Author: John R. Wunder
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803248168
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
The Nebraska-Kansas Act of 1854 turns upside down the traditional way of thinking about one of the most important laws ever passed in American history. The act that created Nebraska and Kansas also, in effect, abolished the Missouri Compromise, which had prohibited slavery in the region since 1820. This bow to local control outraged the nation and led to vicious confrontations, including Kansas' subsequent mini-civil war. At the 150th anniversary of the Kansas-Nebraska Act these scholars reexamine the political, social, and personal contexts of this act and its effect on the course of American history.
Author: Alice Elizabeth Malavasic
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469635534
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Pushing back against the idea that the Slave Power conspiracy was merely an ideological construction, Alice Elizabeth Malavasic argues that some southern politicians in the 1850s did indeed hold an inordinate amount of power in the antebellum Congress and used it to foster the interests of slavery. Malavasic focuses her argument on Senators David Rice Atchison of Missouri, Andrew Pickens Butler of South Carolina, and Robert M. T. Hunter and James Murray Mason of Virginia, known by their contemporaries as the "F Street Mess" for the location of the house they shared. Unlike the earlier and better-known triumvirate of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster, the F Street Mess was a functioning oligarchy within the U.S. Senate whose power was based on shared ideology, institutional seniority, and personal friendship. By centering on their most significant achievement--forcing a rewrite of the Nebraska bill that repealed the restriction against slavery above the 36 degrees 30′ parallel--Malavasic demonstrates how the F Street Mess's mastery of the legislative process led to one of the most destructive pieces of legislation in United States history and helped pave the way to secession.
Author: Ann Durkin Keating
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022666452X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
When Juliette Kinzie first visited Chicago in 1831, it was anything but a city. An outpost in the shadow of Fort Dearborn, it had no streets, no sidewalks, no schools, no river-spanning bridges. And with two hundred disconnected residents, it lacked any sense of community. In the decades that followed, not only did Juliette witness the city’s transition from Indian country to industrial center, but she was instrumental in its development. Juliette is one of Chicago’s forgotten founders. Early Chicago is often presented as “a man’s city,” but women like Juliette worked to create an urban and urbane world, often within their own parlors. With The World of Juliette Kinzie, we finally get to experience the rise of Chicago from the view of one of its most important founding mothers. Ann Durkin Keating, one of the foremost experts on nineteenth-century Chicago, offers a moving portrait of a trailblazing and complicated woman. Keating takes us to the corner of Cass and Michigan (now Wabash and Hubbard), Juliette’s home base. Through Juliette’s eyes, our understanding of early Chicago expands from a city of boosters and speculators to include the world that women created in and between households. We see the development of Chicago society, first inspired by cities in the East and later coming into its own midwestern ways. We also see the city become a community, as it developed its intertwined religious, social, educational, and cultural institutions. Keating draws on a wealth of sources, including hundreds of Juliette’s personal letters, allowing Juliette to tell much of her story in her own words. Juliette’s death in 1870, just a year before the infamous fire, seemed almost prescient. She left her beloved Chicago right before the physical city as she knew it vanished in flames. But now her history lives on. The World of Juliette Kinzie offers a new perspective on Chicago’s past and is a fitting tribute to one of the first women historians in the United States.
Author: Nicole Etcheson
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700614923
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
Few people would have expected bloodshed in Kansas Territory. After all, it had few slaves and showed few signs that slavery would even flourish. But civil war tore this territory apart in the 1850s and 60s, and "Bleeding Kansas" became a forbidding symbol for the nationwide clash over slavery that followed. Many free-state Kansans seemed to care little about slaves, and many proslavery Kansans owned not a single slave. But the failed promise of the Kansas-Nebraska Act-when fraud in local elections subverted the settlers' right to choose whether Kansas would be a slave or free state-fanned the flames of war. While other writers have cited slavery or economics as the cause of unrest, Nicole Etcheson seeks to revise our understanding of this era by focusing on whites' concerns over their political liberties. The first comprehensive account of "Bleeding Kansas" in more than thirty years, her study re-examines the debate over slavery expansion to emphasize issues of popular sovereignty rather than slavery's moral or economic dimensions. The free-state movement was a coalition of settlers who favored black rights and others who wanted the territory only for whites, but all were united by the conviction that their political rights were violated by nonresident voting and by Democratic presidents' heavy-handed administration of the territories. Etcheson argues that participants on both sides of the Kansas conflict believed they fought to preserve the liberties secured by the American Revolution and that violence erupted because each side feared the loss of meaningful self-governance. Bleeding Kansas is a gripping account of events and people-rabble-rousing Jim Lane, zealot John Brown, Sheriff Sam Jones, and others-that examines the social milieu of the settlers along with the political ideas they developed. Covering the period from the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act to the 1879 Exoduster Migration, it traces the complex interactions among groups inside and outside the territory, creating a comprehensive political, social, and intellectual history of this tumultuous period in the state's history. As Etcheson demonstrates, the struggle over the political liberties of whites may have heightened the turmoil but led eventually to a broadening of the definition of freedom to include blacks. Her insightful re-examination sheds new light on this era and is essential reading for anyone interested in the ideological origins of the Civil War.
