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In this new study, Dr. Carole Troxler steps back more than two decades before the pivotal Battle of Alamance (May 16, 1771) to examine the issues and their cultural context that fostered the Regulator Movement and determined its progress, and political aftermath. This is the story of local government more interested in its needs than those of its constituents--and of settlers steeped in the Dissenter religious culture who drew on its political orientation to risk activism often cited as a prelude to the American Revolution.
In this lively two-part narrative, Carole W. Troxler and William M. Vincent place the legacy of Alamance County solidly in the context of regional and national history. Using a broad social scope and the conventional break at 1865, they connect themes and stories across that artificial line. The resulting threads link pre-Civil War divisions with the post-Emancipation violence that made the area the storm center of the state in the 1870s. Thereafter, recovery and renewal depended on leadership, education, and especially labor -- the constant back-and-forth motion of the shuttle across the loom and its parallel, the plow along the furrow.Shuttle & Plow spans more than three centuries, twice t...
Loyalists in Nova Scotia hoped that their anticipated prosperity, to be achieved with British aid, would show that the American rebellion had been a terrible mistake. But prosperity was elusive. The loyalists were disappointed not only by their treatment at the hands of the British government - their reluctant benefactor - but also by the apparent unwillingness of the government and the people of Nova Scotia to recognise their sacrifice and encourage their advancement. This sense of opposition from the existing community made their experience different from that of loyalists elsewhere and contributed to the intensity and longevity of Nova Scotia's loyalist tradition. The early period of loyalist settlement came to a close shortly after Britain gained portable pensions and withdrew free provisions, a turn of events which led many of the exiles to return to their homeland. By 1791 relations with the old settlers and the provincial government, changing attitudes toward the United States, and conflict among themselves had modified loyalist opinions and expectations in ways they would never have imagined a decade earlier.
The Spurgin family of North Carolina experienced the cataclysm of the American Revolution in the most dramatic ways—and from different sides. This engrossing book tells the story of Jane Welborn Spurgin, a patriot who welcomed General Nathanael Greene to her home and aided Continental forces while her loyalist husband was fighting for the king as an officer in the Tory militia. By focusing on the wife of a middling backcountry farmer, esteemed historian Cynthia Kierner shows how the Revolution not only toppled long-established political hierarchies but also strained family ties and drew women into the public sphere to claim both citizenship and rights—as Jane Spurgin did with a dramatic series of petitions to the North Carolina state legislature when she fought to reclaim her family’s lost property after the war was over. While providing readers with stories of battles, horse-stealing, bigamy, and exile that bring the Revolutionary era vividly to life, this book also serves as an invaluable examination of the potentially transformative effects of war and revolution, both personally and politically.
In this study of political party development in North Carolina during the antebellum period, Thomas E. Jeffrey accounts for the persistence of the second-party system in that state, emphasizing the sectional conflict that divided eastern plantation and western small farming counties. Although members of the Whig and Democratic parties disagreed strongly over national issues, the state issues—public school funding, internal improvements, the creation of new counties—divided citizens along sectional rather than party lines. Party leaders attempted to reconcile progressive western interests and conservative eastern interests by accentuating cohesive national issues. Jeffrey reveals factors that preserved the vitality of the secondparty system in North Carolina even as other states became politically stagnant. This vitality would shape politics of the Old North State during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The upheaval of the Civil War vindicated the policies of the Whigs, and although extinct outside of the state, this party would lead North Carolina into the age of the New South.
Adding to a dynamic new wave of scholarship in Atlantic history, The Loyal Atlantic offers fresh interpretations of the key role played by Loyalism in shaping the early modern British Empire. This cohesive collection investigates how Loyalism and the empire were mutually constituted and reconstituted from the eighteenth century onward. Featuring contributions by authors from across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, The Loyal Atlantic brings Loyalism into a genuinely international focus. Through cutting-edge archival research, The Loyal Atlantic contextualizes Loyalism within the larger history of the British Empire. It also details how, far from being a passive allegiance, Loyalism changed in unexpected and fascinating ways especially in times of crisis. Most importantly, The Loyal Atlantic demonstrates that neither the conquest of Canada nor the American Revolution can be properly understood without assessing the meanings of Loyalism in the wider Atlantic world.
More than 12,000 soldiers from the Highlands of Scotland were recruited to serve in Great Britain’s colonies in the Americas in the middle to the late decades of the eighteenth century. In this compelling history, Matthew P. Dziennik corrects the mythologized image of the Highland soldier as a noble savage, a primitive if courageous relic of clanship, revealing instead how the Gaels used their military service to further their own interests and, in doing so, transformed the most maligned region of the British Isles into an important center of the British Empire.
Describes how the Bill of Rights came into existence, detailing how the Founders argued over the contents of the document, reflecting an ideological divide between the power of the federal versus state governments that still exists to this day.
Florida has had many frontiers. Imagination, greed, missionary zeal, disease, war, and diplomacy have created its historical boundaries. Bodies of water, soil, flora and fauna, the patterns of Native American occupation, and ways of colonizing have defined Florida's frontiers. Paul E. Hoffman tells the story of those frontiers and how the land and the people shaped them during the three centuries from 1565 to 1860. For settlers to La Florida, the American Southeast ca. 1500, better natural and human resources were found on the piedmont and on the western side of Florida's central ridge, while the coasts and coastal plains proved far less inviting. But natural environment was only one importa...