A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY71 start with P start with P
In Pacific Possessions: The Pursuit of Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Oceanian Travel Accounts, Chris J. Thomas expands the literary canon on Polynesia and Melanesia beyond the giants, such as Herman Melville and Jack London, to include travel narratives by British and American visitors. These accounts were widely read and reviewed when they first appeared but have largely been ignored by scholars. For the first time, Thomas defines these writings as a significant literary genre.
Recovering these works allows us to reconceive of nineteenth-century Oceania as a vibrant hub of cultural interchange. Pacific Possessions recaptures the polyphony of voices that enlivened this space through the writing of these travelers, while also paying attention to their Oceanian interlocutors. Each chapter centers on a Pacific cultural marker, what Thomas refers to as each writer’s “possession”: the Tongan tattoo, the Hawaiian hula, the Fijian cannibal fork, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s cache of South Seas photographs.
Thomas analyzes how westerners formed narratives around these objects and what those objects meant within nineteenth-century Oceanian cultures. He argues that the accounts served to shape a version of Oceanian authenticity that persists today. The profiled traveler-writers had complex experiences, at times promoting exoticized exaggerations of so-called authentic Polynesian and Melanesian cultures and at other times genuinely engaging in cultural exchange. However, their views were ultimately compromised by a western lens. In Thomas’s words, “the authenticity is at once celebrated and written over.”
The dramatic story of the fights and compromises that shaped an Irish community
Disdained by many Yankee residents as Catholic lowlifes, the growing Irish population of the Lowell, Massachusetts, “paddy camps” in the nineteenth century proved a tempting source of cheap labor for local mill owners, who took advantage of the immigrants’ proximity to exploit them to the fullest. Displaced by their cheaper labor, other workers blamed the Irish for job losses and added to their plight through repression and segregation.
Now in paperback and featuring a new preface, Brian C. Mitchell’s The Paddy Camps demonstrates how the Irish community in Lowell overcame adversity to develop strong religious institutions, an increased political presence, and a sense of common traditions.
These are questions that have bedeviled scientists, doctors, and ethicists for decades, and in Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good, Cathy Gere presents the gripping story of how we have addressed them over time. Today, we are horrified at the idea that a medical experiment could be performed on someone without consent. But, as Gere shows, that represents a relatively recent shift: for more than two centuries, from the birth of utilitarianism in the eighteenth century, the doctrine of the greater good held sway. If a researcher believed his work would benefit humanity, then inflicting pain, or even death, on unwitting or captive subjects was considered ethically acceptable. It was only in the wake of World War II, and the revelations of Nazi medical atrocities, that public and medical opinion began to change, culminating in the National Research Act of 1974, which mandated informed consent. Showing that utilitarianism is based in the idea that humans are motivated only by pain and pleasure, Gere cautions that that greater good thinking is on the upswing again today and that the lesson of history is in imminent danger of being lost.
Rooted in the experiences of real people, and with major consequences for how we think about ourselves and our rights, Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good is a dazzling, ambitious history.
The unique and powerful voice of an extraordinary nineteenth-century woman poet
Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836-1919) now ranks as the strongest American woman poet of the nineteenth century after Emily Dickinson. Published heavily in all the period's most prestigious journals, Piatt was widely celebrated by her peers as a gifted stylist in the genteel tradition. This selected edition reveals Piatt's other side, a side that contemporary critics found more problematic: ironic, experimental, pushing the limits of Victorian language and the sentimental female persona.
Spanning more than half a century, this collection reveals the "borderland temper" of Piatt's mind and art. As an expatriate southerner, Piatt voices guilt at her own past as the daughter of slave-holders and raw anguish at the waste of war; as an eleven-year "exile" in Ireland, she expresses her dismay at the indifference of the wealthy to the daily suffering of the poor. Her poetry, whether speaking of children, motherhood, marriage, or illicit love affairs, uses conventional language and forms but in ways that greatly broadened the range of what women's poetry could say. Going beyond and even contradicting the genteel aesthetic, Piatt's poetry moves toward an innovative kind of dramatic realism built on dialogue, an approach more familiar to modern readers, acquainted with Faulknerian polyvocal texts, than to her contemporaries, who were as ill at ease with complexity as they were with irony.
This astutely edited selection of Piatt's mature work--much of it never before collected--explains why her "deviant poetics" caused her peers such discomfort and why they offer such fertile ground for study today. Illustrated with engravings from Harper's Weekly and Harper's Bazaar, both periodicals in which Piatt's work appeared, Palace-Burner marks the reemergence of one of the most interesting writers in American literary history.
The Panic introduced Americans to the new phenomenon of boom and bust, changed the country's attitudes towards wealth and poverty, spurred the political movement that became Jacksonian Democracy, and helped create the sectional divide that would lead to the Civil War. Although it stands as one of the turning points of American history, few Americans today have heard of the Panic of 1819, with the result that we continue to ignore its lessons—and repeat its mistakes.
In 1811, a portion of the Creek Indians who inhabited a vast area across Georgia, Alabama, and parts of Florida and Mississippi, interpreted an earth tremor as a sign that they had to return to their traditional way of life. What was an internal Indian dispute soon became engulfed in the greater War of 1812 to become perhaps the most consequential campaign of that conflict. At immediate stake in what became known as the Creek War of 1813–14 was whether the Creeks and their inconstant British and Spanish allies or the young United States would control millions of acres of highly fertile Native American land. The conflict’s larger issue was whether the Indian nations of the lower American South—the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw—would be able to remain in their ancestral homes.
Beginning with conquistador Ferdinand DeSoto’s fateful encounter with Indians of the southeast in the 1500s, A Paradise of Blood: The Creek War of 1813–14 by Howard T. Weir, III, narrates the complete story of the cultural clash and centuries-long struggle for this landscape of stunning beauty. Using contemporary letters, military reports, and other primary sources, the author places the Creek War in the context of Tecumseh’s fight for Native American independence and the ongoing war between the United States and European powers for control of North America. The Creek War was marked by savagery, such as the murder of hundreds of settlers at Fort Mims, Alabama—the largest massacre of its kind in United States history—and fierce battles, including Horseshoe Bend, where more Indian warriors were confirmed killed than in any other single engagement in the long wars against the Indians. Many notable personalities fought during the conflict, including Andrew Jackson, who gained national prominence for his service, Sam Houston, War Chief William Weatherford, and Davy Crockett. When the war was over, more than twenty million acres had been added to the United States, thousands of Indians were dead or homeless, and Jackson was on his way to the presidency. The war also eliminated the last effective Native American resistance to westward expansion east of the Mississippi, and by giving the United States land that was ideal for large-scale cotton planting, it laid the foundation for the Civil War a generation later. A Paradise of Blood is a comprehensive and masterful history of one of America’s most important and influential early wars.
At the same time, the United States felt the influence of the rise of popular mass-circulation newspapers and magazines and the surge in American book publishing. Concern over living correctly as well as prosperously was commonly discussed by leading authors and journalists, who were now writing for ever-expanding regional and national audiences. Women became more important as authors and editors, giving advice and building huge markets for women readers, with the magazine Godey's Lady's Book and novels by Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, and Harriet Beecher Stowe expressing women's views about the troubled state of society. Best-selling male writers--including novelist George Lippard, historian George Bancroft, and travel writer Bayard Taylor--were among those adding their voices to concerns about prosperity and morality and about America's place in the world. Writers and publishers discovered that a high moral tone could be exceedingly good for business.
The authors of this book examine how popular writers and widely read newspapers, magazines, and books expressed social tensions between prosperity and morality. This study draws on that nationwide conversation through leading mass media, including circulation-leading newspapers, the New York Herald and the New York Tribune, plus prominent newspapers from the South and West, the Richmond Enquirer and the Cincinnati Enquirer. Best-selling magazines aimed at middle-class tastes, Harper's Magazine and the Southern Literary Messenger, added their voices, as did two leading business magazines.
Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. With Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, Humboldt offered to the world his vision of humans and nature as integrated halves of a single whole. In it, Humboldt espoused the idea that, while the universe of nature exists apart from human purpose, its beauty and order, the very idea of the whole it composes, are human achievements: cosmos comes into being in the dance of world and mind, subject and object, science and poetry.
