Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region, 1790–1850
Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region, 1790–1850

Author: David Maldwyn Ellis

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1501721275

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The transition from a predominantly self-sufficient economy to one primarily dependent on the market in the first half of the nineteenth century was to effect changes in the United States fully as far-reaching if not as spectacular as those accompanying the industrial revolution. Farming as a way of life was yielding place to the concept of farming as a means of profit. Few farmers in the country felt the impact of these revolutionary forces more directly than those of eastern New York State. Indeed, discontent over these changes contributed to the violent Anti-Rent War (1839–1846) centered in the Catskills. How New York farmers met these challenges is the central theme of Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region, 1790–1850. Focusing on twenty-one counties in eastern New York, David Maldwyn Ellis describes the process of settlement, the growth of population, and the characteristics of pioneer agriculture; traces the rapid shifts from grain culture to sheep raising and dairying; and points out the variety of individual and local adjustments caused by differences in soil, topography, accessibility to market, cultural legacies, and individual enterprise. Ellis also contrasts the forces leading to rural decline with the beginnings of scientific husbandry and agricultural education; evaluates the role of roads, canals, and railroads, and outlines the land pattern and the effect of leasehold upon the region's agrarian development. In short, this classic work of American agricultural history and the history of New York State—originally published by Cornell in 1946—chronicles the transformation of the pioneer farmer into the dairyman.

Land and Freedom
Land and Freedom

Author: Reeve Huston

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2000-10-12

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0198031092

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During the early nineteenth-century, two million acres of New York's farmland were controlled by a handful of great families. Along the Hudson Valley and across the Catskills lay the great estates of the Van Rensselaers, the Livingstons, and a dozen lesser landlords. Some two hundred and sixty thousand men, women, and children-a twelfth of the population of New York, the nation's most populous state-worked this land as tenants. Beginning in 1839, these tenants created a movement dedicated to destroying the estates and distributing the land to those who farmed it. The "anti-rent" movement quickly became one of the most powerful and influential movements of the antebellum era. The anti-renters raised issues that lay at the heart of America's republican experiment: the distribution of land, the nature of democracy, and the meaning of freedom. In doing so, they left an indelible mark on politics and public ideals in both New York and the nation. They influenced and bitterly divided both major political parties, and helped create the Republican party. Moreover, they shaped the ideas, policies, and careers of such national leaders as Martin Van Buren, Silas Wright, Horace Greeley, and William Seward. Deftly interweaving an engaging narrative history with broad-ranging social and political analysis, Land and Freedom brings to life the voices of antebellum northern farmers as they debated the critical social and political issues of their day. It grounds those debates in a detailed analysis of social and political change on New York's estates, and demonstrates the impact of farmers' ideas and initiatives on the broader social and political order. In doing so, it offers new insights into the social and political thought of northeastern farmers, the extent and limits of popular political power under the Jacksonian political order, and the social origins of free-labor ideology and the Republican party.

The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo
The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo

Author: Jeroen Dewulf

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2016-12-20

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1496808843

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The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo presents the history of the nation's forgotten Dutch slave community and free Dutch-speaking African Americans from seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to nineteenth-century New York and New Jersey. It also develops a provocative new interpretation of one of America's most intriguing black folkloric traditions, Pinkster. Jeroen Dewulf rejects the usual interpretation of this celebration of a "slave king" as a form of carnival. Instead, he shows that it is a ritual rooted in mutual-aid and slave brotherhood traditions. By placing these traditions in an Atlantic context, Dewulf identifies striking parallels to royal election rituals in slave communities elsewhere in the Americas, and he traces these rituals to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and the impact of Portuguese culture in West-Central Africa. Dewulf's focus on the social capital of slaves follows the mutual aid to seventeenth-century Manhattan. He suggests a much stronger impact of Manhattan's first slave community on the development of African American identity in New York and New Jersey than hitherto assumed. While the earliest works on slave culture in a North American context concentrated on an assumed process of assimilation according to European standards, later studies pointed out the need to look for indigenous African continuities. The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo suggests the necessity for an increased focus on the substantial contact that many Africans had with European--primarily Portuguese--cultures before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas. The book has already garnered honors as the winner of the Richard O. Collins Award in African Studies, the New Netherland Institute Hendricks Award, and the Clague and Carol Van Slyke Prize.