Author: Jeffrey Ostler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Ostler shows that economic conditions alone cannot explain why populism flourished or foundered. Through a study of populism in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, Ostler demonstrates that the strength or weakness of the two dominant political parties within a state had a significant effect on the success of a third party challenge.
Author: Iralee Barnard
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700619453
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Once covered by wild grasses, America's heartland is by nature a grassland, populated with plants whose ecological importance, practical value, and subtle beauty we are only now beginning to comprehend. Of the 3,000 species of wild plants in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, in the heart of the heartland, only two of every ten are grasses, and in some prairies just one or two of these can account for 80 to 90 percent of the ground cover. It is these major wild grasses, the native and the naturalized, that this field guide covers, as well as some not found in such large numbers but nonetheless widespread and easily noticed. From the more familiar (like big bluestem, little bluestem, Indiangrass, switchgrass, buffalograss, sideoats grama, and blue grama) to the less recognized (such as ticklegrass, rice cutgrass, and prairie wedgegrass), from the weedy to the desirable, each of the seventy species profiled in these pages appears in full-color, its fundamental characteristics clearly identifiable by novice and expert alike: flowers and seed heads, leaf details with size comparisons, and whole mature plant pictures. Though of ever broadening interest--to ranchers, gardeners, naturalists, and restorers of prairies and native landscapes--grasses are notoriously tricky to identify. A number of features of this guide make the task considerably easier. A handy system of "finding lists," allows a user to navigate quickly to identification of an unknown grass. Descriptions, written in clear and easily understood terms, focus on the primary characteristics of each species and are accompanied by distribution maps. And an illustrated glossary, leaf comparison section, and table of grass flowering dates provide additional information and opportunities for recognizing and appreciating various species. Putting these plants into ecological and cultural context, botanist and grass specialist Iralee Barnard gives readers, whether curious amateur, passionate naturalist, or professional, a new way of understanding the grasses of America's prairies and plains, including their plant structures and adaptations, their natural history, ecological associations, and cultural importance.
Author: James E. Potter
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803244908
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
From a pool of barely nine thousand men of military age, Nebraska—still a territory at the time—sent more than three thousand soldiers to the Civil War. They fought and died for the Union cause, were wounded, taken prisoner, and in some cases deserted. But Nebraska’s military contribution is only one part of the more complex and interesting story that James E. Potter tells in Standing Firmly by the Flag, the first book to fully explore Nebraska’s involvement in the Civil War and the war’s involvement in Nebraska’s evolution from territory to thirty-seventh state on March 1, 1867. Although distant from the major battlefronts and seats of the warring governments, Nebraskans were aware of the war’s issues and subject to its consequences. National debates about the origins of the rebellion, the policies pursued to quell it, and what kind of nation should emerge once it was over echoed throughout Nebraska. Potter explores the war’s impact on Nebraskans and shows how, when Nebraska Territory sought admission to the Union at war’s end, it was caught up in political struggles over Reconstruction, the fate of the freed slaves, and the relationship between the states and the federal government.
Author: Eric Foner
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039308082X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
“A masterwork [by] the preeminent historian of the Civil War era.”—Boston Globe Selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, this landmark work gives us a definitive account of Lincoln's lifelong engagement with the nation's critical issue: American slavery. A master historian, Eric Foner draws Lincoln and the broader history of the period into perfect balance. We see Lincoln, a pragmatic politician grounded in principle, deftly navigating the dynamic politics of antislavery, secession, and civil war. Lincoln's greatness emerges from his capacity for moral and political growth.
Author: Richard Reece
Publisher: ABDO
ISBN: 1614784450
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114
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Book Description
This title examines an important historic event - bleeding Kansas. Easy-to-read, compelling text explores the history of America during this violent time period as territories entered the Union as free or slave states. Readers will learn about the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the man behind it, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the signer of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, President Franklin Pierce, and the effects of this event on society. Also discussed are the abolition movement, Nat Turner's Rebellion, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Features include a table of contents, glossary, selected bibliography, Web links, source notes, and an index, plus a timeline and essential facts. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.
Author: H. Craig Miner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
"Following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Kansas Territory was a national issue that dominated America's press, not to mention three sessions of Congress." "Craig Miner now offers the first in-depth study of national media coverage devoted to the beleaguered territory, unearthing new examples of what Americans were saying about Kansas and showing how those words affected the course of national events." "Miner draws on dozens of newspapers and magazines from all parts of the country and of all political persuasions: a trove of rich quotations and unvarnished epithets, nearly all of them published here for the first time. He reveals how the heated, polarizing rhetoric widened the sectional rift, weakened chances of accommodation, and contributed more to the onset of civil war than has been previously recognized."--BOOK JACKET.
