Republic of Taste

Republic of Taste PDF Author: Catherine E. Kelly
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812292952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Since the early decades of the eighteenth century, European, and especially British, thinkers were preoccupied with questions of taste. Whether Americans believed that taste was innate—and therefore a marker of breeding and station—or acquired—and thus the product of application and study—all could appreciate that taste was grounded in, demonstrated through, and confirmed by reading, writing, and looking. It was widely believed that shared aesthetic sensibilities connected like-minded individuals and that shared affinities advanced the public good and held great promise for the American republic. Exploring the intersection of the early republic's material, visual, literary, and political cultures, Catherine E. Kelly demonstrates how American thinkers acknowledged the similarities between aesthetics and politics in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority. Judgments about art, architecture, literature, poetry, and the theater became an arena for considering political issues ranging from government structures and legislative representation to qualifications for citizenship and the meaning of liberty itself. Additionally, if taste prompted political debate, it also encouraged affinity grounded in a shared national identity. In the years following independence, ordinary women and men reassured themselves that taste revealed larger truths about an individual's character and potential for republican citizenship. Did an early national vocabulary of taste, then, with its privileged visuality, register beyond the debates over the ratification of the Constitution? Did it truly extend beyond political and politicized discourse to inform the imaginative structures and material forms of everyday life? Republic of Taste affirms that it did, although not in ways that anyone could have predicted at the conclusion of the American Revolution.

Republic of Taste

Republic of Taste PDF Author: Catherine E. Kelly
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812292952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the early decades of the eighteenth century, European, and especially British, thinkers were preoccupied with questions of taste. Whether Americans believed that taste was innate—and therefore a marker of breeding and station—or acquired—and thus the product of application and study—all could appreciate that taste was grounded in, demonstrated through, and confirmed by reading, writing, and looking. It was widely believed that shared aesthetic sensibilities connected like-minded individuals and that shared affinities advanced the public good and held great promise for the American republic. Exploring the intersection of the early republic's material, visual, literary, and political cultures, Catherine E. Kelly demonstrates how American thinkers acknowledged the similarities between aesthetics and politics in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority. Judgments about art, architecture, literature, poetry, and the theater became an arena for considering political issues ranging from government structures and legislative representation to qualifications for citizenship and the meaning of liberty itself. Additionally, if taste prompted political debate, it also encouraged affinity grounded in a shared national identity. In the years following independence, ordinary women and men reassured themselves that taste revealed larger truths about an individual's character and potential for republican citizenship. Did an early national vocabulary of taste, then, with its privileged visuality, register beyond the debates over the ratification of the Constitution? Did it truly extend beyond political and politicized discourse to inform the imaginative structures and material forms of everyday life? Republic of Taste affirms that it did, although not in ways that anyone could have predicted at the conclusion of the American Revolution.

Other People's Money

Other People's Money PDF Author: Sharon Ann Murphy
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421421755
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
How the contentious world of nineteenth-century banking shaped the United States. Pieces of paper that claimed to be good for two dollars upon redemption at a distant bank. Foreign coins that fluctuated in value from town to town. Stock certificates issued by turnpike or canal companies—worth something . . . or perhaps nothing. IOUs from farmers or tradesmen, passed around by people who could not know the person who first issued them. Money and banking in antebellum America offered a glaring example of free-market capitalism run amok—unregulated, exuberant, and heading pell-mell toward the next “panic” of burst bubbles and hard times. In Other People’s Money, Sharon Ann Murphy explains how banking and money worked before the federal government, spurred by the chaos of the Civil War, created the national system of US paper currency. Murphy traces the evolution of banking in America from the founding of the nation, when politicians debated the constitutionality of chartering a national bank, to Andrew Jackson’s role in the Bank War of the early 1830s, to the problems of financing a large-scale war. She reveals how, ultimately, the monetary and banking structures that emerged from the Civil War also provided the basis for our modern financial system, from its formation under the Federal Reserve in 1913 to the present. Touching on the significant role that numerous historical figures played in shaping American banking—including Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Louis Brandeis—Other People’s Money is an engaging guide to the heated political fights that surrounded banking in early America as well as to the economic causes and consequences of the financial system that emerged from the turmoil. By helping readers understand the financial history of this period and the way banking shaped the society in which ordinary Americans lived and worked, this book broadens and deepens our knowledge of the Early American Republic.

Everyday Life in Early America

Everyday Life in Early America PDF Author: David F. Hawke
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060912510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
"In this clearly written volume, Hawke provides enlightening and colorful descriptions of early Colonial Americans and debunks many widely held assumptions about 17th century settlers."--Publishers Weekly

Everyday Life in the Early Republic

Everyday Life in the Early Republic PDF Author: Catherine E. Hutchins
Publisher: Winterthur Museum
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Essays on the patterns of daily existence & cultural values embodied in the seemingly ordinary activities & goods of the emerging middle class in the years between constitutional ratification in 1789 & Andrew Jackson1s election in 1828.

A Democracy of Facts

A Democracy of Facts PDF Author: Andrew J. Lewis
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812243080
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Chronicles the story of American naturalists who came of age and stumbled toward a profession in the years after the American Revolution. --from publisher description.

