The Preston Genealogy; Tracing the History of the Family from about 1040, A.D., in Great Britain, in the New England States, and in Virginia, to the P
The Preston Genealogy; Tracing the History of the Family from about 1040, A.D., in Great Britain, in the New England States, and in Virginia, to the P

Author: William Bowker Preston

Publisher: Franklin Classics

Published: 2018-10-14

Total Pages: 624

ISBN-13: 9780343084783

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Gentry and Common Folk
Gentry and Common Folk

Author: Albert H. TillsonJr.

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-11-21

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0813188180

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In the late eighteenth century, the Upper Valley of Virginia experienced a conflict between the elitist culture of the gentry and the more republican values of the populace. Albert Tillson addresses here several major issues in historical scholarship on Virginia and the southern backcountry, focusing on changing political values in the late colonial and Revolutionary eras. In the colonial period, Tillson shows, the Upper Valley's deferential culture was much less pervasive than has often been suggested. Although the gentry maintained elitist values in the county courts and some other political arenas, much of the populace rejected their leadership, especially in the militia and other defense activities. Such dissent indicates the beginnings of an alternative political culture, one based on the economic realities of small-scale agriculture, the preference for less hierarchical styles of leadership, and a stronger attachment to local neighborhoods than to county, colony, or empire. Despite the strength of this division, the Upper Valley experienced less disorder than many other areas of the southern backcountry. Tillson attributes this in part to the close ties between the elite and provincial authorities, in part to their willingness to compromise with popular dissidents. Indeed, many of the subsidiary leaders in direct contact with local neighborhoods and militia training companies came to act as intermediaries between their superiors and popular groups. As Tillson shows, the events and ideology of the Revolutionary period interacted to transform the region's political culture. By creating tremendous demands for manpower and economic support, the war led to greater discontent and forced regional leaders to make substantial concessions to popular sentiment. The republican ideology sanctioned by the Revolution not only justified these concessions but also legitimated popular support for challenges to established leaders and institutions.

The Rivers Ran Backward
The Rivers Ran Backward

Author: Christopher Phillips

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-04-22

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0190606134

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Most Americans imagine the Civil War in terms of clear and defined boundaries of freedom and slavery: a straightforward division between the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri and the free states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas. However, residents of these western border states, Abraham Lincoln's home region, had far more ambiguous identities-and contested political loyalties-than we commonly assume. In The Rivers Ran Backward, Christopher Phillips sheds light on the fluid political cultures of the "Middle Border" states during the Civil War era. Far from forming a fixed and static boundary between the North and South, the border states experienced fierce internal conflicts over their political and social loyalties. White supremacy and widespread support for the existence of slavery pervaded the "free" states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, which had much closer economic and cultural ties to the South, while those in Kentucky and Missouri held little identification with the South except over slavery. Debates raged at every level, from the individual to the state, in parlors, churches, schools, and public meeting places, among families, neighbors, and friends. Ultimately, the pervasive violence of the Civil War and the cultural politics that raged in its aftermath proved to be the strongest determining factor in shaping these states' regional identities, leaving an indelible imprint on the way in which Americans think of themselves and others in the nation. The Rivers Ran Backward reveals the complex history of the western border states as they struggled with questions of nationalism, racial politics, secession, neutrality, loyalty, and even place-as the Civil War tore the nation, and themselves, apart. In this major work, Phillips shows that the Civil War was more than a conflict pitting the North against the South, but one within the West that permanently reshaped American regions.

American Leviathan
American Leviathan

Author: Patrick Griffin

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2008-04

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780809024919

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The dark and bloody ground of the frontier during the years of the American Revolution created much that we associate with the idea of America. Between 1763 and 1795, westerners not only participated in a war of independence but also engaged in a revolution that ushered in fundamental changes in the relationship between individuals and society. In the West, the process was stripped down to its essence: uncertainty, competition, disorder, and frenzied and contradictory attempts to reestablish order. The violent nature of the contest to reconstitute sovereignty produced a revolutionary settlement, riddled with what we would regard as paradox, in which new notions of race went hand in hand with new definitions of citizenship. In the almost Hobbesian state of nature that the West had become, westerners created a liberating yet frightening vision of what society was to be. In vivid detail, Patrick Griffin recaptures a chaotic world of settlers, Indians, speculators, British regulars, and American and state officials vying with one another to remake the American West during its most formative period.

Union Jacks
Union Jacks

Author: Michael J. Bennett

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9780807828700

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Historians have given a great deal of attention to the lives and experiences of Civil War soldiers, but surprisingly little is known about navy sailors who participated in the conflict. Michael J. Bennett remedies the longstanding neglect of Civil War sea

Genteel Rebel
Genteel Rebel

Author: Sheila R. Phipps

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2003-10-13

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0807165387

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This elegantly written biography depicts the combined effect of social structure, character, and national crisis on a woman’s life. Mary Greenhow Lee (1819–1907) was raised in a privileged Virginia household. As a young woman, she flirted with President Van Buren’s son, drank tea with Dolley Madison, and frolicked in bedsheets through the streets of Washington with her sister-in-law, future Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow. Later in life, Lee debated with senators, fed foreign emissaries and correspondents, scolded generals, and nursed soldiers. As a Confederate sympathizer in the hotly contested small border town of Winchester, Virginia, she ran an underground postal service, hid contraband under her nieces’ dresses, abetted the Rebel cause, and was finally banished. Lee’s personal history is an intriguing story. It is also an account of the complex social relations that characterized nineteenth-century life. She was an elite southern woman who knew the rules but who also flouted and other times flaunted the prevailing gender arrangements. Her views on status suggest that the immeasurable markers of prestige were much more important than wealth in her social stratum. She had strong ideas about who was (or was not) her “equal,” yet she married a man of quite modest means. Lee’s biography also enlarges our view of Confederate patriotism, revealing a war within a war and divisions arising as much from politics and geography as from issues of slavery and class. Mary Greenhow Lee was a woman of her time and place — one whose youthful rebellion against her society’s standards yielded to her desire to preserve that society’s way of life. Genteel Rebel illustrates the value of biography as history as it narrates the eventful life of a surprisingly powerful southern lady.

Jefferson's Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion
Jefferson's Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion

Author: Christopher Michael Curtis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-04-30

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1107017408

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Jefferson's Freeholders explores the processes by which Virginia was transformed from a British colony into a Southern slave state. Focusing on ideas of ownership, the book emphasizes the persistent influence of English common law on the state's political culture. It uniquely details how the traditional principles of land tenure were subverted by the economic and political changes of the nineteenth century and how they fostered law reforms that encouraged the idea that slavery should replace land ownership as the distinguishing basis for political power.