Humboldt’s science laid the foundations for ecology and inspired the theories of his most important scientific disciple, Charles Darwin. In the United States, his ideas shaped the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman. They helped spark the American environmental movement through followers like John Muir and George Perkins Marsh. And they even bolstered efforts to free the slaves and honor the rights of Indians.
Laura Dassow Walls here traces Humboldt’s ideas for Cosmos to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world’s peoples—and envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link ideas, disciplines, and nations into a global web of knowledge and cultures. In reclaiming Humboldt’s transcultural and transdisciplinary project, Walls situates America in a lively and contested field of ideas, actions, and interests, and reaches beyond to a new worldview that integrates the natural and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities.
To the end of his life, Humboldt called himself “half an American,” but ironically his legacy has largely faded in the United States. The Passage to Cosmos will reintroduce this seminal thinker to a new audience and return America to its rightful place in the story of his life, work, and enduring legacy.
Since 1783, patriotic societies have become an integral part of American history. The great number of Sons, Daughters, and Dames, and the alphabetical jungle of G.A.R., D.A.R., V.F.W., U.C.V., U.D.C., W.R.D., etc. are well known--and are often subjects of controversy. Wallace Evan Davies here recounts, in fascinating detail, the activities and attitudes of both veterans' and hereditary patriotic societies in America up to 1900. In a lively manner, he explores their significance as social organizations, their concept of patriotism, and their influence upon public opinion and legislation.
At the close of the American Revolution a group of officers formed the first patriotic veterans' society, The Society of the Cincinnati--open to all officers who had served for three years or were in the army at the end of the Revolution. Thus it began. Then, after the Civil War, came the numerous organizations of veterans of both sides and of their relatives. And as some Americans became more nationalistic, others, becoming absorbed in family trees, started the many hereditary societies. After discussing the founding of men's, women's, and children's patriotic societies, the author describes their organizational aspects: their size, qualifications for membership, officers, dues, ritual, badges, costumes, and the like. In hereditary groups, membership wasdeliberately limited, for exclusiveness was often their strongest appeal. The veterans' groups, however, were usually anxious to be as large as possible so as to enhance their influence upon legislators.
The appearance, beginning in the 1860's, of nearly seventy patriotic newspapers and magazines testifies to the rising popularity of these groups: prominent publications of the patriotic press included The Great Republic, The Soldiers' Friend, The Grand Army Record, The Vedette, National Tribune, and American Tribune. Many people turned to patriotism as to a sort of secular religion in which their increasing differences--in national origin and in religious and cultural inheritance--could be submerged; many others joined these societies primarily for social reasons. Once members, however, all became devoted campaigners for such projects as pensions for veterans, care of war orphans, and popular observance of national patriotic holidays; they also took to the field over desecrations of the flag, sectional animosity, the teaching of history, immigration policy, labor disturbances, military instruction in schools, and expansionism.
In Patriotism on Parade we have a cross-section of American social and intellectual history for the period 1783-1900. In writing it, Davies quotes liberally from contemporary letters and newspapers which make lively reading, and he has had access to the many scrapbooks and voluminous papers of William McDowell--prominent in the founding of several hereditary groups--which shed new light on the early years of the D.A.R. and the S.A.R. in particular. His book will be read with interest by the general public, by historians, and especially by persons who have belonged to any of the organizations he describes.
The land of the United States is defined by vast distances encouraging human movement and migration on a grand scale. Consequently, American stories are filled with descriptions of human bodies walking through the land.
In Peregrinations, Amy T. Hamilton examines stories told by and about Indigenous American, Euroamerican, and Mexican walkers. Walking as a central experience that ties these texts together—never simply a metaphor or allegory—offers storytellers and authors an elastic figure through which to engage diverse cultural practices and beliefs including Puritan and Catholic teachings, Diné and Anishinaabe oral traditions, Chicanx histories, and European literary traditions.
Hamilton argues that walking bodies alert readers to the ways the physical world—more-than-human animals, trees, rocks, wind, sunlight, and human bodies—has a hand in creating experience and meaning. Through material ecocriticism, a reading practice attentive to historical and ongoing oppressions, exclusions, and displacements, she reveals complex layerings of narrative and materiality in stories of walking human bodies.
This powerful and pioneering methodology for understanding place and identity, clarifies the wide variety of American stories about human relationships with the land and the ethical implications of the embeddedness of humans in the more-than-human world.
Written in the early twentieth century for her children and grandchildren and first published in 1975, these eloquent memoirs detail the life of General Ulysses S. Grant’s wife. First Lady Julia Dent Grant wrote her reminiscences with the vivacity and charm she exhibited throughout her life, telling her story in the easy flow of an afternoon conversation with a close friend. She writes fondly of White Haven, a plantation in St. Louis County, Missouri, where she had an idyllic girlhood and later met Ulysses.
In addition to relating the joys she experienced, Grant tells about the difficult and sorrowful times. Her anecdotes give fascinating glimpses into the years of the American Civil War. One recounts the night President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Grant insisted she and her husband turn down an invitation to the theater. Her decision saved her husband’s life: like Lincoln, he too had been marked for assassination.
Throughout these memoirs, which she ends with her husband’s death, Grant seeks to introduce her descendants to both her and the man she loved. She also strives to correct misconceptions that were circulated about him. She wanted posterity to share her pride in this man, whom she saw as one of America’s greatest heroes. Her book is a testament to their devoted marriage.
This forty-fifth-anniversary edition includes a new foreword by John F. Marszalek and Frank J. Williams, a new preface by Pamela K. Sanfilippo, the original foreword by Bruce Catton, the original introduction by editor John Y. Simon, recommendations for further reading, and more than twenty photographs of the Grants, their children, and their friends.
Written in the early twentieth century for her children and grandchildren and first published in 1975, these eloquent memoirs detail the life of General Ulysses S. Grant’s wife. First Lady Julia Dent Grant wrote her reminiscences with the vivacity and charm she exhibited throughout her life, telling her story in the easy flow of an afternoon conversation with a close friend. She writes fondly of White Haven, a plantation in St. Louis County, Missouri, where she had an idyllic girlhood and later met Ulysses.
In addition to relating the joys she experienced, Grant tells about the difficult and sorrowful times. Her anecdotes give fascinating glimpses into the years of the American Civil War. One recounts the night President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Grant insisted she and her husband turn down an invitation to the theater. Her decision saved her husband’s life: like Lincoln, he too had been marked for assassination.
Throughout these memoirs, which she ends with her husband’s death, Grant seeks to introduce her descendants to both her and the man she loved. She also strives to correct misconceptions that were circulated about him. She wanted posterity to share her pride in this man, whom she saw as one of America’s greatest heroes. Her book is a testament to their devoted marriage.
This forty-fifth-anniversary edition includes a new foreword by John F. Marszalek and Frank J. Williams, a new preface by Pamela K. Sanfilippo, the original foreword by Bruce Catton, the original introduction by editor John Y. Simon, recommendations for further reading, and more than twenty photographs of the Grants, their children, and their friends.
“Leaps straight onto the roster of essential reading for anyone even vaguely interested in Grant and the Civil War.”
—Ron Chernow, author of Grant
“Provides leadership lessons that can be obtained nowhere else… Ulysses Grant in his Memoirs gives us a unique glimpse of someone who found that the habit of reflection could serve as a force multiplier for leadership.”
—Thomas E. Ricks, Foreign Policy
Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, sold door-to-door by former Union soldiers, were once as ubiquitous in American households as the Bible. Mark Twain and Henry James hailed them as great literature, and countless presidents credit Grant with influencing their own writing. This is the first comprehensively annotated edition of Grant’s memoirs, clarifying the great military leader’s thoughts on his life and times through the end of the Civil War and offering his invaluable perspective on battlefield decision making. With annotations compiled by the editors of the Ulysses S. Grant Association’s Presidential Library, this definitive edition enriches our understanding of the pre-war years, the war with Mexico, and the Civil War. Grant provides essential insight into how rigorously these events tested America’s democratic institutions and the cohesion of its social order.
“What gives this peculiarly reticent book its power? Above all, authenticity… Grant’s style is strikingly modern in its economy.”