Building the Empire State

Building the Empire State PDF Author: Brian Phillips Murphy
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812247167
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Focusing on the state of New York, home to the first American banks, utilities, canals, and transportation infrastructure projects, Building the Empire State examines the origins of American capitalism by tracing how and why business corporations were first introduced into the economy of the early republic.

Unbecoming British

Unbecoming British PDF Author: Kariann Akemi Yokota
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199779910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
What can homespun cloth, stuffed birds, quince jelly, and ginseng reveal about the formation of early American national identity? In this wide-ranging and bold new interpretation of American history and its Founding Fathers, Kariann Akemi Yokota shows that political independence from Britain fueled anxieties among the Americans about their cultural inferiority and continuing dependence on the mother country. Caught between their desire to emulate the mother country and an awareness that they lived an ocean away on the periphery of the known world, they went to great lengths to convince themselves and others of their refinement. Taking a transnational approach to American history, Yokota examines a wealth of evidence from geography, the decorative arts, intellectual history, science, and technology to underscore that the process of "unbecoming British" was not an easy one. Indeed, the new nation struggled to define itself economically, politically, and culturally in what could be called America's postcolonial period. Out of this confusion of hope and exploitation, insecurity and vision, a uniquely American identity emerged.

Tom Paine's America

Tom Paine's America PDF Author: Seth Cotlar
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813931061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Tom Paine’s America explores the vibrant, transatlantic traffic in people, ideas, and texts that profoundly shaped American political debate in the 1790s. In 1789, when the Federal Constitution was ratified, "democracy" was a controversial term that very few Americans used to describe their new political system. That changed when the French Revolution—and the wave of democratic radicalism that it touched off around the Atlantic World—inspired a growing number of Americans to imagine and advocate for a wide range of political and social reforms that they proudly called "democratic." One of the figureheads of this new international movement was Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense. Although Paine spent the 1790s in Europe, his increasingly radical political writings from that decade were wildly popular in America. A cohort of democratic printers, newspaper editors, and booksellers stoked the fires of American politics by importing a flood of information and ideas from revolutionary Europe. Inspired by what they were learning from their contemporaries around the world, the evolving democratic opposition in America pushed their fellow citizens to consider a wide range of radical ideas regarding racial equality, economic justice, cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, and the construction of more literally democratic polities. In Europe such ideas quickly fell victim to a counter-Revolutionary backlash that defined Painite democracy as dangerous Jacobinism, and the story was much the same in America’s late 1790s. The Democratic Party that won the national election of 1800 was, ironically, the beneficiary of this backlash; for they were able to position themselves as the advocates of a more moderate, safe vision of democracy that differentiated itself from the supposedly aristocratic Federalists to their right and the dangerously democratic Painite Jacobins to their left.

Empire of Liberty

Empire of Liberty PDF Author: Gordon S. Wood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199738335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 801

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Book Description
The Oxford History of the United States is by far the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, two New York Times bestsellers, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. Now, in the newest volume in the series, one of America's most esteemed historians, Gordon S. Wood, offers a brilliant account of the early American Republic, ranging from 1789 and the beginning of the national government to the end of the War of 1812. As Wood reveals, the period was marked by tumultuous change in all aspects of American life--in politics, society, economy, and culture. The men who founded the new government had high hopes for the future, but few of their hopes and dreams worked out quite as they expected. They hated political parties but parties nonetheless emerged. Some wanted the United States to become a great fiscal-military state like those of Britain and France; others wanted the country to remain a rural agricultural state very different from the European states. Instead, by 1815 the United States became something neither group anticipated. Many leaders expected American culture to flourish and surpass that of Europe; instead it became popularized and vulgarized. The leaders also hope to see the end of slavery; instead, despite the release of many slaves and the end of slavery in the North, slavery was stronger in 1815 than it had been in 1789. Many wanted to avoid entanglements with Europe, but instead the country became involved in Europe's wars and ended up waging another war with the former mother country. Still, with a new generation emerging by 1815, most Americans were confident and optimistic about the future of their country. Named a New York Times Notable Book, Empire of Liberty offers a marvelous account of this pivotal era when America took its first unsteady steps as a new and rapidly expanding nation.

Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC

Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC PDF Author: Paula C. Austin
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479808113
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
The fullest account to date of African American young people in a segregated city Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC offers a complex narrative of the everyday lives of black young people in a racially, spatially, economically, and politically restricted Washington, DC, during the 1930s. In contrast to the ways in which young people have been portrayed by researchers, policy makers, law enforcement, and the media, Paula C. Austin draws on previously unstudied archival material to present black poor and working class young people as thinkers, theorists, critics, and commentators as they reckon with the boundaries imposed on them in a Jim Crow city that was also the American emblem of equality. The narratives at the center of this book provide a different understanding of black urban life in the early twentieth century, showing that ordinary people were expert at navigating around the limitations imposed by the District of Columbia’s racially segregated politics. Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC is a fresh take on the New Negro movement, and a vital contribution to the history of race in America.