American Agriculture
American Agriculture

Author: R. Douglas Hurt

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 9781557532817

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R. Douglas Hurt's brief history of American agriculture, from the prehistoric period through the twentieth century, is written for anyone coming to this subject for the first time. American Agriculture is a story of considerable achievement and success, but it is also a story of greed, racism, and violence. Hurt offers a provocative look at a history that has been shaped by the best and worst of human nature. Here is the background essential for understanding the complexity of American agricultural history, from the transition to commercial agriculture during the colonial period to the failure of government policy following World War II. Complete with maps, drawings, and over seventy splendid photographs, this revised edition closes with an examination of the troubled landscape at the turn of the twenty-first century. It also provides a ready reference to the economic, social, political, scientific, and technological changes that have most affected farming in America and the contributions of African Americans, Native Americans, and women. This survey will serve as a text for courses in the history of American agriculture and rural studies as well as a supplementary text for economic history and rural sociology courses.

The Historical Origins of Terrorism in America
The Historical Origins of Terrorism in America

Author: Robert Kumamoto

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-02-05

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 131791144X

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When we think of American terrorism, it is modern, individual terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh that typically spring to mind. But terrorism has existed in America since the earliest days of the colonies, when small groups participated in organized and unlawful violence in the hope of creating a state of fear for their own political purposes. Using case studies of groups such as the Green Mountain Boys, the Mollie Maguires, and the North Carolina Regulators, as well as the more widely-known Sons of Liberty and the Ku Klux Klan, Robert Kumamoto introduces readers to the long history of terrorist activity in America. Sure to incite discussion and curiosity in anyone studying terrorism or early America, The Historical Origins of Terrorism in America brings together some of the most radical groups of the American past to show that a technique that we associate with modern atrocity actually has roots much farther back in the country’s national psyche.

The Best Land
The Best Land

Author: Susan A. Brewer

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1501777246

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In Susan A. Brewer's fascinating The Best Land, she recounts the story of the parcel of central New York land on which she grew up. Brewer and her family had worked and lived on this land for generations when the Oneida Indians claimed that it rightfully belonged to them. Why, she wondered, did she not know what had happened to this place her grandfather called the best land. Here, she tells its story, tracing over the past four hundred years the two families—her own European settler family and the Oneida/Mohawk family of Polly Denny—who called the best land home. Situated on the passageway to the west, the ancestral land of the Oneidas was coveted by European colonizers and the founders of the Empire State. The Brewer and Denny families took part in imperial wars, the American Revolution, broken treaties, the building of the Erie Canal, Native removal, the rise and decline of family farms, bitter land claims controversies, and the revival of the Oneida Indian Nation. As Brewer makes clear in The Best Land, through centuries of violence, bravery, greed, generosity, racism, and love, the lives of the Brewer and Denny families were profoundly intertwined. The story of this homeland, she discovers, unsettles the history she thought she knew. With clear determination to tell history as it was, without sugarcoating or ignoring the pain and suffering of both families, Brewer navigates the interconnected stories with grace, humility, and a deep love for the land. The Best Land is a beautiful homage to the people, the place, and the environment itself.

The World of the Revolutionary American Republic
The World of the Revolutionary American Republic

Author: Andrew Shankman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-16

Total Pages: 632

ISBN-13: 1317814967

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In its early years, the American Republic was far from stable. Conflict and violence, including major land wars, were defining features of the period from the Revolution to the outbreak of the Civil War, as struggles over who would control land and labor were waged across the North American continent. The World of the Revolutionary American Republic brings together original essays from an array of scholars to illuminate the issues that made this era so contested. Drawing on the latest research, the essays examine the conflicts that occurred both within the Republic and between the different peoples inhabiting the continent. Covering issues including slavery, westward expansion, the impact of Revolutionary ideals, and the economy, this collection provides a diverse range of insights into the turbulent era in which the United States emerged as a nation. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, both American and international, The World of the Revolutionary American Republic is an important resource for any scholar of early America.