—T. J. Stiles, New York Times
“It’s been said that if you’re going to pick up one memoir of the Civil War, Grant’s is the one to read. Similarly, if you’re going to purchase one of the several annotated editions of his memoirs, this is the collection to own, read, and reread.”
—Library Journal
Robert Bray tells the full story of the long relationship between Cartwright and Lincoln, including their political campaigns against each other, their social antagonisms, and their radical disagreements on the Christian religion, as well as their shared views on slavery and the central fact of their being "self-made."
In addition, the biography examines in close detail Cartwright's instrumental role in Methodism's bitter "divorce" of 1844, in which the southern conferences seceded in a remarkable prefigurement of the United States a decade later. Finally, Peter Cartwright attempts to place the man in his appropriate national context: as a potent "man of words" on the frontier, a self-authorizing "legend in his own time," and, surprisingly, an enduring western literary figure.
The two journals—“From York Factory to Buckingham House” and “From Buckingham House to the Rocky Mountains”—detail Fidler’s travels over a period of nine months. They include remarks on fur trade history, organization of the inland brigade, three distinct geographical regions, and the daily life of a Plains nation. Belyea’s introduction and ample notes provide insight into the way geographic, specifically cartographic, information was noted in the journals, with additional information on industry trading techniques, traders’ economic decisions, broad changes in regional social and economic conditions, and interactions with indigenous peoples.
Fidler’s journals are an exceptional record of the fur trade’s western expansion and the daily life of a Plains nation at the height of its power and prosperity. With its rich analysis of primary source documents and painstaking reproduction of historical trade routes, Peter Fidler: From York Factory to the Rocky Mountains will be of great value to students and scholars in the fields of fur trade studies, cartography, travel literature, and Canadian history, as well as general readers interested in westward expansion, exploration, commerce, and indigenous-colonial relations.
Barbour, a Virginia lawyer, participated in America’s transition from a mostly republican government to a truer majority democracy, notably while serving as the twelfth Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and later as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. After being elected to the US Congress during the War of 1812, Barbour also emerged as one of the foremost champions of states’ rights, consistently and energetically fighting against expansions of federal powers. He, along with other Jeffersonian Old Republicans, opposed federal plans for a national tariff and internal improvements. Later, Barbour became one of the first Jeffersonian politicians to join the Jacksonian Democrats in Jackson’s war against a national bank.
Barbour continued to make crucial strides in support of states’ rights after taking his seat on the United States Supreme Court in 1836 under Chief Justice Roger Taney. He contributed to the Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge and Briscoe v. Bank of Kentucky decisions, which bolstered states’ rights. He also delivered the opinion of the court in New York v. Miln, which provided the basis for the State Police Powers Doctrine.
Expertly interweaving biography, history, political science, and jurisprudence, Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America remembers the man whose personal life and career were emblematic of the decades in which the United States moved from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Jackson, contributing to developments that continue to animate American politics today.
The Victorians were image obsessed. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry. Technological advances enabled the Victorians to adorn with images the pages of their books and the walls of their homes. But this was not a wholly visual culture. Pictorial Victorians focuses on two of the most popular mid-nineteenth-century genres—illustration and narrative painting—that blurred the line between the visual and textual.
Illustration negotiated text and image on the printed page, while narrative painting juxtaposed the two media in its formulation of pictorial stories. Author Julia Thomas reassesses mid-nineteenth-century values in the light of this interplay. The dialogue between word and image generates meanings that are intimately related to the Victorians' image of themselves. Illustrations in Victorian publications and the narrative scenes that lined the walls of the Royal Academy reveal the Victorians' ideas about the world in which they lived and their notions of gender, class, and race.
Pictorial Victorians surveys a range of material, from representations of the crinoline, to the illustrations that accompanied Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Tennyson's poetry, to paintings of adultery. It demonstrates that the space between text and image is one in which values are both constructed and questioned.
For as long as women have battled for equitable political representation in America, those battles have been defined by images—whether illustrations, engravings, photographs, or colorful chromolithograph posters. Some of these pictures have been flattering, many have been condescending, and others downright incendiary. They have drawn upon prevailing cultural ideas of women’s perceived roles and abilities and often have been circulated with pointedly political objectives.
Picturing Political Power offers perhaps the most comprehensive analysis yet of the connection between images, gender, and power. In this examination of the fights that led to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Allison K. Lange explores how suffragists pioneered one of the first extensive visual campaigns in modern American history. She shows how pictures, from early engravings and photographs to colorful posters, proved central to suffragists’ efforts to change expectations for women, fighting back against the accepted norms of their times. In seeking to transform notions of womanhood and win the right to vote, white suffragists emphasized the compatibility of voting and motherhood, while Sojourner Truth and other leading suffragists of color employed pictures to secure respect and authority. Picturing Political Power demonstrates the centrality of visual politics to American women’s campaigns throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing the power of images to change history.
Originally published in 1887, The Pioneer Preacher is a lively account of a Congregationalist minister's attempts to lead a sin-free existence on the American frontier. Sherlock Bristol (1815-1906) was a California gold miner, wagon train captain, Wisconsin farmer, Idaho rancher, Indian fighter, abolitionist, and Oberlin-trained clergyman. While serving a series of churches in the East, he periodically cured himself of "nervous disorders" by journeying out West. He only broke the Sabbath once---during an Indian attack!
Reflecting in his memoirs the exploits of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Bristol delights in recounting his adventures, ecclesiastical or otherwise. He vividly recalls his redemption in the wilderness where he enjoyed having "little opportunity for reading books or mental exercise, and an abundance of calls for muscular employment." Greatly influenced by the evangelist Charles G. Finney at Oberlin, Bristol tried to teach miners and frontiersmen the principles of revivalism, postmillennialism, and perfectionism. In The Pioneer Preacher he shares his own disputatious views on abolition, American Indians, temperance, and other issues of his day.
In A Place Called Appomattox, William Marvel turns his extensive Civil War scholarship toward Appomattox County, Virginia, and the village of Appomattox Court House, which became synonymous with the end of the Civil War when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant there in 1865. Marvel presents a formidably researched and elegantly written analysis of the county from 1848 to 1877, using it as a microcosm of Southern attitudes, class issues, and shifting cultural mores that shaped the Civil War and its denouement.
With an eye toward correcting cultural myths and enriching the historical record, Marvel analyzes the rise and fall of the village and county from 1848 to 1877, detailing the domestic economic and social vicissitudes of the village, and setting the stage for the flight of Lee’s Army toward Appomattox and the climactic surrender that still resonates today.
Now available for the first time in paperback, A Place Called Appomattox reveals a new view of the Civil War, tackling some of the thorniest issues often overlooked by the nostalgic exaggerations and historical misconceptions that surround Lee’s surrender.
Plain But Wholesome presents a groundbreaking foray into Mormon history. Brock Cheney explores the foodways of Mormon pioneers from their trek west through the arrival of the railroad and reveals new perspectives on the fasci-nating Mormon settlement era. Relying on original diaries, newspaper accounts, and recipe books from the 1850s, Cheney draws a vivid portrait of what Mormon pioneers ate and drank. Although other authors have sketched the subject before, this portrait is the first effort that might be described as scholarly, though the lively prose will interest a broad general audience.
Presented here are the first explicit descriptions of the menus, food processes, and recipes of the Mormon pioneers. While many have supposed that earlier pioneer foodways continued to be handed down through Mormon families, Cheney has confirmed traditions going back generations and covering more than a century. The book also exposes myths and clichés about pioneer piety and hardships, as Cheney examines such pioneer extravagances as fresh “oysters on the half shell” and pioneer trends of alcohol consumption.
A perfect gift for the history buff or Dutch oven chef, Plain But Wholesome will also prove its place among scholars and historians. With its rollicking blend of historical source material and modern interpretation, this book will entertain and educate novice and expert alike.
The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery’s long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South. Using plantation goods—the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South—historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans—white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free—across an expanding nation.
By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery—a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South. Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Plantation Goods brings northern industrialists, southern slaveholders, enslaved field hands, and paid factory laborers into the same picture. In one part of the country, entrepreneurs envisioned fortunes to be made from “planter’s hoes” and rural women spent their days weaving “negro cloth” and assembling “slave brogans.” In another, enslaved people actively consumed textiles and tools imported from the North to contest their bondage. In between, merchants, marketers, storekeepers, and debt collectors laid claim to the profits of a thriving interregional trade.
Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods explores how people in the nineteenth century thought about complicity with slavery while showing how slavery structured life nationwide and established a modern world of entrepreneurship and exploitation. Rockman brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.
Inspiration, happy accidents, and outright obsessions have all had their way with gardens—but nothing has done more to shape the modern garden than plants themselves. In a story that ranges from continent to continent and spans four centuries, botanist and gardener David Stuart reveals how the garden as we know it was created not by garden designers but by ordinary gardeners responding to exotic and novel plants that suggested new spaces, places, and means of display. The history begins with two earth-changing events—the establishment of colonies in the Americas and the spread of the Turkish empire. Both brought the first astonishing wave of flowering exotics to gardens across Europe. Stuart relates how, over the following centuries, the influx of new plants inspired a frenzy of hybridization (at first by a new breed of gardener, the “florist,” later by nurserymen), which in turn led to such features as the familiar herbaceous border, flower bed, and rose garden, as well as the now little-known rockery, shrubbery, and “wilderness.”
From the Dutch tulip mania, the eighteenth-century European passion for “American gardens,” and on to the rhododendron craze of the nineteenth century, Stuart’s book traces the shape of the modern garden as it changed with the fashion, returning at last to classic, cottage garden varieties long neglected in favor of the foreign and new. In conclusion, Stuart looks at plant prospecting today—now that the collecting of plants may prove essential to protecting botanical diversity and preserving plant species rapidly disappearing from the wild.
This massive annotated bibliography of all known significant eyewitness accounts of nineteenth-century central overland travel fills a conspicuous gap in historical literature, and will greatly accelerate research, writing, and collecting.
Platte River Road Narratives includes not only all identifiable overland accounts, but also a number of those identifiable in manuscript form only. Over 2,000 entries identify the author, the form of the passage, overland trip, and give Matte's authoritative commentary and evaluation, as well as identification of the repository of the source material.
Hardworking actor, playwright, and stage manager Harry Watkins (1825–94) was also a prolific diarist. For fifteen years Watkins regularly recorded the plays he saw, the roles he performed, the books he read, and his impressions of current events. Performing across the U.S., Watkins collaborated with preeminent performers and producers, recording his successes and failures as well as his encounters with celebrities such as P. T. Barnum, Junius Brutus Booth, Edwin Forrest, Anna Cora Mowatt, and Lucy Stone. His is the only known diary of substantial length and scope written by a U.S. actor before the Civil War—making Watkins, essentially, the antebellum equivalent of Samuel Pepys. Theater historians Amy E. Hughes and Naomi J. Stubbs have selected, edited, and annotated excerpts from the diary in an edition that offers a vivid glimpse of how ordinary people like Watkins lived, loved, struggled, and triumphed during one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history. The selections in A Player and a Gentleman are drawn from a more expansive digital archive of the complete diary. The book, like its digital counterpart, will richly enhance our knowledge of antebellum theater culture and daily life in the U.S. during this period.
On a moonlit night in 1889, Iowa farmer John Elkins and his young wife, Hattie, were brutally murdered in their bed. Eight days later, their son, eleven-year-old Wesley Elkins, was arrested and charged with murder. The community reeled with shock by both the gruesome details of the homicides and the knowledge of the accused perpetrator—a small, quiet boy weighing just 75 pounds.
Accessible and fast-moving, The Plea delivers a complete, complex, and nuanced narrative of this horrific crime, while shedding light on the legal, social, and political environment of Iowa and the country in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Pleasure Grounds of Death considers the history of the rural cemetery in the United States throughout the duration of the nineteenth century as not only a critical cultural institution embedded in the formation of community and national identities, but also as major sites of contest over matters of burial reform, taste and respectability, and public behavior; issues concerning race, class, and gender; conflicts over the burial of the Civil War dead and formation of postwar memory; and what constituted the most appropriate ways to structure the landscape of the dead in a modern and progressive society. As cultural landscapes that served the needs of the living as well as the dead, rural cemeteries offer a mirror for the transformations and conflicts taking place throughout the nineteenth century in American society.
The working classes, colonial subjects, European nationalists, and Roman Catholics—these groups generated intense anxiety for Victorian England’s elite public, which often responded by accusing them of being dangerous conspirators. Bringing together a wide range of literary and historical evidence, Albert D. Pionke argues that the pejorative meanings attached to such opportunistic accusations of conspiracy were undermined by the many valorized versions of secrecy in Victorian society.
After surveying England’s evolving theories of representative politics and individual and collective secretive practices, Pionke traces the intersection of democracy and secrecy through a series of case histories. Using works by Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, John Henry Newman, and others, along with periodicals, histories, and parliamentary documents of the period, he shows the rhetorical prominence of groups such as the Freemasons, the Thugs, the Carbonari, the Fenians, and the Jesuits in Victorian democratic discourse.
By highlighting the centrality of representations of conspiracy in every case, Plots of Opportunity shows for the first time the markedly similar strategies of repression, resistance, and concealment used by competing agents in the democracy debate.
Early American naturalists assembled dazzling collections of native flora and fauna, from John Bartram’s botanical garden in Philadelphia and the artful display of animals in Charles Willson Peale’s museum to P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, infamously characterized by Henry James as “halls of humbug.” Yet physical collections were only one of the myriad ways that these naturalists captured, catalogued, and commemorated America’s rich biodiversity. They also turned to writing and art, from John Edward Holbrook’s forays into the fascinating world of herpetology to John James Audubon’s masterful portraits of American birds.
In this groundbreaking, now classic book, Christoph Irmscher argues that early American natural historians developed a distinctly poetic sensibility that allowed them to imagine themselves as part of, and not apart from, their environment. He also demonstrates what happens to such inclusiveness in the hands of Harvard scientist-turned Amazonian explorer Louis Agassiz, whose racist pseudoscience appalled his student William James.
This expanded, full-color edition of The Poetics of Natural History features a preface and art from award-winning artist Rosamond Purcell and invites the reader to be fully immersed in an era when the boundaries between literature, art, and science became fluid.
of poetic indifference began to emerge.
The Poetry of Indifference analyzes nineteenth-century works by Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Edward FitzGerald, among others—works that do not merely declare themselves to be indifferent but formally enact the indifference they describe. Each poem consciously disregards some aspect of poetry that is usually considered to be crucial or definitive, even at the risk of seeming "indifferent" in the sense of "mediocre." Such gestures discourage critical attention, since the poetry of indifference refuses to make claims for itself.
This is particularly true of FitzGerald's Rubáiyát, one of the most popular poems of the nineteenth century, but one that recent critics have almost entirely ignored. In concentrating on this underexplored mode of poetry, Gray not only traces a major shift in recent literary history, from a Romantic poetics of sympathy to a Modernist poetics of alienation, but also considers how this literature can help us understand the sometimes embarrassing but unavoidable presence of indifference in our lives.
This difference in outcome doesn’t mean that poisonous women didn’t preoccupy Americans. In the decades following Andrew Jackson’s first presidential bid, Americans buzzed over women who used poison to kill men. They produced and devoured reams of ephemeral newsprint, cheap trial transcripts, and sensational “true” pamphlets, as well as novels, plays, and poems. Female poisoners served as crucial elements in the literary manifestos of writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to George Lippard and the cheap pamphleteer E. E. Barclay, but these characters were given a strangely positive spin, appearing as innocent victims, avenging heroes, or engaging humbugs.
The reason for this poison predilection lies in the political logic of metaphor. Nineteenth-century Britain strove to rein in democratic and populist movements by labeling popular print “poison” and its providers “poisoners,” drawing on centuries of established metaphor that negatively associated poison, women, and popular speech or writing. Jacksonian America, by contrast, was ideologically committed to the popular—although what and who counted as such was up for serious debate. The literary gadfly John Neal called on his fellow Jacksonian writers to defy British critical standards, saying, “Let us have poison.” Poisonous Muse investigates how they answered, how they deployed the figure of the female poisoner to theorize popular authorship, to validate or undermine it, and to fight over its limits, particularly its political, gendered, and racial boundaries.
