Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine PDF Author: Craig Nelson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143112389
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
A fresh new look at the Enlightenment intellectual who became the most controversial of America's founding fathers Despite his being a founder of both the United States and the French Republic, the creator of the phrase "United States of America," and the author of Common Sense, Thomas Paine is the least well known of America's founding fathers. This edifying biography by Craig Nelson traces Paine's path from his years as a London mechanic, through his emergence as the voice of revolutionary fervor on two continents, to his final days in the throes of dementia. By acquainting us as never before with this complex and combative genius, Nelson rescues a giant from obscurity-and gives us a fascinating work of history.

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine PDF Author: Craig Nelson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143112389
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
A fresh new look at the Enlightenment intellectual who became the most controversial of America's founding fathers Despite his being a founder of both the United States and the French Republic, the creator of the phrase "United States of America," and the author of Common Sense, Thomas Paine is the least well known of America's founding fathers. This edifying biography by Craig Nelson traces Paine's path from his years as a London mechanic, through his emergence as the voice of revolutionary fervor on two continents, to his final days in the throes of dementia. By acquainting us as never before with this complex and combative genius, Nelson rescues a giant from obscurity-and gives us a fascinating work of history.

The Village Enlightenment in America

The Village Enlightenment in America PDF Author: Craig Hazen
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252068287
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Village Enlightenment in America focuses on three nineteenth-century spiritual activists who epitomized the marriage of science and religion fostered in antebellum, pre-Darwinian America by the American Enlightenment. A theologian, writer, and apologist for the nascent Mormon movement, as well as an amateur scientist, Orson Pratt wrote Key to the Universe, or a New Theory of Its Mechanism, to establish a scientific base for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Robert Hare, an inventor and ardent convert to spiritualism, used his scientific expertise to lend credence to the spiritualist movement. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, generally considered the initiator of the American mind-cure movement, developed an overtly religious concept of science and used it to justify his system of theology. Pratt, Hare, and Quimby all employed a potent combination of popular science and Baconianism to legitimate their new religious ideas. Using the same terms--matter, ether, magnetic force--to account for the behavior of particles, planetary rotation, and the influence of the Holy Ghost, these agents of the Enlightenment constructed complex systems intended to demonstrate a fundamental harmony between the physical and the metaphysical. Through the lives and work of these three influential men, The Village Enlightenment in America opens a window to a time when science and religion, instead of seeming fundamentally at odds with each other, appeared entirely reconcilable.

Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment

Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment PDF Author: Henry Steele Commager
Publisher: ACLS History E-Book Project
ISBN: 9781628200959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
A collection of essays and lectures from Henry Steele Commager, one of America's eminent historians. The focus is on the age of enlightenment, with particular attention to Thomas Jefferson, and how enlightenment philosophy shaped the birth of the United States.

The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe

The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe PDF Author: James Van Horn Melton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521469692
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
James Melton examines the rise of the public in 18th-century Europe. A work of comparative synthesis focusing on England, France and the German-speaking territories, this a reassessment of what Habermas termed the bourgeois public sphere.

Village Atheists

Village Atheists PDF Author: Leigh Eric Schmidt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691183112
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
A compelling history of atheism in American public life A much-maligned minority throughout American history, atheists have been cast as a threat to the nation’s moral fabric, barred from holding public office, and branded as irreligious misfits in a nation chosen by God. Yet village atheists—as these godless freethinkers came to be known by the close of the nineteenth century—were also hailed for their gutsy dissent from stultifying pieties and for posing a necessary secularist challenge to the entanglements of church and state. In Village Atheists, Leigh Eric Schmidt explores the complex cultural terrain that unbelievers have long had to navigate in their fight to secure equal rights and liberties in American public life. He rebuilds the history of American secularism from the ground up, giving flesh and blood to these outspoken infidels. Village Atheists demonstrates that the secularist vision for the United States proved to be anything but triumphant in a country where faith and citizenship were—and still are—closely interwoven.

The Counter-Revolution of 1776

The Counter-Revolution of 1776 PDF Author: Gerald Horne
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479808725
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book Here

Book Description
Illuminates how the preservation of slavery was a motivating factor for the Revolutionary War The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt. For European colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. It was a real and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition throughout the colonies—a possibility the founding fathers feared would bring slave rebellions to their shores. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment PDF Author: Ritchie Robertson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062410679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1035

Get Book Here

Book Description
A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.

