Author: Michael R. Allen
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807119075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Western Rivermen, the first documented sociocultural history of its subject, is a fascinating book. Michael Allen explores the rigorous lives of professional boatmen who plied non-steam vessels—flatboats, keelboats, and rafts—on the Ohio and lower Mississippi rivers from 1763-1861. Allen first considers the mythical “half horse, half alligator” boatmen who were an integral part of the folklore of the time. Americans of the Jacksonian and pre-Civil War period perceived the rivermen as hard-drinking, straight-shooting adventurers on the frontier. Their notions were reinforced by romanticized portrayals of the boatmen in songs, paintings, newspaper humor, and literature. Allen contends that these mythical depictions of the boatmen were a reflection of the yearnings of an industrializing people for what they thought to be a simpler time. Allen demonstrates, however, that the actual lives of the rivermen little resembled their portrayals in popular culture. Drawing on more than eighty firsthand accounts—ranging from a short letter to a four-volume memoir—he provides a rounded view of the boatmen that reveals the lonely, dangerous nature of their profession. He also discusses the social and economic aspects of their lives, such as their cargoes, the river towns they visited, and the impact on their lives of the steamboat and advancing civilization. Allen’s comprehensive, highly informative study sheds new light on a group of men who played an important role in the development of the trans-Appalachian West and the ways in which their lives were transformed into one of the enduring themes of American folk culture.
Author: Michael Allen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780807115619
Category : Boaters (Persons)
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
After first considering the romanticized, mythical boatmen who were part of the folklore of the time, Allen (history, U. of Washington at Tacoma) draws on firsthand accounts to reveal the lonely, dangerous nature of the profession as well as the social and economic aspects of the rivermen's lives, such as their cargoes, the river towns they visited, and the impact on their lives of the steamboat and advancing civilization. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Thomas R. Beard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780807103074
Category : Louisiana
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Author: Larry Schweikart
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1595231153
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1009
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Book Description
Revised and updated, this 15th anniversary edition of the #1 New York Times bestseller salutes America’s true and proud history. Fifteen years ago, Professors Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen set out to correct the doctrinaire biases that had distorted the way America’s past is taught – and they succeeded. A Patriot’s History of the United States is the definitive objective history of our country, presented honestly and fairly. Schweikart and Allen don’t ignore America’s mistakes through the years. Instead, they put them back in the proper perspective, celebrating the strengths of the men and women who cleared the wilderness, abolished slavery, and rid the world of fascism and communism. Now in this revised fifteenth-anniversary edition, a new generation of readers will learn the truth about America’s discovery, founding, and advancement, from Columbus’s voyage to Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again."
Author: Christopher G. Bates
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317457404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1453
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Book Description
First Published in 2015. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.
Author: Samuel Forman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493044621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Ill-Fated Frontier is at once a pioneer adventure and a compelling narrative of the frictions that emerged among entrepreneurial pioneers and their sixty slaves, Indians fighting to preserve their land, and Spanish colonials with their own agenda. Here is a lively and visceral portrait of the wild and enduring American frontier in 1789. The melting pot America would become was barely simmering when an ill-fated attempt to settle land near Natchez in brought together a volatile mix of ambitious Northern pioneers and their slaves, Spanish colonists, and Native Americans who had claimed the land as theirs for hundreds of years. This illuminating episode in American history comes to life in this account of an expedition gone wrong. It began with an optimistic plan to settle and expand in the new territory. It ended ignominiously, with the body of one of the expedition’s leaders returning to New Jersey stored in a pickle barrel. What happened in between—a cautionary tale of greed, incompetence, and hubris—lies at the center of this fascinating account by Harvard historian Samuel A. Forman. Endorsed by New York Times best-selling author Nathaniel Philbrick, it is a startling and frank portrait of a young America that examines the dream of an inclusive American experience and its reality—a debate that continues today. Imperious General David Forman, a terror to his Monmouth County, New Jersey, Loyalist neighbors, during the Revolutionary War obtained a large land grant in Natchez, then part of Spanish West Florida. His charge was to establish a plantation that would lure settlers and establish a new American presence. Staying behind in New Jersey David Forman appointed his rotund and gouty older brother Ezekiel as leader of the expedition, his young cousin Samuel S. Forman as its business manager, and a former military aide as overseer of the enslaved African Americans who accompanied them. It did not go well. When the expedition finally reached the new territory it found waiting Spanish colonials who felt the land was theirs and Native Americans who still maintained their sovereignty over the contested lands. When Ezekiel Forman died unexpectedly, David Forman stormed from New Jersey into Natchez to take control of the unraveling situation. He would find on his arrival that those awaiting him had other ideas about who the land actually belonged to. He would return to New Jersey quite dead and pickled in a barrel of rum. Lively, impeccably researched, and rich in details that have escaped the usual tales of American growth and enterprise, Ill-Fated Frontier shines new and entertaining light on what it means to be an American.