Poisonous Muse tracks the progress of this debate from approximately 1820 to 1845. Uncovering forgotten writers and restoring forgotten context to well-remembered authors, it seeks to understand Jacksonian print culture from the inside out, through its own poisonous language.
Founded by Peter the Great in 1718, Russia’s police were key instruments of tsarist power. In the reign of Alexander II (1855-1881), local police forces took on new importance. The liberation of 23 million serfs from landlord control, growing fear of crime, and the terrorist violence of the closing years challenged law enforcement with new tasks that made worse what was already a staggering burden. (“I am obliged to inform Your Imperial Highness that the police often fail to carry out their assignments and, when they do execute them, they do so poorly because of their moral corruption…”) This book describes the regime’s decades-long struggle to reform and strengthen the police. The author reviews the local police’s role and performance in the mid-nineteenth century and the implications of the largely unsuccessful effort to transform them. From a longer-term perspective, the study considers how the police’s systemic weaknesses undermined tsarist rule, impeded a range of liberalizing reforms, perpetuated reliance on the military to maintain law and order, and gave rise to vigilante justice.
While its primary focus is on European Russia, the analysis also covers much of the imperial periphery, discussing the police systems in the Baltic Provinces, Congress Poland, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia.
Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann mines seven decades' worth of thoughts expressed by Ameryka-Echo readers to chronicle the ethnic press's role in the immigrant experience. Open and unedited debate harkened back to homegrown journalistic traditions, and Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann opens up the nuances of an editorial philosophy that cultivated readers as content creators. As she shows, ethnic publications in the process forged immigrant social networks and pushed notions of education and self-improvement throughout Polonia. Paryski, meanwhile, built a publishing empire that earned him the nickname ""The Polish Hearst.""
Detailed and incisive, The Polish Hearst opens the door on the long-overlooked world of ethnic publishing and the amazing life of one of its towering figures.
Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated modern chronicler of North and South America and the Caribbean, and this translation of his essay on New Spain—the first modern regional economic and political geography—covers his travels across today’s Mexico in 1803–1804. The work canvases natural-scientific and cultural-scientific objects alike, combining the results of fieldwork with archival research and expert testimony.
To show how people, plants, animals, goods, and ideas moved across the globe, Humboldt wrote in a variety of styles, bending and reshaping familiar writerly conventions to keep readers attentive to new inputs. Above all, he wanted his readers to be open-minded when confronted with cultural and other differences in the Americas. Fueled by his comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science, he used his writing to support Latin American independence and condemn slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. It is these voluminous and innovative writings on the New World that made Humboldt the undisputed father of modern geography, early American studies, transatlantic cultural history, and environmental studies.
This two-volume critical edition—the third installment in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series—is based on the full text, including all footnotes, tables, and maps, of the second, revised French edition of Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827, which has never been translated into English before. Extensive annotations and full-color atlases are available on the series website.
Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated modern chronicler of North and South America and the Caribbean, and this translation of his essay on New Spain—the first modern regional economic and political geography—covers his travels across today’s Mexico in 1803–1804. The work canvases natural-scientific and cultural-scientific objects alike, combining the results of fieldwork with archival research and expert testimony.
To show how people, plants, animals, goods, and ideas moved across the globe, Humboldt wrote in a variety of styles, bending and reshaping familiar writerly conventions to keep readers attentive to new inputs. Above all, he wanted his readers to be open-minded when confronted with cultural and other differences in the Americas. Fueled by his comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science, he used his writing to support Latin American independence and condemn slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. It is these voluminous and innovative writings on the New World that made Humboldt the undisputed father of modern geography, early American studies, transatlantic cultural history, and environmental studies.
This two-volume critical edition—the third installment in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series—is based on the full text, including all footnotes, tables, and maps, of the second, revised French edition of Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827, which has never been translated into English before. Extensive annotations and full-color atlases are available on the series website.
Blessed with fertile and well-watered soil, East Africa’s kingdom of Buganda supported a relatively dense population and became a major regional power by the mid-nineteenth century. This complex and fascinating state has also long been in need of a thorough study that cuts through the image of autocracy and military might.
Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda explores the material basis of Ganda political power, gives us a new understanding of what Ganda power meant in real terms, and relates the story of how the kingdom used the resources at its disposal to meet the challenges that confronted it. Reid further explains how these same challenges ultimately limited Buganda’s dominance of the East African great lakes region.
“Who is James K. Polk?” was a rallying cry of the Whigs during the campaign of 1844. Polk answered that question adequately by winning the election against his Whig opponent, Henry Clay.
Today the question might be recast—respectfully, not derisively—“Who was James K. Polk?” Few persons could give more than a perfunctory answer, even though when he left office the United States was half again larger than it was when he became president.
Polk, unlike his close friend Andrew Jackson, has been the subject of but few books. Stern and serious-minded, intent upon his work, he never caught the public’s imagination as did some of the more magnetic personalities who filled the office of president. His lack of personal charm, however, should not hide from generations of Americans the great benefit he brought their country and his key role in developing the powers of the presidency.
This book will be a revelation to readers who might be confounded, even momentarily, by the question “Who was James K. Polk?” It is based on the assumption that the presidential power-role, though expressed in the Constitution and prescribed by law, is not a static role but a dynamic one, shaped and developed by a president’s personal reaction to the crises and circumstances of the times during which he serves. And Polk faced many crises, among them the Mexican War, the Oregon boundary dispute, the tariff question, Texas’s admission to the Union, and the establishment by the United States of a more stable and respected position in the world of nations.
Based on the dynamic power-role theory, the book analyzes its theme of how and why James K. Polk, the eleventh president of the United States, responded to the challenges of his times and thereby increased the authority and importance of the presidential role for future incumbents.
Charles McCoy became interested in writing this book after two of his friends, both informed historians, pointed out to him that James K. Polk was a neglected figure in American history. Preliminary research showed this to be true, but without reason—for, as the eminent historian George Bancroft said, “viewed from the standpoint of results, [Polk’s administration] was perhaps the greatest in our national history, certainly one of the greatest.” For his own astute appraisal of the Polk administration, McCoy emphasized the use of firsthand sources of information: the Polk Diary; newspapers of the period; the unpublished papers of Polk, Jackson, Trist, Marcy, and Van Buren; and congressional documents and reports.
In the wake of Joseph Smith Jr.’s murder in 1844, his following splintered, and some allied themselves with a maverick Mormon apostle, Lyman Wight. Sometimes called the "Wild Ram of Texas," Wight took his splinter group to frontier Texas, a destination to which Smith, before his murder, had considered moving his followers, who were increasingly unwelcome in the Midwest. He had instructed Wight to take a small band of church members from Wisconsin to establish a Texas colony that would prepare the ground for a mass migration of the membership. Having received these orders directly from Smith, Wight did not believe the former’s death changed their significance. If anything, he felt all the more responsible for fulfilling what he believed was a prophet’s intention.
Antagonism with Brigham Young and the other LDS apostles grew, and Wight refused to join with them or move to their new gathering place in Utah. He and his small congregation pursued their own destiny, becoming an interesting component of the Texas frontier, where they had a significant economic role as early millers and cowboys and a political one as a buffer with the Comanches. Their social and religious practices shared many of the idiosyncracies of the larger Mormon sect, including polygamous marriages, temple rites, and economic cooperatives. Wight was a charismatic but authoritarian and increasingly odd figure, in part because of chemical addictions. His death in 1858 while leading his shrinking number of followers on yet one more migration brought an effective end to his independent church.
A radical reconceptualization of modernism, this book traces the appearance of the modern artist to the Paris of the 1830s and links the emergence of an enduring modernist aesthetic to the fleeting forms of popular culture. Contrary to conventional views of a private self retreating from history and modernity, Popular Bohemia shows us the modernist as a public persona parodying the stereotypes of commercial mass culture. Here we see how the modern artist—alternately assuming the roles of the melodramatic hero, the urban flâneur, the female hysteric, the tribal primitive—created his own version of an expressive, public modernity in opposition to an increasingly repressive and conformist bourgeois culture. And here we see how a specifically modern aesthetic culture in nineteenth-century Paris came about, not in opposition to commercial popular culture, but in close alliance with it.