Eleanor in the Village

Eleanor in the Village PDF Author: Jan Jarboe Russell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501198173
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
A “riveting and enlightening account” (Bookreporter) of a mostly unknown chapter in the life of Eleanor Roosevelt—when she moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, shed her high-born conformity, and became the progressive leader who pushed for change as America’s First Lady. Hundreds of books have been written about FDR and Eleanor, both together and separately, but yet she remains a compelling and elusive figure. And, not much is known about why in 1920, Eleanor suddenly abandoned her duties as a mother of five and moved to Greenwich Village, then the symbol of all forms of transgressive freedom—communism, homosexuality, interracial relationships, and subversive political activity. Now, in this “immersive…original look at an iconic figure of American politics” (Publishers Weekly), Jan Russell pulls back the curtain on Eleanor’s life to reveal the motivations and desires that drew her to the Village and how her time there changed her political outlook. A captivating blend of personal history detailing Eleanor’s struggle with issues of marriage, motherhood, financial independence, and femininity, and a vibrant portrait of one of the most famous neighborhoods in the world, this unique work examines the ways that the sensibility, mood, and various inhabitants of the neighborhood influenced the First Lady’s perception of herself and shaped her political views over four decades, up to her death in 1962. When Eleanor moved there, the Village was a zone of Bohemians, misfits, and artists, but there was also freedom there, a miniature society where personal idiosyncrasy could flourish. Eleanor joined the cohort of what then was called “The New Women” in Greenwich Village. Unlike the flappers in the 1920s, the New Women had a much more serious agenda, organizing for social change—unions for workers, equal pay, protection for child workers—and they insisted on their own sexual freedom. These women often disagreed about politics—some, like Eleanor, were Democrats, others Republicans, Socialists, and Communists. Even after moving into the White House, Eleanor retained connections to the Village, ultimately purchasing an apartment in Washington Square where she lived during World War II and in the aftermath of Roosevelt’s death in 1945. Including the major historical moments that served as a backdrop for Eleanor’s time in the Village, this remarkable work offers new insights into Eleanor’s transformation—emotionally, politically, and sexually—and provides us with the missing chapter in an extraordinary life.

The Nation in the Village

The Nation in the Village PDF Author: Keely Stauter-Halsted
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501702238
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
How do peasants come to think of themselves as members of a nation? The widely accepted argument is that national sentiment originates among intellectuals or urban middle classes, then "trickles down" to the working class and peasants. Keely Stauter-Halsted argues that such models overlook the independent contribution of peasant societies. She explores the complex case of the Polish peasants of Austrian Galicia, from the 1848 emancipation of the serfs to the eve of the First World War. In the years immediately after emancipation, Polish-speaking peasants were more apt to identify with the Austrian Emperor and the Catholic Church than with their Polish lords or the middle classes of the Galician capital, Cracow. Yet by the end of the century, Polish-speaking peasants would cheer, "Long live Poland" and celebrate the centennial of the peasant-fueled insurrection in defense of Polish independence. The explanation for this shift, Stauter-Halsted says, is the symbiosis that developed between peasant elites and upper-class reformers. She reconstructs this difficult, halting process, paying particular attention to public life and conflicts within the rural communities themselves. The author's approach is at once comparative and interdisciplinary, drawing from literature on national identity formation in Latin America, China, and Western Europe. The Nation in the Village combines anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism with economic, social, cultural, and political history.

American Shtetl

American Shtetl PDF Author: Nomi M. Stolzenberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691199779
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 496

Get Book Here

Book Description
A compelling account of how a group of Hasidic Jews established its own local government on American soil Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. This book tells the story of how this group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a world apart by using the very instruments of secular political and legal power that it disavows. Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers paint a richly textured portrait of daily life in Kiryas Joel, exploring the community's guiding religious, social, and economic norms. They delve into the roots of Satmar Hasidism and its charismatic founder, Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, following his journey from nineteenth-century Hungary to post–World War II Brooklyn, where he dreamed of founding an ideal Jewish town modeled on the shtetls of eastern Europe. Stolzenberg and Myers chart the rise of Kiryas Joel as an official municipality with its own elected local government. They show how constant legal and political battles defined and even bolstered the community, whose very success has coincided with the rise of political conservatism and multiculturalism in American society over the past forty years. Timely and accessible, American Shtetl unravels the strands of cultural and legal conflict that gave rise to one of the most vibrant religious communities in America, and reveals a way of life shaped by both self-segregation and unwitting assimilation.