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Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty examines the material artifacts, festivities, and rituals by which Congress endeavored not only to assert its political legitimacy and to bolster the war effort, but ultimately to glorify the United States and to win the allegiance of the American people. But fact, as Benjamin H. Irvin demonstrates, the "people out of doors"--including the working poor, women, loyalists, Native Americans and others not represented in Congress--vigorously contested the trappings of nationhood into which Congress had enfolded them.
The story of one of the most important -- and most elusive -- figures of the American Revolution, Samuel Adams traces the life of the "Man of the Revolution," as he was called by Thomas Jefferson, from his childhood as a fifth-generation New Englander to his pivotal role in the Boston Tea Party and war that followed to a life spent in public service. Benjamin Irvin explores the fascinating contradictions of Samuel Adams's life: he was born into a family of high rank, but lived a humble, almost impoverished life; he could barely manage his personal household, but brilliantly managed the Massachusetts House of Representatives; he pushed for the Revolution, but resisted the Constitution; he spearheaded resistance to the English government but staunchly opposed resistance to the U.S. government. A perceptive look at the life of a complex man, Samuel Adams is an evocative portrait of one of our nation's most interesting Founding Fathers.
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In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote, “What then, is the American, this new man? He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced.” In casting aside their European mores, these pioneers, de Crèvecoeur implied, were the very embodiment of a new culture, society, economy, and political system. But to what extent did manliness shape early America’s character and institutions? And what roles did race, ethnicity, and class play in forming masculinity? Thomas A. Foster and his contributors grapple with these questions in New Men, showcasing how colonial and Revolutionary conditions gave...
In A Is for Arson, Campbell F. Scribner sifts through two centuries of debris to uncover the conditions that have prompted school vandalism and to explain why attempts at prevention have inevitably failed. Vandalism costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars every year, as students, parents, and even teachers wreak havoc on school buildings. Why do they do it? Can anything stop them? Who should pay for the damage? Underlying these questions are long-standing tensions between freedom and authority, and between wantonness and reason. Property destruction is not simply a moral failing, to be addressed with harsher punishments, nor can the problem be solved through more restrictive architec...
In A History of Global Consumption: 1500 – 1800, Ina Baghdiantz McCabe examines the history of consumption throughout the early modern period using a combination of chronological and thematic discussion, taking a comprehensive and wide-reaching view of a subject that has long been on the historical agenda. The title explores the topic from the rise of the collector in Renaissance Europe to the birth of consumption as a political tool in the eighteenth century. Beginning with an overview of the history of consumption and the major theorists, such as Bourdieu, Elias and Barthes, who have shaped its development as a field, Baghdiantz McCabe approaches the subject through a clear chronological framework. Supplemented by illlustrations in every chapter and ranging in scope from an analysis of the success of American commodities such as tobacco, sugar and chocolate in Europe and Asia to a discussion of the Dutch tulip mania, A History of Global Consumption: 1500 – 1800 is the perfect guide for all students interested in the social, cultural and economic history of the early modern period.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn ...
A sweeping history of early American trade and the foundation of the American economy "We could have no better guide than Truxes explaining incisively how American colonial merchants enriched their communities through licit and illicit trade, and how this enrichment was the product of slavery and the slave trade."--Nicholas Canny, author of Imagining Ireland's Pasts In a single, readily digestible, coherent narrative, historian Thomas M. Truxes presents the three hundred-year history of the overseas trade of British America. Born from seeds planted in Tudor England in the sixteenth century, Atlantic trade allowed the initial survival, economic expansion, and later prosperity of British America, and brought vastly different geographical regions, each with a distinctive identity and economic structure, into a single fabric. Truxes shows how colonial American prosperity was only possible because of the labor of enslaved Africans, how the colonial economy became dependent on free and open markets, and how the young United States owed its survival in the struggle of the American Revolution to Atlantic trade.
Writing the Rebellion presents a cultural history of loyalist writing in early America, dissolving the old legend that loyalists were more British than American, and patriots the embodiment of a new sensibility.