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Black suffrage was a crucial and volatile issue in the North during the Civil War era. In The Politics of Race in New York, Phyllis F. Field studies the development of racial policies in the Empire State. Asserting that it is not possible to understand the move toward black suffrage by examining national trends and the actions of individual politicians, she takes a close look at the social context of reform.Field assesses popular reaction to the idea of black suffrage by systematically analyzing the results of a series of referenda on the issue held in New York State between 1846 and 1869. Tracing the relation between changes in public opinion and the positions taken by political parties, Field concludes that party leaders tried both to express the views of their constituents and to mold those views so as to strengthen and unify their own political organizations. Inevitably, this intrusion of political considerations in the issue of race had long-term consequences for the process of social change in the United States.The Politics of Race in New York shows clearly how, in 1870, black suffrage could be achieved even though the battle for black equality had yet to begin.
Challenging traditional approaches to the study of American political history, the essays in this book establish the significance of the institutional framework of the electoral system and argue the importance of its interaction with political conditions.
It was a year packed with unsettling events. The Panic of 1857 closed every bank in New York City, ruined thousands of businesses, and caused widespread unemployment among industrial workers. The Mormons in Utah Territory threatened rebellion when federal troops approached with a non-Mormon governor to replace Brigham Young. The Supreme Court outraged northern Republicans and abolitionists with the Dred Scott decision ("a breathtaking example of judicial activism"). And when a proslavery minority in Kansas Territory tried to foist a proslavery constitution on a large antislavery majority, President Buchanan reneged on a crucial commitment and supported the minority, a disastrous miscalculati...
This text consists of six chapters, all on the related subjects of black revolt, slavery, freemanship and labour. A short introduction organizes the collection and argues its importance for historians of early American labour, slavery, black studies and general history.
As one of the country's oldest ethnic groups, the Irish have played a vital part in its history. New York has been both port of entry and home to the Irish for three centuries. This joint project of the Irish Institute and the New York Irish History Roundtable offers a fresh perspective on an immigrant people's encounter with the famed metropolis. 37 illustrations.
During and after the Civil War, four presidents faced the challenge of reuniting the nation and of providing justice for black Americans—and of achieving a balance between those goals. This first book to collectively examine the Reconstruction policies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Rutherford B. Hayes reveals how they confronted and responded to the complex issues presented during that contested era in American politics. Brooks Simpson examines the policies of each administration in depth and evaluates them in terms of their political, social, and institutional contexts. Simpson explains what was politically possible at a time when federal authority and presiden...
Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human differences."--BOOK JACKET.
Robert Patrick Bender is a history instructor at Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell. He is the author of Like Grass Before the Scythe: The Life and Death of Sgt. William Remmel, 121st New York Infantry.
These boldly argued essays describe and analyze key developments in American politics and government in an era when political parties commanded mass loyalties and wielded unprecedented power over government affairs. McCormick follows the major parties from their emergence in the 1820s and 1830s to their transformation almost a century later, discussing the nature of governance, clarifying economic policies of promotion, distribution, and (later) regulation that characterized government functions at every level, and sorting out the complex relationships between politics and policy during the "party period."
"Why is The Making of New Deal Democrats so significant? One of the major controversies in the study of American elections has to do with the nature of electoral realignments. One school argues that a realignment involves a major shift of voters from one party to another, while another school argues that the process consists largely of mobilization of previously inactive voters. The debate is crucial for understanding the nature of the New Deal realignment. Almost all previous work on the subject has dealt with large-scale national patterns which make it difficult to pin down the precise processes by which the alignment took place. Gamm's work is most remarkable in that it is a close analysis of shifting voter alignments on the precinct and block level in the city of Boston. His extremely detailed and painstaking work of isolating homogeneous ethnic units over a twenty-year period allows one to trace the voting behavior of the particular ethnic groups that ultimately formed the core of the New Deal realignment."—Sidney Verba, Harvard University