Democracy by Petition
Democracy by Petition

Author: Daniel Carpenter

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 649

ISBN-13: 0674258878

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Winner of the James P. Hanlan Book Award Winner of the J. David Greenstone Book Prize Winner of the S. M. Lipset Best Book Award This pioneering work of political history recovers the central and largely forgotten role that petitioning played in the formative years of North American democracy. Known as the age of democracy, the nineteenth century witnessed the extension of the franchise and the rise of party politics. As Daniel Carpenter shows, however, democracy in America emerged not merely through elections and parties, but through the transformation of an ancient political tool: the petition. A statement of grievance accompanied by a list of signatures, the petition afforded women and men excluded from formal politics the chance to make their voices heard and to reshape the landscape of political possibility. Democracy by Petition traces the explosion and expansion of petitioning across the North American continent. Indigenous tribes in Canada, free Blacks from Boston to the British West Indies, Irish canal workers in Indiana, and Hispanic settlers in territorial New Mexico all used petitions to make claims on those in power. Petitions facilitated the extension of suffrage, the decline of feudal land tenure, and advances in liberty for women, African Americans, and Indigenous peoples. Even where petitioners failed in their immediate aims, their campaigns advanced democracy by setting agendas, recruiting people into political causes, and fostering aspirations of equality. Far more than periodic elections, petitions provided an everyday current of communication between officeholders and the people. The coming of democracy in America owes much to the unprecedented energy with which the petition was employed in the antebellum period. By uncovering this neglected yet vital strand of nineteenth-century life, Democracy by Petition will forever change how we understand our political history.

Sojourner Truth's America
Sojourner Truth's America

Author: Margaret Washington

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2011-04-21

Total Pages: 522

ISBN-13: 0252093747

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This fascinating biography tells the story of nineteenth-century America through the life of one of its most charismatic and influential characters: Sojourner Truth. In an in-depth account of this amazing activist, Margaret Washington unravels Sojourner Truth's world within the broader panorama of African American slavery and the nation's most significant reform era. Born into bondage among the Hudson Valley Dutch in Ulster County, New York, Isabella was sold several times, married, and bore five children before fleeing in 1826 with her infant daughter one year before New York slavery was abolished. In 1829, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a domestic, preached, joined a religious commune, and then in 1843 had an epiphany. Changing her name to Sojourner Truth, she began traveling the country as a champion of the downtrodden and a spokeswoman for equality by promoting Christianity, abolitionism, and women's rights. Gifted in verbal eloquence, wit, and biblical knowledge, Sojourner Truth possessed an earthy, imaginative, homespun personality that won her many friends and admirers and made her one of the most popular and quoted reformers of her times. Washington's biography of this remarkable figure considers many facets of Sojourner Truth's life to explain how she became one of the greatest activists in American history, including her African and Dutch religious heritage; her experiences of slavery within contexts of labor, domesticity, and patriarchy; and her profoundly personal sense of justice and intuitive integrity. Organized chronologically into three distinct eras of Truth's life, Sojourner Truth's America examines the complex dynamics of her times, beginning with the transnational contours of her spirituality and early life as Isabella and her embroilments in legal controversy. Truth's awakening during nineteenth-century America's progressive surge then propelled her ascendancy as a rousing preacher and political orator despite her inability to read and write. Throughout the book, Washington explores Truth's passionate commitment to family and community, including her vision for a beloved community that extended beyond race, gender, and socioeconomic condition and embraced a common humanity. For Sojourner Truth, the significant model for such communalism was a primitive, prophetic Christianity. Illustrated with dozens of images of Truth and her contemporaries, Sojourner Truth's America draws a delicate and compelling balance between Sojourner Truth's personal motivations and the influences of her historical context. Washington provides important insights into the turbulent cultural and political climate of the age while also separating the many myths from the facts concerning this legendary American figure.