how it came to be the Los Angeles we know today. It is a study of how an innovative intercultural community developed along racial lines, and how immigrants from the United States engineered a profound shift in civic ideals and the physical environment, creating a social and spatial rupture that endures to this day.Less

Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso's Civil War

John R. Kelso

Christopher Grasso (ed.)

This book presents an edited edition of a Union soldier's remarkable memoir, offering a rare perspective on guerrilla warfare and on the larger meanings of the American Civil War. While tales of ... More

This book presents an edited edition of a Union soldier's remarkable memoir, offering a rare perspective on guerrilla warfare and on the larger meanings of the American Civil War. While tales of Confederate guerilla-outlaws abound, there are few scholarly accounts of the Union men who battled them. This Civil War memoir presents a first-hand account of an ordinary man's extraordinary battlefield experiences along with his evolving interpretation of what the bloody struggle meant. A former Methodist preacher and Missouri schoolteacher, John Russell Kelso served as a Union Army foot soldier, cavalry officer, guerilla fighter, and spy. Initially shaped by a belief in the Founding Fathers' republic and a disdain for the slave-holding aristocracy, Kelso became driven by revenge after pro-Southern neighbors stole his property, burned down his house, and drove his family and friends from their homes. Interweaving Kelso's compelling voice with insightful commentary, this fascinating work charts the transformation of an everyday citizen into a man the Union hailed as a hero and Confederate sympathizers called a monster.Less

Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish-American Frontier, 1776-1821

J. C. A. Stagg

In examining how the United States gained control over the northern borderlands of Spanish America, this work reassesses the diplomacy of President James Madison. Historians have assumed that ... More

In examining how the United States gained control over the northern borderlands of Spanish America, this work reassesses the diplomacy of President James Madison. Historians have assumed that Madison's motive in sending agents into the Spanish borderlands between 1810 and 1813 was to subvert Spanish rule, but the author argues that his real intent was to find peaceful and legal resolutions to long-standing disputes over the boundaries of Louisiana at a time when the Spanish-American Empire was in the process of dissolution. Drawing on an array of American, British, French, and Spanish sources, he describes how a myriad cast of local leaders, officials, and other small players affected the borderlands diplomacy between the United States and Spain, and casts new light on Madison's contribution to early American expansionism.Less

The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860

Calvin Schermerhorn

Businesses that financed, traded, and transported enslaved people chart the progress of nineteenth-century American capitalism more strikingly than any other enterprise. Drawing on history, ... More

Businesses that financed, traded, and transported enslaved people chart the progress of nineteenth-century American capitalism more strikingly than any other enterprise. Drawing on history, literature, and business studies, this book details the interstate United States slave trade at the level of the firm. Slave traders investigated here were business insiders rather than social outcasts and were some of the early U.S. republic’s most ingenious merchants. In seven chapters, each centering on a particular enterprise, this book explores how enslavers sought competitive advantages and developed strategies over a forty-five-year period. Subjects range from a trio of self-financed partners driving enslaved people along rough Appalachian trails in 1818 to the most successful interstate slave trading firms of the 1820s and 1830s to a New York-based steamship company that seized a virtual monopoly on the Gulf Coast trade with Texas by the close of the 1840s. Participants in the slavery business innovated in finance and transportation, and this book investigates entrepreneurship and creativity in the context of the growth of finance and government sponsorship and protections. Over time some opportunities closed as others opened. But the business of slavery was never merely business, and the creative destruction that built a commercial republic and helped create a continental empire was one that racked the bodies, splintered the families, and tried the souls of African-descended Americans. The book explores their reactions and counter-strategies, illustrating the tragedy of slaveholders’ ambitions.Less

The Exile's Song: Edmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World

Sally McKee

This book chronicles the extraordinary story of African American composer Edmond Dede, raised in antebellum New Orleans, and his remarkable career in France. In 1855, Edmond Dede, a free black ... More

This book chronicles the extraordinary story of African American composer Edmond Dede, raised in antebellum New Orleans, and his remarkable career in France. In 1855, Edmond Dede, a free black composer from New Orleans, emigrated to Paris. There he trained with France's best classical musicians and went on to spend thirty-six years in Bordeaux leading the city's most popular orchestras. How did this African American, raised in the biggest slave market in the United States, come to compose ballets for one of the best theaters outside of Paris and gain recognition as one of Bordeaux's most popular orchestra leaders? Beginning with his birth in antebellum New Orleans in 1827 and ending with his death in Paris in 1901, this text recounts the life of this extraordinary man. From the Crescent City to the City of Light and on to the raucous music halls of Bordeaux, this intimate narrative history brings to life the lost world of exiles and travelers in a rapidly modernizing world that threatened to leave the most vulnerable behind.Less

