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Edward Coles was a wealthy heir to a central Virginia plantation, an ardent emancipator, the second governor of Illinois, the loyal personal secretary to President James Madison, and a close antislavery associate of Thomas Jefferson. Yet never before has a full-length book detailed his remarkable life story and his role in the struggle to free all slaves. In Crusade Against Slavery, Kurt E. Leichtle and Bruce G. Carveth correct this oversight with the first modern and complete biography of a unique but little-known and quietly influential figure in American history. Rejecting slavery from a young age, Coles's early wishes to free his family's slaves initially were stymied by legal, practical...
Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary people engaged in normal activities. How did the United States become the world's largest consumer of energy? David Nye shows that this is less a question about the development of technology than it is a question about the development of culture. In Consuming Power, Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary people engaged in normal activities. He looks at how these activities changed as new energy systems were constructed, from colonial times to recent years. He also shows how, as Americans incorporated new machines and processes into their lives, they became ensnared in power systems that were not easily...
The death of a chief executive, regardless of the circumstances—sudden or expected, still in office or decades later—is always a moment of reckoning and reflection. Mourning the Presidents brings together renowned and emerging scholars to examine how different generations and communities of Americans have eulogized and remembered US presidents since George Washington’s death in 1799. Over twelve individually illuminating chapters, this volume offers a unique approach to understanding American culture and politics by uncovering parallels between different generations of mourners, highlighting distinct experiences, and examining what presidential deaths can tell us about societal fissures at various critical points in the nation’s history, right up to the present moment.
Washington. The widow Washington ; Martha Dandridge ; Married lady ; Mistress of Mount Vernon ; Revolutionary war ; First lady ; Slaves in the president's house ; Home again -- Jefferson. Martha Wayles ; Mistress of Monticello I ; War in Virginia ; Birth and death at Monticello ; Patsy Jefferson and Sally Hemings ; First lady ; Mistress of Monticello II ; The Hemingses ; Death of Thomas Jefferson -- Madison. Dolley Payne ; Mrs. Madison ; First lady ; Mistress of Montpelier ; Decline of Montpelier ; The widow Madison ; Sale of Montpelier ; In Washington ; Death of Dolley Madison -- Epilogue inside and outside
In 1830, eighteen-year-old Samuel Callahan has only ever known a life of being enslaved under the pressing hand of his brutal and ambitious politician father. But love, hatred, and opportunities thrust him into unexpected liberty, where, like an orphan, he finds himself unbearably lost and shaken. Afflicted by years of bondage that Sam has yet to break, his anger toward God's justice and character leads him to ask, "What kind of god is he?" In his brokenness, he thinks about how badly he wants to know the answer to his question. Sam is challenged not only by his newfound freedom but also by the woman he loves, a troubled younger brother, unlikely friends, determined enemies, and the rapid ag...
Examines the full course of American history from a comparative state-law perspective, using Wisconsin as a case study to emphasize the vital role states have taken in creating American law.
This book posits that the American Revolution--waged to form a "more perfect union"--still raged long after the guns went silent. Eight major fugitive slave stories of the antebellum era are described and interpreted to demonstrate how fugitive slaves and their abolitionist allies embraced Patrick Henry's motto "Give me Liberty or Give me Death" and the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. African Americans and white abolitionists seized upon these dramatic events to exhort citizens to complete the Revolution by extending liberty to all Americans. Casting fugitive slaves and their slave revolt leaders as heroic American Revolutionaries seeking freedom for themselves and their enslaved brethren, this book provides a broader interpretation of the American Revolution.
The study of USA's on-going failure to achieve true racial integration, Bind Us Apart shows how, from the Revolution through to the Civil War, white American anti-slavery reformers failed to forge a colour-blind society.
His greatest work began as a misinterpretation. Edward Coles, former Virginian aristocrat and future governor of Illinois, began his move westward under the impression that the Northwest Ordinance straightforwardly banned slavery in all territories north of the Ohio River. This impression, however, was much more absolute in law than it ever was in fact. The reality of the situation was that slaveholders moved to territories such as Illinois and brought their lifestyle with them. So-called indentured servants, whose condition was supposedly a result of their own choices, were often simply slaves by another name. Having freed his slaves (some of whom nevertheless chose to remain with him) once...
This ambitious work uncovers the constitutional foundations of that most essential institution of modern democracy, the political party. Taking on Richard Hofstadter's classic The Idea of a Party System, it rejects the standard view that Martin Van Buren and other Jacksonian politicians had the idea of a modern party system in mind when they built the original Democratic party. Grounded in an original retelling of Illinois politics of the 1820s and 1830s, the book also includes chapters that connect the state-level narrative to national history, from the birth of the Constitution to the Dred Scott case. In this reinterpretation, Jacksonian party-builders no longer anticipate twentieth-centur...