Author: T. Harry Williams
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807125144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
This first collection of the essays of the late T. Harry Williams brings together some of the best shorter works of a man who was, by any standard, one of the finest historians of our time. Spanning the range of Williams’ interests, this volume contains essays on the Civil War, Reconstruction, the ear of the world wars, military affairs, the craft of the historian, and the careers of Abraham Lincoln, Huey Long, and Lyndon Johnson. Williams’ reputation rests on such large-scale works as Lincoln and His Generals and the Pulitzer-Prize winning biography Huey Long—exhaustively researched studies, monumental in their scope and ambition. Providing Williams with the chance to let his gaze probe beyond the fixed borders of such works, the essay was a flexible medium in which he could freely pursue some of the ideas that grew out of his daily regimen of writing and reading. He used the essay to examine large themes that spanned many areas of his interests as well as specific incidents in the course of American history, to reach both a popular audience and his fellow historians, to test ideas for books in the planning stage, and to assess the works of his colleagues. Among the essays brought together in this volume are “That Strange Sad War,” in which Williams examines the Civil War as the first truly, and tragically, modern war; “Abraham Lincoln: Pragmatic Democrat,” which sees Lincoln as the supreme example in our history of the union of principle and pragmatism in politics; and “The Louisiana Unification Movement of 1873,” which traces the short history of an ambitious attempt to bring about racial unity in Reconstruction Louisiana. In “Interlude: 1918-1939”—an essay published here for the first time—Williams analyzes the weakened state of American military preparedness before Franklin Roosevelt came into office and turned his attention to the growing threat of Hitler’s Germany. In “The Macs and the Ikes: America’s Two Military Traditions,” Williams contrasts the opposing types of military leaders in American history—those generals in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower who follow orders and submit to the power of the president and Congress, and the more fractious generals such as Douglas Macarthur, who view the military as an aristocracy of courage and genius and bridle at the reigns of civilian authority. “Huey, Lyndon, and Southern Radicalism” traces the common political roots of two men Williams considered among the most successful “power artists” of the century. And in “Lyndon Johnson and the Art of Biography,” Williams discusses his own plans to write a biography of Johnson and speaks of his unapologetic belief in a great-man theory of history.
Author: Thomas Harry Williams
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780807110959
Category : Reconstruction
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Examines the Civil War, the period of Reconstruction, and the political careers of Abraham Lincoln, Huey Long, and Lyndon Johnson
Author: Harry T. Williams
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
ISBN: 1461731364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 124
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Book Description
Here are the characters and personalities of the three great Union generals, explored with intelligence and wit by one of our most distinguished historians of the Civil War. Mr. Williams is interested not only in military skills but in the temperament for command and, most of all, in moral courage. Each of these men, he writes, "represents a particular and significant aspect of leadership, and together they show a progression toward the final type of leadership that had to be developed before the war could be won. Most important, each one illustrates dramatically the relation between character and generalship." From McClellan's eighteenth-century view of war as something like a game conducted by experts on a strategic chessboard; to Sherman's understanding of the violent implications of making war against civilians; to the completeness of character displayed by Grant, Mr. Williams's absorbing investigation offers a fresh perspective on a subject of enduring interest.
Author: Thomas H. Williams
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780783777504
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Author: Thomas Harry Williams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Governors
Languages : en
Pages : 958
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Book Description
He was one of the most extraordinary figures in America's political history, a great natural politician who had become, at the time of his assassination, a serious rival to Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency.