A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City

Erica Armstrong Dunbar

This book describes the lives of African American women in the urban north during the early years of the republic. It investigates how African American women in Philadelphia journeyed from ... More

This book describes the lives of African American women in the urban north during the early years of the republic. It investigates how African American women in Philadelphia journeyed from enslavement to the precarious status of free persons in the decades leading up to the Civil War, and examines comparable developments in the cities of New York and Boston. Free of the many burdens of poverty, a handful of African American women in Philadelphia had the opportunity to engage in political and social activism, the most important of which was the antislavery movement, and would enter an arena of politics inhabited by white men and women and contribute to the definition of abolition in its formative moments. Even though their own freedom, although precarious, had been secured shortly after the American Revolution, they worked to secure the freedom of all men and women of African descent. These elite women were unusual. Without the benefits of family wealth and reputation, the majority of African American women in Philadelphia gained freedom and its advantages through their own long and arduous work. As domestics, washerwomen, seamstresses, and fruit hucksters, they experienced emancipation in the later years of their lives, spending much of their energy securing the freedom of their children, their own sweet buds of promise.Less

Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War

Kendra Taira Field

Growing Up with the Country documents the migration of freedom’s first generation out of the South and into the West after the Civil War. A narrative history, the book traces three of the author’s ... More

Growing Up with the Country documents the migration of freedom’s first generation out of the South and into the West after the Civil War. A narrative history, the book traces three of the author’s ancestors and their successive migrations in the half-century after emancipation. Between 1865 and 1915, tens of thousands of former slaves sought freedom through a series of experiments in land ownership, town building, and emigration that spanned the Mississippi delta, Arkansas, Kansas, Indian Territory, Texas, West Africa, western Canada, Mexico, and beyond. Deepening and widening the roots of the Great Migration, the book argues that their lives and choices complicate notions of the quintessential domesticity and “biracialism” of the nadir, revealing instead the deeply transnational and multiracial dimensions of freedom’s first generation. The book shows that Indian Territory and early Oklahoma served as one of the first sites of African-American transnational movement in the postemancipation period, decentering the United States in North American history even at the turn of the “American century.” It illustrates the gradual emergence of American “biracialism” and the painstaking construction of race and nation that undergirded the rise of American economic, political, and cultural power at the turn of the twentieth century. Finally, the book reveals that historical erasure of this multiracial, multinational past depended upon the manipulation of family and kinship.Less

The Nation's Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America

Peter Kastor

This book explores the circumstances in which the United States acquired Louisiana in 1803, and investigates the period from 1803 to 1808, when the Louisiana Purchase unleashed numerous, often ... More

This book explores the circumstances in which the United States acquired Louisiana in 1803, and investigates the period from 1803 to 1808, when the Louisiana Purchase unleashed numerous, often conflicting, visions of incorporation. Although a series of changes to the domestic apparatus seemed to establish the federal hold and white supremacy by 1808, the book shows how a series of crises at home and abroad from 1809 to 1815 upset the institutional development that was supposed to secure incorporation. It also investigates the period from 1815 to 1820, when the Whites in Louisiana completed the process of constructing the legal, political, administrative, racial, and military structures of racial supremacy, and examines the three different Republican administrations of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Jefferson occupied the presidency during the period of the greatest domestic uncertainty in Louisiana, Madison during the period of the greatest international activity, and Monroe during the period of resolution on foreign and domestic fronts. These developments say less about the three presidents than they do about shifting circumstances in Louisiana, the Americas, and Europe. The book discusses how the incorporation of Louisiana occurred during a period of tremendous consistency in Washington, as Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe pursued almost identical priorities, and also examines the events that helped in developing bondage between Louisiana and the United States.Less

Nature's Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West

Monica Rico

This book explores the myth of the American West in the nineteenth century as a place for men to assert their masculinity by “roughing it” in the wilderness, and reveals how this myth played out in a ... More

This book explores the myth of the American West in the nineteenth century as a place for men to assert their masculinity by “roughing it” in the wilderness, and reveals how this myth played out in a transatlantic context. It uncovers the networks of elite men—British and American—who circulated between the West and the metropoles of London and New York, and narrates the story of an individual who, by traveling these transatlantic paths, sought to resolve anxieties about class, gender, and empire in an era of profound economic and social transformation. All of the men discussed—from the well known, including Theodore Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody, to the comparatively obscure, such as English cattle rancher Moreton Frewen—envisioned the American West as a global space into which redemptive narratives of heroic upper-class masculinity could be written.Less

The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel

Gary Dorrien

The black social gospel is wrongly and strangely overlooked. “Black social gospel” is the category that best describes Martin Luther King, Jr., his chief mentors, his closest movement allies, and the ... More

