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The Making of Michigan is a wide-ranging collection of primary accounts of life in Michigan during the pioneer period. The Making of Michigan is a wide-ranging collection of primary accounts of life in Michigan during the pioneer period, the era from the 1820s to the outbreak of the Civil War. In this time of explosive growth, the state's population increased from 8,000 to 750,000. These emigrants brought the state into the union in 1837 and began to create a set of institutions and a way of life. Justin Kestenbaum draws on the rich documentary record left by those who sojourned in the state during this time and recorded their impressions. Not only pioneers but land speculators, missionaries, and sight-seers left valuable accounts of the Michigan landscape and its emerging society. Following a general introduction, the book is divided into six parts: The Interminable Forest, Laying the Foundation, The Great Migration, Education, A Vision of Life, and Political Life, each with its own brief introduction. Notes and a bibliography conclude this valuable resource history.
This book should be of interest to undergraduate courses in American history and politics.
From America’s preeminent military historian, Stephen E. Ambrose, comes the definitive telling of the war in Europe, from D-Day, June 6, 1944, to the end, eleven months later, on May 7, 1945. This authoritative narrative account is drawn by the author himself from his five acclaimed books about that conflict, most particularly from the definitive and comprehensive D-Day and Citizen Soldiers, about which the great Civil War historian James McPherson wrote, “If there is a better book about the experience of GIs who fought in Europe during World War II, I have not read it. Citizen Soldiers captures the fear and exhilaration of combat, the hunger and cold and filth of the foxholes, the small...
A highly original history of American portraiture that places the experiences of enslaved people at its center This timely and eloquent book tells a new history of American art: how enslaved people mobilized portraiture for acts of defiance. Revisiting the origins of portrait painting in the United States, Jennifer Van Horn reveals how mythologies of whiteness and of nation building erased the aesthetic production of enslaved Americans of African descent and obscured the portrait's importance as a site of resistance. Moving from the wharves of colonial Rhode Island to antebellum Louisiana plantations to South Carolina townhouses during the Civil War, the book illuminates how enslaved people's relationships with portraits also shaped the trajectory of African American art post-emancipation. Van Horn asserts that Black creativity, subjecthood, viewership, and iconoclasm constituted instances of everyday rebellion against systemic oppression. Portraits of Resistance is not only a significant intervention in the fields of American art and history but also an important contribution to the reexamination of racial constructs on which American culture was built.
Examines the history of slavery in Maryland and discusses the conditions of life of Maryland's slaves and free Blacks.
What can the performance of a single play on one specific night tell us about the world this event inhabited so briefly? Alexander Nemerov takes a performance of Macbeth in Washington, DC on October 17, 1863—with Abraham Lincoln in attendance—to explore this question and illuminate American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived. Nemerov’s inspiration is Wallace Stevens and his poem "Anecdote of the Jar," in which a single object organizes the wilderness around it in the consciousness of the poet. For Nemerov, that evening’s performance of Macbeth reached across the tragedy of civil war to acknowledge the horrors and emptiness of a world it tried and ultimately failed to change.