Author: David Herbert Donald
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1786251981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 171
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Book Description
WHY THE SOUTH LOST What led to the downfall of the Confederacy? The distinguished professors of history represented in this volume examine the following crucial factors in the South’s defeat: ECONOMIC—RICHARD N. CURRENT of the University of Wisconsin attributes the victory of the North to fundamental economic superiority so great that the civilian resources of the South were dissipated under the conditions of war. MILITARY—T. HARRY WILLIAMS of Louisiana State University cites the deficiencies of Confederate strategy and military leadership, evaluating the influence on both sides of Baron Jomini, a 19th-century strategist who stressed position warfare and a rapid tactical offensive. DIPLOMATIC—NORMAN A. GRAERNER of the University of Illinois holds that the basic reason England and France decided not to intervene on the side of the South was simply that to have done so would have violated the general principle of non-intervention to which they were committed. SOCIAL—DAVID DONALD of Columbia University offers the intriguing thesis that an excess of Southern democracy killed the Confederacy. From the ordinary man in the ranks to Jefferson Davis himself, too much emphasis was placed on individual freedom and not enough on military discipline. POLITICAL—DAVID M. POTTER of Stanford University suggests that the deficiencies of President Davis as a civil and military leader turner the balance, and that the South suffered from the lack of a second well-organized political party to force its leadership into competence.
Author: Walter E. Williams
Publisher: Hoover Press
ISBN: 0817949135
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
In this selected collection of his syndicated newspaper columns, Walter Williams offers his sometimes controversial views on education, health, the environment, government, law and society, race, and a range of other topics. Although many of these essays focus on the growth of government and our loss of liberty, many others demonstrate how the tools of freemarket economics can be used to improve our lives in ways ordinary people can understand.
Author: Nancy Isenberg
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 110160848X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
The New York Times bestseller A New York Times Notable and Critics’ Top Book of 2016 Longlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction One of NPR's 10 Best Books Of 2016 Faced Tough Topics Head On NPR's Book Concierge Guide To 2016’s Great Reads San Francisco Chronicle's Best of 2016: 100 recommended books A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2016 Globe & Mail 100 Best of 2016 “Formidable and truth-dealing . . . necessary.” —The New York Times “This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.” —O Magazine In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg upends history as we know it by taking on our comforting myths about equality and uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash. “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,” says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity. We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.
Author: Alan Brinkley
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307803228
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
The study of two great demagogues in American history--Huey P. Long, a first-term United States Senator from the red-clay, piney-woods country of nothern Louisiana; and Charles E. Coughlin, a Catholic priest from an industrial suburb near Detroit. Award-winning historian Alan Brinkely describes their modest origins and their parallel rise together in the early years of the Great Depression to become the two most successful leaders of national political dissidence of their era. *Winner of the American Book Award for History*
Author: Lawrence Lee Hewitt
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1572338865
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
A legendary professor at Louisiana State University, T. Harry Williams not only produced such acclaimed works as Lincoln and the Radicals, Lincoln and His Generals, and a biography of Huey Long that won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but he also mentored generations of students who became distinguished historians in their own right. In this collection, ten of those former students, along with one author greatly inspired by Williams’s example, offer incisive essays that honor both Williams and his career-long dedication to sound, imaginative scholarship and broad historical inquiry. The opening and closing essays, fittingly enough, deal with Williams himself: a biographical sketch by Frank J. Wetta and a piece by Roger Spiller that place Williams in larger historical perspective among writers on Civil War generalship. The bulk of the book focuses on Robert E. Lee and a number of the commanders who served under him, starting with Charles Roland’s seminal article “The Generalship of Robert E. Lee,” the only one in the collection that has been previously published. Among the essays that follow Roland’s are contributions by Brian Holden Reid on the ebb and flow of Lee’s reputation, George C. Rable on Stonewall Jackson’s deep religious commitment, A. Wilson Greene on P. G. T. Beauregard’s role in the Petersburg Campaign, and William L. Richter on James Longstreet as postwar pariah. Together these gifted historians raise a host of penetrating and original questions about how we are to understand America’s defining conflict in our own time—just as T. Harry Williams did in his. And by encompassing such varied subjects as military history, religion, and historiography, Lee and His Generals demonstrates once more what a fertile field Civil War scholarship remains. Lawrence Lee Hewitt is professor of history emeritus at Southeastern Louisiana University. Most recently, he and Arthur W. Bergeron, now deceased, coedited three volumes of essays under the collective title Confederate Generals in the Western Theater. Thomas E. Schott served for many years as a historian for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Special Operations Command. He is the author of Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography, which won both the Society of American Historians Award and the Jefferson Davis Award.
