Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution
Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution

Author: Patricia Bradley

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2010-04-08

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1604736690

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Under the leadership of Samuel Adams, patriot propagandists deliberately and conscientiously kept the issue of slavery off the agenda as goals for freedom were set for the American Revolution. By comparing coverage in the publications of the patriot press with those of the moderate colonial press, this book finds that the patriots avoided, misinterpreted, or distorted news reports on blacks and slaves, even in the face of a vigorous antislavery movement. The Boston Gazette, the most important newspaper of the Revolution, was chief among the periodicals that dodged or excluded abolition. The author of this study shows that The Gazette misled its readers about the notable Somerset decision that led to abolition in Great Britain. She notes also that The Gazette excluded anti-slavery essays, even from patriots who supported abolition. No petitions written by Boston slaves were published, nor were any writings by the black poet Phillis Wheatley. The Gazette also manipulated the racial identity of Crispus Attucks, the first casualty in the Revolution. When using the word slavery, The Gazette took care to focus it not upon abolition but upon Great Britain's enslavement of its American colonies. Since propaganda on behalf of the Revolution reached a high level of sophistication, and since Boston can be considered the foundry of Revolutionary propaganda, the author writes that the omission of abolition from its agenda cannot be considered as accidental but as intentional. By the time the Revolution began, white attitudes toward blacks were firmly fixed, and these persisted long after American independence had been achieved. In Boston, notions of virtue and vigilance were shown to be negatively embodied in black colonists. These devil's imps were long represented in blackface in Boston's annual Pope Day parade. Although the leaders of the Revolution did not articulate a national vision on abolition, the colonial anti-slavery movement was able to achieve a degree of success, but only in drives through the individual colonies.

Books on Early American History and Culture, 1961-1970
Books on Early American History and Culture, 1961-1970

Author: Raymond D. Irwin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2007-02-28

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0313090211

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Each entry within this guide outlines scholarly books, authors, editors and publishers that exhibit the most useful information for research. Following each detailed citation is a brief summary of the book. Each book listed covers a wide variety of subjects in American history including Native Americans, slavery, gender and migration to rural life, agriculture, politics, government and communication. This volume is part of a series of annotated bibliographies on early American history and culture. Extensive indexes, thematic chapters and book summaries will assist any researcher in an easy manner. Aside from outlining fantastic scholarly books, this book includes chapters on general early American history, historiography and public history to name a few. This is the only comprehensive guide to early American history and culture for this period and it indicates which books from the 1960s have been most influential in the journal literature of the past twenty-five years.

Early American Technology
Early American Technology

Author: Judith A. McGaw

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 0807839981

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection of original essays documents technology's centrality to the history of early America. Unlike much previous scholarship, this volume emphasizes the quotidian rather than the exceptional: the farm household seeking to preserve food or acquire tools, the surveyor balancing economic and technical considerations while laying out a turnpike, the woman of child-bearing age employing herbal contraceptives, and the neighbors of a polluted urban stream debating issues of property, odor, and health. These cases and others drawn from brewing, mining, farming, and woodworking enable the authors to address recent historiographic concerns, including the environmental aspects of technological change and the gendered nature of technical knowledge. Brooke Hindle's classic 1966 essay on early American technology is also reprinted, and his view of the field is reassessed. A bibliographical essay and summary of Hindle's bibliographic findings conclude the volume. The contributors are Judith A. McGaw, Robert C. Post, Susan E. Klepp, Michal McMahon, Patrick W. O'Bannon, Sarah F. McMahon, Donald C. Jackson, Robert B. Gordon, Carolyn C. Cooper, and Nina E. Lerman.

Revolutionary Networks
Revolutionary Networks

Author: Joseph M. Adelman

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2021-02-02

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1421439905

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An engrossing and powerful story about the influence of printers, who used their commercial and political connections to directly shape Revolutionary political ideology and mass mobilization. Honorable Mention, St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize, Bibliographical Society of America During the American Revolution, printed material, including newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and broadsides, played a crucial role as a forum for public debate. In Revolutionary Networks, Joseph M. Adelman argues that printers—artisans who mingled with the elite but labored in a manual trade—used their commercial and political connections to directly shape Revolutionary political ideology and mass mobilization. Going into the printing offices of colonial America to explore how these documents were produced, Adelman shows how printers balanced their own political beliefs and interests alongside the commercial interests of their businesses, the customs of the printing trade, and the prevailing mood of their communities. Adelman describes how these laborers repackaged oral and manuscript compositions into printed works through which political news and opinion circulated. Drawing on a database of 756 printers active during the Revolutionary era, along with a rich collection of archival and printed sources, Adelman surveys printers' editorial strategies. Moving chronologically through the era of the American Revolution and to the war's aftermath, he details the development of the networks of printers and explains how they contributed to the process of creating first a revolution and then the new nation. By underscoring the important and intertwined roles of commercial and political interests in the development of Revolutionary rhetoric, this book essentially reframes our understanding of the American Revolution. Printers, Adelman argues, played a major role as mediators who determined what rhetoric to amplify and where to circulate it. Offering a unique perspective on the American Revolution and early American print culture, Revolutionary Networks reveals how these men and women managed political upheaval through a commercial lens.

William Livingston's American Revolution
William Livingston's American Revolution

Author: James J. Gigantino II

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-09-11

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 0812295501

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

William Livingston's American Revolution explores how New Jersey's first governor experienced the American Revolution and managed a state government on the war's front lines. A wartime bureaucrat, Livingston played a pivotal role in a pivotal place, prosecuting the war on a daily basis for eight years. Such second-tier founding fathers as Livingston were the ones who actually administered the war and guided the day-to-day operations of revolutionary-era governments, serving as the principal conduits between the local wartime situation and the national demands placed on the states. In the first biography of Livingston published since the 1830s, James J. Gigantino's examination is as much about the position he filled as about the man himself. The reluctant patriot and his roles as governor, member of the Continental Congress, and delegate to the Constitutional Convention quickly became one, as Livingston's distinctive personality molded his office's status and reach. A tactful politician, successful lawyer, writer, satirist, political operative, gardener, soldier, and statesman, Livingston became the longest-serving patriot governor during a brutal war that he had not originally wanted to fight or believed could be won. Through Livingston's life, Gigantino examines the complex nature of the conflict and the choice to wage it, the wartime bureaucrats charged with administering it, the constant battle over loyalty on the home front, the limits of patriot governance under fire, and the ways in which wartime experiences affected the creation of the Constitution.