The black social gospel is wrongly and strangely overlooked. “Black social gospel” is the category that best describes Martin Luther King, Jr., his chief mentors, his closest movement allies, and the entire tradition of black church social justice activism reaching back to the 1880s. This tradition of reformist theology and politics arose as a response to the challenges of the post-Reconstruction era. Its founders—notably William Simmons, Reverdy C. Ransom, Ida B. Wells, and Alexander Walters—responded to the abandonment of Reconstruction, the evisceration of Constitutional rights, an upsurge of racial lynching and Jim Crow abuse, and struggles against economic injustice. They founded a tradition of social Christianity that had important relationships with, but operated mostly separate from, the white social gospel movement of the Progressive Era. They struggled for a place in the black churches and played a leading role in sustaining the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And they provided the neo-abolitionist theology of social justice that the civil rights movement spoke and sang.Less

Robert Morris's Folly: The Architectural and Financial Failures of an American Founder

Ryan K. Smith

In 1798 Robert Morris—“financier of the American Revolution,” confidant of George Washington, former U.S. senator—plunged from the peaks of wealth and prestige into debtors'prison and public ... More

In 1798 Robert Morris—“financier of the American Revolution,” confidant of George Washington, former U.S. senator—plunged from the peaks of wealth and prestige into debtors'prison and public contempt. How could one of the richest men in the United States, one of only two founders who signed the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, suffer such a downfall? This book examines for the first time the extravagant Philadelphia town house Robert Morris built and its role in bringing about his ruin. Part biography, part architectural history, the book recounts Morris's wild successes as a merchant, his recklessness as a land speculator, and his unrestrained passion in building his palatial, doomed mansion, once hailed as the most expensive private building in the United States but later known as “Morris's Folly.” Setting Morris's tale in the context of the nation's founding, this volume refocuses attention on an essential yet nearly forgotten American figure while also illuminating the origins of America's ongoing, ambivalent attitudes toward the superwealthy and their sensational excesses.Less

Rush to Gold: The French and the California Gold Rush, 1848–1854

Malcolm J. Rohrbough

The California Gold Rush began in 1848 and incited many “wagons west.” However, only half of the 300,000 gold seekers traveled by land. The other half traveled by sea. And it's the story of this ... More

The California Gold Rush began in 1848 and incited many “wagons west.” However, only half of the 300,000 gold seekers traveled by land. The other half traveled by sea. And it's the story of this second group that this book describes. It examines the California gold rush through the eyes of 30,000 French participants. In so doing, it offers an analysis of an important—but previously neglected—chapter in the history of the Gold Rush, which occurred at a time of sweeping changes in France.Less

Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War

Richard D. Brown

How did Americans in the generations following the Declaration of Independence translate its lofty ideals into practice? In this broadly synthetic work, distinguished historian Richard Brown shows ... More

How did Americans in the generations following the Declaration of Independence translate its lofty ideals into practice? In this broadly synthetic work, distinguished historian Richard Brown shows that despite its founding statement that “all men are created equal,” the early Republic struggled with every form of social inequality. While people paid homage to the ideal of equal rights, this ideal came up against entrenched social and political practices and beliefs. Brown illustrates how the ideal was tested in struggles over race and ethnicity, religious freedom, gender and social class, voting rights and citizenship. It shows how high principles fared in criminal trials and divorce cases when minorities, women, and people from different social classes faced judgment. This book offers a much-needed exploration of the ways revolutionary political ideas, and especially the idea of equality, penetrated popular thinking and everyday practice.Less

Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform

Scott Gac

This book outlines the interwoven story of music, careerism, reform, the transformation of American culture, and one of the greatest musical acts in American history. Following the Hutchinson Family ... More

This book outlines the interwoven story of music, careerism, reform, the transformation of American culture, and one of the greatest musical acts in American history. Following the Hutchinson Family Singers through the nineteenth century as they explored and shaped new openings in American society, it unveils the centrality of political allegiance to artistic creation in the antebellum era. The book further tells how the Hutchinsons fought against many of the barriers that later generations of cultural reformers would face. It did not hurt that for a long time the Hutchinsons were also held in high regard in popular consciousness; twenty-four years after John Hutchinson died, his name topped a 1932 Washington Post list. As grandchildren of the Revolutionary War generation, the Hutchinson Family Singers were integral players in bringing American reform from the enlightenment offering of Tom Paine's “Common Sense” to the brand of Romantic activism found in their music and in the writings of such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe. From New Hampshire to New York, from temperance to antislavery, from revivals to political parades to parlors, and from an aspiring musical trio to a wealthy quartet, the Hutchinson Family Singers shepherded in one of the great nineteenth-century phenomena.Less