Popular Bohemia revises dominant historical narratives about modernism from the perspective of a theoretically informed cultural history that spans the period between 1830 and 1914. In doing so, it reconnects the intellectual history of avant-garde art with the cultural history of bohemia and the social history of the urban experience to reveal the circumstances in which a truly modernist culture emerged.
Americans commonly recognize television, e-mail, and instant messaging as agents of pervasive cultural change. But many of us may not realize that what we now call snail mail was once just as revolutionary. As David M. Henkin argues in The Postal Age, a burgeoning postal network initiated major cultural shifts during the nineteenth century, laying the foundation for the interconnectedness that now defines our ever-evolving world of telecommunications.
This fascinating history traces these shifts from their beginnings in the mid-1800s, when cheaper postage, mass literacy, and migration combined to make the long-established postal service a more integral and viable part of everyday life. With such dramatic events as the Civil War and the gold rush underscoring the importance and necessity of the post, a surprisingly broad range of Americans—male and female, black and white, native-born and immigrant—joined this postal network, regularly interacting with distant locales before the existence of telephones or even the widespread use of telegraphy. Drawing on original letters and diaries from the period, as well as public discussions of the expanding postal system, Henkin tells the story of how these Americans adjusted to a new world of long-distance correspondence, crowded post offices, junk mail, valentines, and dead letters.
The Postal Age paints a vibrant picture of a society where possibilities proliferated for the kinds of personal and impersonal communications that we often associate with more recent historical periods. In doing so, it significantly increases our understanding of both antebellum America and our own chapter in the history of communications.
Embedded in the consciousness of Americans throughout much of the country’s history has been the American Dream: that every citizen, no matter how humble his beginnings, is free to climb to the top of the social and economic ladder. Poverty and Progress assesses the claims of the American Dream against the actual structure of economic and social opportunities in a typical nineteenth century industrial community—Newburyport, Massachusetts.
Here is local history. With the aid of newspapers, census reports, and local tax, school, and savings bank records Stephan Thernstrom constructs a detailed and vivid portrait of working class life in Newburyport from 1850 to 1880, the critical years in which this old New England town was transformed into a booming industrial city. To determine how many self-made men there really were in the community, he traces the career patterns of hundreds of obscure laborers and their sons over this thirty year period, exploring in depth the differing mobility patterns of native-born and Irish immigrant workmen. Out of this analysis emerges the conclusion that opportunities for occupational mobility were distinctly limited. Common laborers and their sons were rarely able to attain middle class status, although many rose from unskilled to semiskilled or skilled occupations.
But another kind of mobility was widespread. Men who remained in lowly laboring jobs were often strikingly successful in accumulating savings and purchasing homes and a plot of land. As a result, the working class was more easily integrated into the community; a new basis for social stability was produced which offset the disruptive influences that accompanied the first shock of urbanization and industrialization.
Since Newburyport underwent changes common to other American cities, Thernstrom argues, his findings help to illuminate the social history of nineteenth century America and provide a new point of departure for gauging mobility trends in our society today. Correlating the Newburyport evidence with comparable studies of twentieth century cities, he refutes the popular belief that it is now more difficult to rise from the bottom of the social ladder than it was in the idyllic past. The “blocked mobility” theory was proposed by Lloyd Warner in his famous “Yankee City” studies of Newburyport; Thernstrom provides a thorough critique of the “Yankee City” volumes and of the ahistorical style of social research which they embody.
Originally published in 1962, this story of the English Settlement in pioneer Illinois is compiled from the eyewitness accounts of the participants. The founders, Morris Birkbeck and George Flower, as well as their associates and the many visitors to their prairie settlement, wrote mainly for immediate and sometimes controversial ends. Charles Boewe has selected excerpts from letters, descriptions, diaries, histories, and periodicals within a chronological framework to emphasize the implicit drama of the settlers' deeds as they searched for a suitable site, founded their colony, and augmented their forces with new arrivals from England. No less dramatic is the subsequent estrangement of the two founders, the disillusionment of many of the English settlers, the untimely death of Birkbeck, and the financial ruin of Flower.
The regiment’s history unfolds around major events in the Western Theater from 1861 to September 1865, including campaigns at Helena, Vicksburg, Jackson, and Meridian, as well as numerous little-known skirmishes. Although they were led almost exclusively by Northern-born Republicans, the majority of the soldiers in the Fifth Illinois remained Democrats. As Kohl demonstrates, politics, economics, education, social values, and racism separated the line officers from the common soldiers, and the internal friction caused by these cultural disparities led to poor leadership, low morale, disciplinary problems, and rampant alcoholism.
The narrative pulls the Fifth Illinois out of historical oblivion, elucidating the highs and lows of the soldiers’ service as well as their changing attitudes toward war goals, religion, liberty, commanding generals, Copperheads, and alcoholism. By reconstructing the cultural context of Fifth Illinois soldiers, Prairie Boys Go to War reveals how social and economic traditions can shape the wartime experience.
2018 ISHS Annual Award Winner for a Scholarly Publication
According to conventional wisdom, Abraham Lincoln spent most of his law career collecting debt and representing railroads, and this focus made him inept at defending clients in homicide cases. In this unprecedented study of Lincoln’s criminal cases, George Dekle disproves these popular notions, showing that Lincoln was first and foremost a trial lawyer. Through careful examination of Lincoln’s homicide cases and evaluation of his legal skills, Dekle demonstrates that criminal law was an important part of Lincoln's practice, and that he was quite capable of defending people accused of murder, trying approximately one such case per year.
Dekle begins by presenting the viewpoints of not only those who see Lincoln as a perfect lawyer whose only flaw was his inability to represent the wrong side of a case but also those who believe Lincoln was a less-than-honest legal hack. The author invites readers to compare these wildly different stereotypes with the flesh-and-blood Lincoln revealed in each case described in the book, including an axe murder suit in which Lincoln assisted the prosecution, a poisoning case he refused to prosecute for $200 but defended for $75, and a case he won by proving that a supposed murder victim was actually still alive.
For each case Dekle covers, he first tells the stories of the feuds, arguments, and insults that led to murder and other criminal activity, giving a gripping view of the seamy side of life in nineteenth-century Illinois. Then he traces the course of the pretrial litigation, describes the trials and the various tactics employed in the prosecution and defense, and critiques the performance of both Lincoln and his adversaries.
Dekle concludes that Lincoln was a competent, diligent criminal trial lawyer who knew the law, could argue it effectively to both judge and jury, and would use all lawful means to defend clients whether he believed them to be innocent or guilty. His trial record shows Lincoln to have been a formidable defense lawyer who won many seemingly hopeless cases through his skill as a courtroom tactician, cross-examiner, and orator. Criminal defendants who could retain Lincoln as a defense attorney were well represented, and criminal defense attorneys who sought him as co-counsel were well served. Providing insight into both Lincoln’s legal career and the culture in which he practiced law, Prairie Defender resolves a major misconception concerning one of our most important historical figures.
Winner, ISHS Superior Achievement Award for a Scholarly Publication, 2016
A concise legal history of Illinois through the end of the nineteenth century, Prairie Justice covers the region’s progression from French to British to early American legal systems, which culminated in a unique body of Illinois law that has influenced other jurisdictions. Written by Roger L. Severns in the 1950s and published in serial form in the 1960s, Prairie Justice is available now for the first time as a book, thanks to the work of editor John A. Lupton, an Illinois and legal historian who also contributed an introduction.
Illinois’ legal development demonstrates the tension between two completely different European legal systems, between river communities and prairie towns, and between agrarian and urban interests. Severns uses several rulings—including a reconstitution of the Supreme Court in 1824, slavery-related cases, and the impeachment of a Supreme Court justice—to examine political movements in Illinois and their impact on the local judiciary. Through legal decisions, the Illinois judiciary became an independent, co-equal branch of state government. By the mid-nineteenth century, Illinois had established itself as a leading judicial authority, influencing not only the growing western frontier but also the industrialized and farming regions of the country. With a close eye for detail, Severns reviews the status of the legal profession during the 1850s by looking new members of the Court, the nostalgia of circuit riding, and how a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln rose to prominence.
