Author: H. W. Brands
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0525563458
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481
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Book Description
From the acclaimed historian and bestselling author: a page-turning account of the epic struggle over slavery as embodied by John Brown and Abraham Lincoln—two men moved to radically different acts to confront our nation’s gravest sin. John Brown was a charismatic and deeply religious man who heard the God of the Old Testament speaking to him, telling him to destroy slavery by any means. When Congress opened Kansas territory to slavery in 1854, Brown raised a band of followers to wage war. His men tore pro-slavery settlers from their homes and hacked them to death with broadswords. Three years later, Brown and his men assaulted the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to arm slaves with weapons for a race war that would cleanse the nation of slavery. Brown’s violence pointed ambitious Illinois lawyer and former officeholder Abraham Lincoln toward a different solution to slavery: politics. Lincoln spoke cautiously and dreamed big, plotting his path back to Washington and perhaps to the White House. Yet his caution could not protect him from the vortex of violence Brown had set in motion. After Brown’s arrest, his righteous dignity on the way to the gallows led many in the North to see him as a martyr to liberty. Southerners responded with anger and horror to a terrorist being made into a saint. Lincoln shrewdly threaded the needle between the opposing voices of the fractured nation and won election as president. But the time for moderation had passed, and Lincoln’s fervent belief that democracy could resolve its moral crises peacefully faced its ultimate test. The Zealot and the Emancipator is the thrilling account of how two American giants shaped the war for freedom.
Author: Theodore Clarke Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
Author: The National Archives
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198042272
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Our Documents is a collection of 100 documents that the staff of the National Archives has judged most important to the development of the United States. The entry for each document includes a short introduction, a facsimile, and a transcript of the document. Backmatter includes further reading, credits, and index. The book is part of the much larger Our Documents initiative sponsored by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), National History Day, the Corporation for National and Community Service, and the USA Freedom Corps.
Author: Paul S. Boyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199911657
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
This volume in Oxford's A Very Short Introduction series offers a concise, readable narrative of the vast span of American history, from the earliest human migrations to the early twenty-first century when the United States loomed as a global power and comprised a complex multi-cultural society of more than 300 million people. The narrative is organized around major interpretive themes, with facts and dates introduced as needed to illustrate these themes. The emphasis throughout is on clarity and accessibility to the interested non-specialist.
Author: R. J. M. Blackett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108418716
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 531
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Book Description
Examines the impact fugitive slaves had on the Fugitive Slave Law and the coming of the American Civil War.
Author: Elizabeth R. Varon
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807887188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470
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Book Description
In the decades of the early republic, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. As Elizabeth Varon shows, "disunion" connoted the dissolution of the republic--the failure of the founders' effort to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a cataclysm that would plunge the nation into the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world. For many others, however, disunion was seen as the main instrument by which they could achieve their partisan and sectional goals. Varon blends political history with intellectual, cultural, and gender history to examine the ongoing debates over disunion that long preceded the secession crisis of 1860-61.
Author: Martin R. Delany
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674088727
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
Martin R. Delany’s Blake (1859, 1861–1862) is one of the most important African American—and indeed American—works of fiction of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of Henry Blake’s escape from a southern plantation and his subsequent travels across the United States, into Canada, and to Africa and Cuba. His mission is to unite the black populations of the American Atlantic regions, both free and slave, in the struggle for freedom, whether through insurrection or through emigration and the creation of an independent black state. Blake is a rhetorical masterpiece, all the more strange and mysterious for remaining incomplete, breaking off before its final scene. This edition of Blake, prepared by textual scholar Jerome McGann, offers the first correct printing of the work in book form. It establishes an accurate text, supplies contextual notes and commentaries, and presents an authoritative account of the work’s composition and publication history. In a lively introduction, McGann argues that Delany employs the resources of fiction to develop a critical account of the interconnected structure of racist power as it operated throughout the American Atlantic. He likens Blake to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, in its willful determination to transform a living and terrible present. Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition will be used in undergraduate and graduate classes on the history of African American fiction, on the history of the American novel, and on black cultural studies. General readers will welcome as well the first reliable edition of Delany’s fiction.
Author: David H. Bennett
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679767215
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 609
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Book Description
Why, for two hundred years, have some American citizens seen this country as an endangered Eden, to be purged of corrupting peoples or ideas by any means necessary? To the Know-Nothings of the 1850s, the enemy was Irish immigrants. To the Ku Klux Klan, it was Jews, blacks, and socialists. To groups like the Michigan Militia, the enemy is the government itself -- and some of them are willing to take arms against it. The Party of Fear -- which has now been updated to examine the right-wing resurgence of the 1990s -- is the first book to reveal the common values and anxieties that lie beneath the seeming diversity of the far right. From the anti-Catholic riots that convulsed Philadelphia in 1845 to the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, it casts a brilliant, cautionary light not only on our political fringes but on the ways in which ordinary Americans define themselves and demonize outsiders.
Author: Arthur Charles Cole
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 604
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Book Description
Author: Harold F. Bass
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810863227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 489
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Book Description
The constitution that establishes the institutional framework for American national government makes no mention of political parties. Yet for over two centuries, political parties have competed in encouraging, organizing, and directing political activity in the United States. This volume compiles entries of concepts, terms, labels, and individuals central to identifying and comprehending these key roles political parties have played in American political life. The second edition of Historical Dictionary of United States Political Parties addresses the historical development, organization, operation, and leadership of the parties, as well as their broader environment. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, a bibliography, and over 800 cross-referenced dictionary entries addressing individuals, institutions, and terms.
