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The United States was made in Britain. For over a hundred years following independence, a diverse and lively crowd of emigrant Americans left the United States for Britain. From Liverpool and London, they produced Atlantic capitalism and managed transfers of goods, culture, and capital that were integral to US nation-building. In British social clubs, emigrants forged relationships with elite Britons that were essential not only to tranquil transatlantic connections, but also to fighting southern slavery. As the United States descended into Civil War, emigrant Americans decisively shaped the Atlantic-wide battle for public opinion. Equally revered as informal ambassadors and feared as anti-r...
In 1840s Rhode Island, the state’s seventeenth-century colonial charter remained in force and restricted suffrage to property owners, effectively disenfranchising 60 percent of potential voters. Thomas Wilson Dorr’s failed attempt to rectify that situation through constitutional reform ultimately led to an armed insurrection that was quickly quashed—and to a stiff sentence for Dorr himself. Nevertheless, as Erik Chaput shows, the Dorr Rebellion stands as a critical moment of American history during the two decades of fractious sectional politics leading up to the Civil War. This uprising was the only revolutionary republican movement in the antebellum period that claimed the people’s...
"How does it feel to be a problem?" asked W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). For Progressive Era thinkers across the color line, the "Negro problem" was inextricably linked to the concurrent "labor problem," occasioning debates regarding blacks' role in the nation's industrial past, present and future. With blacks freed from what some believed to be the protective embrace of slavery, many felt that the assumedly primitive Negro was doomed to expire in the face of unbridled industrial progress. Yet efforts to address the so-called Negro problem invariably led to questions regarding the relationship between race, industry, and labor. In consequence, a collection of thinkers acros...
This new first volume proposes that the British North American colonists' desire for expansion, security and prosperity is the essence of American foreign relations.
The classroom canon of young adult novels in historical context
Making Slavery History focuses on how commemorative practices and historical arguments about the American Revolution set the course for antislavery politics in the nineteenth century. The particular setting is a time and place in which people were hyperconscious of their roles as historical actors and narrators: Massachusetts in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. This book shows how local abolitionists, both black and white, drew on their state's Revolutionary heritage to mobilize public opposition to Southern slavery. When it came to securing the citizenship of free people of color within the Commonwealth, though, black and white abolitionists diverged in terms of how they...
A panoramic history of the United States ranges from the 1815 Battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, interweaving political and military events with social, economic, and cultural history.
Party and Nation examines immigration as a means to understand party competition in American history. The rise of Donald Trump reflects an ongoing regime change in the U.S., in which multiculturalism and nationalism have emerged as central aspects of the major parties’ ideological and coalitional bases. This phenomenon of a multiculturalist Democratic Party and a nationalist Republican Party, the authors suggest, is a dramatic departure from the first American political regime. That older regime was grounded in the Founding generation’s commitment to the principle of natural rights and the shaping of a national culture to support that principle. Partisan debates over immigration set into...
Exploring the morally entangled territory of language and race in 18th- and 19th-century America, Sean Harvey shows that whites’ theories of an “Indian mind” inexorably shaped by Indian languages played a crucial role in the subjugation of Native peoples and informed the U.S. government’s efforts to extinguish Native languages for years to come.
Luxurious Citizens traces the ways in which Americans tied consumer desire to the national interest between 1789 and 1865 and reveals how the nation transformed individual desires for goods into an index of civic worth, placing unbridled consumption at the heart of their modern political economy.