Author: Jon K. Lauck
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806191406
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 479
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Book Description
At the center of American history is a hole—a gap where some scholars’ indifference or disdain has too long stood in for the true story of the American Midwest. A first-ever chronicle of the Midwest’s formative century, The Good Country restores this American heartland to its central place in the nation’s history. Jon K. Lauck, the premier historian of the region, puts midwestern “squares” center stage—an unorthodox approach that leads to surprising conclusions. The American Midwest, in Lauck’s cogent account, was the most democratically advanced place in the world during the nineteenth century. The Good Country describes a rich civic culture that prized education, literature, libraries, and the arts; developed a stable social order grounded in Victorian norms, republican virtue, and Christian teachings; and generally put democratic ideals into practice to a greater extent than any nation to date. The outbreak of the Civil War and the fight against the slaveholding South only deepened the Midwest’s dedication to advancing a democratic culture and solidified its regional identity. The “good country” was, of course, not the “perfect country,” and Lauck devotes a chapter to the question of race in the Midwest, finding early examples of overt racism but also discovering a steady march toward racial progress. He also finds many instances of modest reforms enacted through the democratic process and designed to address particular social problems, as well as significant advances for women, who were active in civic affairs and took advantage of the Midwest’s openness to women in higher education. Lauck reaches his conclusions through a measured analysis that weighs historical achievements and injustices, rejects the acrimonious tones of the culture wars, and seeks a new historical discourse grounded in fair readings of the American past. In a trying time of contested politics and culture, his book locates a middle ground, fittingly, in the center of the country.
Author: Rinker Buck
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501106384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * “Audacious…Life on the Mississippi sparkles.” —The Wall Street Journal * “A rich mix of history, reporting, and personal introspection.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch * “Both a travelogue and an engaging history lesson about America’s westward expansion.” —The Christian Science Monitor The eagerly awaited return of master American storyteller Rinker Buck, Life on the Mississippi is an epic, enchanting blend of history and adventure in which Buck builds a wooden flatboat from the grand “flatboat era” of the 1800s and sails it down the Mississippi River, illuminating the forgotten past of America’s first western frontier. Seven years ago, readers around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious curiosity about history launched him across the West in a covered wagon pulled by mules and propelled his book about the trip, The Oregon Trail, to ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, Buck returns to chronicle his latest incredible adventure: building a wooden flatboat from the bygone era of the early 1800s and journeying down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat Patience accompanied by an eccentric crew of daring shipmates. Over the course of his voyage, Buck steers his fragile wooden craft through narrow channels dominated by massive cargo barges, rescues his first mate gone overboard, sails blindly through fog, breaks his ribs not once but twice, and camps every night on sandbars, remote islands, and steep levees. As he charts his own journey, he also delivers a richly satisfying work of history that brings to life a lost era. The role of the flatboat in our country’s evolution is far more significant than most Americans realize. Between 1800 and 1840, millions of farmers, merchants, and teenage adventurers embarked from states like Pennsylvania and Virginia on flatboats headed beyond the Appalachians to Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Settler families repurposed the wood from their boats to build their first cabins in the wilderness; cargo boats were broken apart and sold to build the boomtowns along the water route. Joining the river traffic were floating brothels, called “gun boats”; “smithy boats” for blacksmiths; even “whiskey boats” for alcohol. In the present day, America’s inland rivers are a superhighway dominated by leviathan barges—carrying $80 billion of cargo annually—all descended from flatboats like the ramshackle Patience. As a historian, Buck resurrects the era’s adventurous spirit, but he also challenges familiar myths about American expansion, confronting the bloody truth behind settlers’ push for land and wealth. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced more than 125,000 members of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and several other tribes to travel the Mississippi on a brutal journey en route to the barrens of Oklahoma. Simultaneously, almost a million enslaved African Americans were carried in flatboats and marched by foot 1,000 miles over the Appalachians to the cotton and cane fields of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, birthing the term “sold down the river.” Buck portrays this watershed era of American expansion as it was really lived. With a rare narrative power that blends stirring adventure with absorbing untold history, Life on the Mississippi is a muscular and majestic feat of storytelling from a writer who may be the closest that we have today to Mark Twain.
Author: William R. Swagerty
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806188219
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 830
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Book Description
Although some have attributed the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition primarily to gunpowder and gumption, historian William R. Swagerty demonstrates in this two-volume set that adopting Indian ways of procuring, processing, and transporting food and gear was crucial to the survival of the Corps of Discovery. The Indianization of Lewis and Clark retraces the well-known trail of America’s most famous explorers as a journey into the heart of Native America—a case study of successful material adaptation and cultural borrowing. Beginning with a broad examination of regional demographics and folkways, Swagerty describes the cultural baggage and material preferences the expedition carried west in 1804. Detailing this baseline reveals which Indian influences were already part of Jeffersonian American culture, and which were progressive adaptations the Corpsmen made of Indian ways in the course of their journey. Swagerty’s exhaustive research offers detailed information on both Indian and Euro-American science, medicine, cartography, and cuisine, and on a wide range of technologies and material culture. Readers learn what the Corpsmen wore, what they ate, how they traveled, and where they slept (and with whom) before, during, and after the return. Indianization is as old as contact experiences between Native Americans and Europeans. Lewis and Clark took the process to a new level, accepting the hospitality of dozens of Native groups as they sought a navigable water route to the Pacific. This richly illustrated, interdisciplinary study provides a unique and complex portrait of the material and cultural legacy of Indian America, offering readers perspective on lessons learned but largely forgotten in the aftermath of the epic journey.
Author: Mike Bunn
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496843797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
Mississippi’s foundational epoch—in which the state literally took shape—has for too long remained overlooked and shrouded in misunderstanding. Yet the years between 1798, when the Mississippi Territory was created, and 1840, when the maturing state came into its own as arguably the heart of the antebellum South, was one of remarkable transformation. Beginning as a Native American homeland subject to contested claims by European colonial powers, the state became a thoroughly American entity in the span of little more than a generation. In Old Southwest to Old South: Mississippi, 1798–1840, authors Mike Bunn and Clay Williams tell the story of Mississippi’s founding era in a sweeping narrative that gives these crucial years the attention they deserve. Several key themes, addressing how and why the state developed as it did, rise to the forefront in the book’s pages. These include a veritable list of the major issues in Mississippi history: a sudden influx of American settlers, the harsh saga of Removal, the pivotal role of the institution of slavery, and the consequences of heavy reliance on cotton production. The book bears witness to Mississippi’s birth as the twentieth state in the Union, and it introduces a cast of colorful characters and events that demand further attention from those interested in the state’s past. A story of relevance to all Mississippians, Old Southwest to Old South explains how Mississippi’s early development shaped the state and continues to define it today.