Illinois has a rich judicial history, but that history has not been adequately documented until now. With the publication of Prairie Justice, those interested in Illinois legal history finally have a book that covers the development of the state’s judiciary in its formative years.
The site of the study—Kansas City, Missouri—reflects the diverse rhetorical experiences of girls in cities across the United States at the beginning of the last century. Four case studies examine the writing of privileged white girls at a college preparatory school, Native American girls at an off-reservation boarding school, African American girls at a segregated high school, and working- and middle-class girls at a large whites-only public high school. Wood’s analysis reveals a contemporary concept of epideictic rhetoric that accounts for issues of gender, race, class, and age.
In 1842, Black Rhode Islanders secured a stunning victory, a success rarely seen in antebellum America: they won the right to vote. Amid heightened public discourse around shifting ideas of race, citizenship, and political rights, they methodically deconstructed the arguments against their enfranchisement, exposing the arbitrariness of the color line in delineating citizenship rights and choosing the perfect moments in which to act forcefully. At the head of this movement, a cohort of prominent business and community members formed an early example of a Black leadership class in the US.
CJ Martin draws upon a wealth of sources—including personal correspondences, government and organizational documents, tax records, and petitions—to argue that Black leaders employed a unique combination of agitation and accommodation to ensure the success of the movement. By investigating their tactics, Martin deepens the story of how race played a crucial role in American citizenship, and by focusing on Black leadership, he relates this history through the people who lived it—who thought, debated, petitioned, and enacted their own liberation. Telling the story of a fight that was as important to the pioneers of interracial democracy as it was for the civil rights activists of the twentieth century, The Precious Birthright provides new insight into the larger story of Black freedom.
In Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel—the first book-length study of the topic—Livia Arndal Woods traces the connections between literary treatments of pregnancy and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth occurring over the long nineteenth century. Woods uses the problem of pregnancy in the Victorian novel (in which pregnancy is treated modestly as a rule and only rarely as an embodied experience) to advocate for “somatic reading,” a practice attuned to impressions of the body on the page and in our own messy lived experiences. Examining works by Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and others, Woods considers instances of pregnancy that are tied to representations of immodesty, poverty, and medical diagnosis. These representations, Woods argues, should be understood in the arc of Anglo-American modernity and its aftershocks, connecting backward to early modern witch trials and forward to the criminalization of women for pregnancy outcomes in twenty-first-century America. Ultimately, she makes the case that by clearing space for the personal and anecdotal in scholarship, somatic reading helps us analyze with uncertainty rather than against it and allows for richer and more relevant textual interpretation.
The U.S. Army has always regarded preparing for war as its peacetime role, but how it fulfilled that duty has changed dramatically over time. J. P. Clark traces the evolution of the Army between the War of 1812 and World War I, showing how differing personal experiences of war and peace among successive generations of professional soldiers left their mark upon the Army and its ways.
Nineteenth-century officers believed that generalship and battlefield command were more a matter of innate ability than anything institutions could teach. They saw no benefit in conceptual preparation beyond mastering technical skills like engineering and gunnery. Thus, preparations for war were largely confined to maintaining equipment and fortifications and instilling discipline in the enlisted ranks through parade ground drill. By World War I, however, Progressive Era concepts of professionalism had infiltrated the Army. Younger officers took for granted that war’s complexity required them to be trained to think and act alike—a notion that would have offended earlier generations. Preparing for War concludes by demonstrating how these new notions set the conditions for many of the successes—and some of the failures—of General Pershing’s American Expeditionary Forces.
A Prescription for Adversity makes the revolutionary case that Ambrose Bierce, far from being a bitter misanthrope, was instead both a compassionate and moral author. Berkove, focusing on Bierce's short fiction, establishes the necessity of recognizing the pattern of his intellectual and literary development over the course of his career. The author shows that Bierce, probably the American author with the most extensive experience of the Civil War, turned to classical Stoicism and English and French Enlightenment literature in his postwar search for meaning. Bierce's fiction arose from his ultimately unsatisfying encounters with the philosophies those sources offered, but the moral commitment as well as the literary techniques of heir authors, particularly Jonathan Swift, inspired him. Dating Bierce's fiction, and introducing uncollected journalism, correspondence, and important new literary history and biographical information, Berkove brings new insights to a number of stories, including "A Son of the Gods" and "A Horseman in the Sky," but especially "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and presents compelling readings of the Parenticide Club tales and "Moxon's Master." A Prescription for Adversity substantiates how Bierce at his best is one of the few American authors who rises to the level of Mark Twain, and the only one who touches Jonathan Swift.
A work of both biography and literary criticism, this book rescues Ambrose Bierce and his literature from the neglect to which it has been assigned by "ill-founded, obtuse and unproductive approaches based on skewed notions of his personality and forced or facile readings of individual stories."
On December 5, 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant transmitted his eighth and final message to Congress. In reviewing his tenure as president, Grant proclaimed, “Mistakes have been made,” though he assured Congress, his administration’s “failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.” Until recently, scholars have portrayed Grant as among the country’s worst chief executives. Though the scholarly consensus about Grant’s presidency is changing, the general public knows little, if anything, about his two terms, other than their outsized reputation for corruption. While scandals are undoubtedly part of the story, there is more to Grant’s presidency: Grant faced the Panic of 1873, the severest economic depression in U.S. history, defeated the powerful Senator Charles Sumner on the annexation of Cuba, and deftly avoided war with Spain while laying the groundwork for the “special relationship” between Great Britain and the United States. Grant’s efforts to ensure justice for African Americans and American Indians, however, were undercut by his own decisions and by the contradictory demands of the various constituencies that made up the Republican Party.
In The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant: Preserving the Civil War’s Legacy, historian Paul Kahan focuses on the unique political, economic, and cultural forces unleashed by the Civil War and how Grant addressed these issues during his tumultuous two terms as chief executive. A timely reassessment, The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant sheds new light on the business of politics in the decade after the Civil War and portrays an energetic and even progressive executive whose legacy has been overshadowed by both his wartime service and his administration’s many scandals.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
In the modern era, there arose a prolific and vibrant print culture—books, newspapers, and magazines issued by and for diverse, often marginalized, groups. This long-overdue collection offers a unique foray into the multicultural world of reading and readers in the United States.
The contributors to this award-winning collection pen interdisciplinary essays that examine the many ways print culture functions within different groups. The essays link gender, class, and ethnicity to the uses and goals of a wide variety of publications and also explore the role print materials play in constructing historical events like the Titanic disaster.
Contributors: Lynne M. Adrian, Steven Biel, James P. Danky, Elizabeth Davey, Michael Fultz, Jacqueline Goldsby, Norma Fay Green, Violet Johnson, Elizabeth McHenry, Christine Pawley, Yumei Sun, and Rudolph J. Vecoli
In 1892, unrepentant anarchists Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, and Carl Nold were sent to the Western Pennsylvania State Penitentiary for the attempted assassination of steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick. Searching for a way to continue their radical politics and to proselytize among their fellow inmates, these men circulated messages of hope and engagement via primitive means and sympathetic prisoners. On odd bits of paper, in German and in English, they shared their thoughts and feelings in a handwritten clandestine magazine called “Prison Blossoms.” This extraordinary series of essays on anarchism and revolutionary deeds, of prison portraits and narratives of homosexuality among inmates, and utopian poems and fables of a new world to come not only exposed the brutal conditions in American prisons, where punishment cells and starvation diets reigned, but expressed a continuing faith in the "beautiful ideal" of communal anarchism.
Most of the "Prison Blossoms" were smuggled out of the penitentiary to fellow comrades, including Emma Goldman, as the nucleus of an exposé of prison conditions in America’s Gilded Age. Those that survived relatively unrecognized for a century in an international archive are here transcribed, translated, edited, and published for the first time. Born at a unique historical moment, when European anarchism and American labor unrest converged, as each sought to repel the excesses of monopoly capitalism, these prison blossoms peer into the heart of political radicalism and its fervent hope of freedom from state and religious coercion.
America’s first crisis with the Islamic world: the diplomatic and military mission to free more than three hundred enslaved sailors
On October 31, 1803, the frigate USS Philadelphia ran aground on a reef a few miles outside the harbor of Tripoli. Since April 1801, the United States had been at war with Tripoli, one of the Barbary “pirate” regimes, over the payment of annual tribute—bribes so that American merchant ships would not be seized and their crews held hostage. After hours under fire, the Philadelphia, aground and defenseless, surrendered, and 307 American sailors and marines were captured. Manhandled and stripped of their clothes and personal belongings, the men of the Philadelphia were paraded before the Bashaw of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanali. The bashaw ordered the crew moved into an old warehouse, and the officers were eventually moved to a dungeon beneath the Bashaw’s castle. While the officers were treated as “gentlemen,” although imprisoned, the sailors worked as enslaved laborers. Regularly beaten and given a meager diet, several died in captivity; escape attempts failed, while a few ended up converting to Islam and joined their captors. President Thomas Jefferson, Congress, U.S. diplomats, and Commodore Edward Preble, commander of the naval squadron off Tripoli, grappled with how to safely free the American captives. The crew of the Philadelphia remained prisoners for nineteen months, until the Tripolitan War ended in June 1805.
The Philadelphia captives became the key to negotiations to end the war; the possibility existed that if threatened too much, the Bashaw would kill the captives. Ultimately, the United States paid $60,000 to get them back—about $200 per man—a sum less than the Bashaw’s initial demands for compensation. In June 1805, the Americans began their journey home. Combining stirring naval warfare, intricate diplomatic negotiations, the saga of surviving imprisonment, and based on extensive primary source research, Prisoners of the Bashaw: The Nineteen-Month Captivity of American Sailors in Tripoli, 1803-1805 by Frederick C. Leiner tells the complete story of America’s first great hostage crisis.
Faith in progress is a characteristic we often associate with the Victorian era. Victorian intellectuals and free-thinkers who believed in progress and wrote history from a progressive point of view—men such as Leslie Stephen, John Morley, W. E. H. Lecky, and James Anthony Froude—are usually thought to have done so because they were optimistic about their own times. Their optimism has been seen as the result of a successful Liberal campaign for political reform in the sixties and seventies, carried out in alliance with religious dissenters—a campaign that removed religion from the arena of public debate.
Jeffrey Paul von Arx challenges this long-standing view of the Victorian intellectual aristocracy. He sees them as preoccupied with and even fearful of a religious resurgence throughout their careers, and demonstrates that their loss of confidence in contemporary liberalism began with their disillusionment over the effects of the Franchise Reform Act of 1867. He portrays their championing of the idea of progress as motivated not by optimism about the present, but by their desire to explain away and reverse if possible contemporary religious and political trends, such as the new mass politics in England and Ireland.
This is the first book to explore how pessimism could be the psychological basis for the Victorians’ progressive conception of history. Throughout, von Arx skillfully interweaves threads of religion, politics, and history, showing how ideas in one sphere cannot be understood without reference to the others.
Hunan province has long interested students of modern China. A citadel of orthodoxy in the nineteenth century and a mainspring of revolution in the twentieth, it is an ideal focus for a study of the great transformation that occurred during the last two decades of the Ch'ing dynasty.
Hunan's experience illuminates key questions. How did foreign imperialism affect Chinese society? What ties bound the provinces to the central government, and how were these ties loosened to permit the secession movement of 1911? Why did nationalism emerge so abruptly and strongly after 1895? How did it differ from the antiforeignism that preceded it, and what did it contribute to the movement against the dynasty? As nationalism became strong, why did social revolution remain weak?
Since Hunanese leadership, moving from orthodoxy through revolution, constitutes one of the great continuities in China's modern history, the answers that a study of Hunan gives to these questions are relevant to larger patterns of change in China as a whole. Charlton Lewis has written a valuable handbook of national as well as provincial events during the turbulent period around the turn of the century.
Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
For understand of the Middle East today, it is essential to know something of the historical background of that region, traditionally known as the Near East. In tracing the influence of American Protestant missionary activities on American foreign policy and diplomacy in the Near East, Professor Grabill contributes significantly to an understanding of contemporary affairs.
It becomes clear, in this account, that missionaries and philanthropists were the most influential force in the United States' relations with the Near East through the First World War and its aftermath. An important turning point in the history occurred in 1915 when officials of the Ottoman Empire massacred or deported several hundred thousand Turkish Armenians, among whom were the principal constituents of the American missionaries. This prompted the mission groups to shift their emphasis from evangelism and education to the development of the second largest relief organization in the United States history ) eventually called Near East Relief). Through powerful lobbying, the missionaries got their government to consider seriously a protectorate over Armenia or all of Asia Minor. Despite their political failure, the religionists succeeded as cultural frontiersmen through their colleges, such as the American University of Beirut, and their technical assistance programs, which showed the way for the Fulbright, foreign aid, and Peace Corps programs.
The archives of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
(Congregational) and the Presbyterian Board of Missions provided rich source material for this book. The illustrations include photographs and maps.
Long ignored by historians and repudiated in their time, practitioners of private law opened the way toward Japan’s legal modernity. From the seventeenth to the turn of the twentieth century, lawyers and their predecessors changed society in ways that first samurai and then the state could not. During the Edo period (1600–1868), they worked from the shadows to bend the shogun’s law to suit the market needs of merchants and the justice concerns of peasants. Over the course of the nineteenth century, legal practitioners changed law from a tool for rule into a new epistemology and laid the foundation for parliamentary politics during the Meiji era (1868–1912).
This social and political history argues that legal modernity sprouted from indigenous roots and helped delineate a budding nation’s public and private spheres. Tracing the transition of law regimes from Edo to Meiji, Darryl E. Flaherty shows how the legal profession emerged as a force for change in modern Japan and highlights its lasting contributions in founding private universities, political parties, and a national association of lawyers that contributed to legal reform during the twentieth century.
In the latter nineteenth century, extraordinary changes in food and agriculture gave rise to new tensions in the ways people understood, obtained, trusted, and ate their food. This was the Era of Adulteration, and its concerns have carried forward to today: How could you tell the food you bought was the food you thought you bought? Could something manufactured still be pure? Is it okay to manipulate nature far enough to produce new foods but not so far that you question its safety and health? How do you know where the line is? And who decides?
In Pure Adulteration, Benjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods and the perceived problems they wrought. Cohen follows farmers, manufacturers, grocers, hucksters, housewives, politicians, and scientific analysts as they struggled to demarcate and patrol the ever-contingent, always contested border between purity and adulteration, and as, at the end of the nineteenth century, the very notion of a pure food changed.
In the end, there is (and was) no natural, prehuman distinction between pure and adulterated to uncover and enforce; we have to decide. Today’s world is different from that of our nineteenth-century forebears in many ways, but the challenge of policing the difference between acceptable and unacceptable practices remains central to daily decisions about the foods we eat, how we produce them, and what choices we make when buying them.
Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination reveals how the leaders of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement—from landmark figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson to scores of lesser-known writers and orators—drew upon the Puritan tradition to shape their politics and personae. In a striking instance of selective memory, reimagined aspects of Puritan history proved to be potent catalysts for abolitionist minds. Black writers lauded slave rebels as new Puritan soldiers, female antislavery militias in Kansas were cast as modern Pilgrims, and a direct lineage of radical democracy was traced from these early New Englanders through the American and French Revolutions to the abolitionist movement, deemed a “Second Reformation” by some. Kenyon Gradert recovers a striking influence on abolitionism and recasts our understanding of puritanism, often seen as a strictly conservative ideology, averse to the worldly rebellion demanded by abolitionists.
Putting Their Hands on Race offers an important labor history of 19th and early 20th century Irish immigrant and US southern Black migrant domestic workers. Drawing on a range of archival sources, this intersectional study explores how these women were significant to the racial labor and citizenship politics of their time. Their migrations to northeastern cities challenged racial hierarchies and formations. Southern Black migrant women resisted the gendered racism of domestic service, and Irish immigrant women strove to expand whiteness to position themselves as deserving of labor rights. On the racially fractious terrain of labor, Black women and Irish immigrant women, including Victoria Earle Matthews, the “Irish Rambler”, Leonora Barry, and Anna Julia Cooper, gathered data, wrote letters and speeches, marched, protested, engaged in private acts of resistance in the workplace, and created women’s institutions and organizations to assert domestic workers’ right to living wages and protection.
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