"'Give me Liberty, or give me Death'!" is a famous quotation attributed to Patrick Henry from a speech he made to the Virginia Convention. It was given March 23, 1775, at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia, ..
Bring history to life for students in grades 6–12 using Exploration, Revolution, and Constitution! This 128-page book is perfect for independent study or use as a tutorial aid. It explores history, geography, and social studies with activities that involve critical thinking, writing, and technology. The book includes topics such as the land of the Vikings, Christopher Columbus, colonial life, the Boston Tea Party, and patriots. It also includes vocabulary words, time lines, maps, and reading lists. The book supports NCSS standards and aligns with state, national, and Canadian provincial standards.
"Every American Interested in understanding the American character and the American past should read this book. There are vivid history lessons on almost every page. The constitution becomes not merely a brilliant blueprint for governance. It is-and was-also the only alternative to chaos. - Thomas Fleming, author of The Perils of Peace Acclaim for The Unexpected George Washington. "It's hard to imagine George Washington as playful, tender, or funny. But Harlow Unger searches to find these seldom-seen aspects of the private man, and the result is a fare more complete and believable founding father." - James C. Rees, Executive Director, Historic Mount Vernon "An intimate view of the American hero who managed to follow his ambitions to great power without being disdained for them." - Publishers Weekly
This small book, first published in 1926, is comprised of three lectures on the American Revolution considered as a Social Movement, which were delivered by renowned historian and author J. Franklin Jameson in November 1925 on the Louis Clark Vanuxem foundation. In the fourth and final chapter, Jameson sums up and provides thoughts in conclusion. Proving to be an influential publication, the book expresses themes that Jameson had been developing since the 1890s, and which reflected the “Progressive” historiography. It downplays ideas and political values and stresses that the Revolution was a fight over power among economic interest groups, especially as to who would rule at home. “This is a small but highly significant book by one of the first scholars of America...A truly notable book, this is, carefully organized, cut with a diamond point to a finish, studded with novel illustrative materials, gleaming with new illumination, serenely engaging in style, and sparingly garnished with genial humor.”—CHARLES A. BEARD “...stands as a landmark in recent American historiography, a slender but unmistakable signpost, pointing a new direction for historical research and interpretation...The influence of this little book with the long title has grown steadily...With the passage of a quarter-century, the book has achieved the standing of a minor classic. One will hardly find a textbook that does not paraphrase or quote Jameson’s words, borrow his illustrations, cite him in its bibliography.”—FREDERICK B. TOLLES in The American Historical Review “The scholarship is impeccable, the style is polished, and, above all, the outlook is broad and thoughtful...The author has a keen eye for relationships which might easily be neglected.”—ALLAN NEVINS
“Popular history in its most vital and accessible form. Standiford has recovered the mentality of America’s first group of young radicals, the Sons of Liberty, and tells their story with flair and grace.” —Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Founding Brothers Les Standiford’s Last Train to Paradise, the fascinating true account of the building of a railroad “across the ocean” from Miami to Key West, is already a classic of popular history. With Desperate Sons, the New York Times bestselling author of Bringing Adam Home tells the remarkable story of America’s first patriots, the Sons of Liberty, whose revolutionary acts have become legend. With all the suspense and power of a historical action thriller, Standiford’s Desperate Sons recounts the courage and tenacity of a hardy group that included Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and John Hancock—radical activists who were responsible for some of the most notorious events leading up to the American Revolution, from the Boston Tea Party to Paul Revere’s fabled midnight ride. Fans of David McCullough’s John Adams and 1776 will be riveted by this true history of young men inflamed by the fires of common purpose who helped a new nation to rise up against its British oppressor.
John Bingham was the architect of the rebirth of the United States following the Civil War. A leading antislavery lawyer and congressman from Ohio, Bingham wrote the most important part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees fundamental rights and equality to all Americans. He was also at the center of two of the greatest trials in history, giving the closing argument in the military prosecution of John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and in the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. And more than any other man, Bingham played the key role in shaping the Union’s policy towards the occupied ex-Confederate States, with consequences that still haunt our politics. American Founding Son provides the most complete portrait yet of this remarkable statesman. Drawing on his personal letters and speeches, the book traces Bingham’s life from his humble roots in Pennsylvania through his career as a leader of the Republican Party. Gerard N. Magliocca argues that Bingham and his congressional colleagues transformed the Constitution that the Founding Fathers created, and did so with the same ingenuity that their forbears used to create a more perfect union in the 1780s. In this book, Magliocca restores Bingham to his rightful place as one of our great leaders. Gerard N. Magliocca is the Samuel R. Rosen Professor at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. He is the author of three books on constitutional law, and his work on Andrew Jackson was the subject of an hour-long program on C-Span’s Book TV.
In the years between the Revolutionary War and the drafting of the Constitution, American gentlemen—the merchants, lawyers, planters, and landowners who comprised the independent republic's elite—worked hard to maintain their positions of power. Gentlemen Revolutionaries shows how their struggles over status, hierarchy, property, and control shaped the ideologies and institutions of the fledgling nation. Tom Cutterham examines how, facing pressure from populist movements as well as the threat of foreign empires, these gentlemen argued among themselves to find new ways of justifying economic and political inequality in a republican society. At the heart of their ideology was a regime of property and contract rights derived from the norms of international commerce and eighteenth-century jurisprudence. But these gentlemen were not concerned with property alone. They also sought personal prestige and cultural preeminence. Cutterham describes how, painting the egalitarian freedom of the republic's "lower sort" as dangerous licentiousness, they constructed a vision of proper social order around their own fantasies of power and justice. In pamphlets, speeches, letters, and poetry, they argued that the survival of the republican experiment in the United States depended on the leadership of worthy gentlemen and the obedience of everyone else. Lively and elegantly written, Gentlemen Revolutionaries demonstrates how these elites, far from giving up their attachment to gentility and privilege, recast the new republic in their own image.
Women of the Republic views the American Revolution through women's eyes. Previous histories have rarely recognized that the battle for independence was also a woman's war. The "women of the army" toiled in army hospitals, kitchens, and laundries. Civilian women were spies, fund raisers, innkeepers, suppliers of food and clothing. Recruiters, whether patriot or tory, found men more willing to join the army when their wives and daughters could be counted on to keep the farms in operation and to resist enchroachment from squatters. "I have Don as much to Carrey on the warr as maney that Sett Now at the healm of government," wrote one impoverished woman, and she was right. Women of the Republic is the result of a seven-year search for women's diaries, letters, and legal records. Achieving a remarkable comprehensiveness, it describes women's participation in the war, evaluates changes in their education in the late eighteenth century, describes the novels and histories women read and wrote, and analyzes their status in law and society. The rhetoric of the Revolution, full of insistence on rights and freedom in opposition to dictatorial masters, posed questions about the position of women in marriage as well as in the polity, but few of the implications of this rhetoric were recognized. How much liberty and equality for women? How much pursuit of happiness? How much justice? When American political theory failed to define a program for the participation of women in the public arena, women themselves had to develop an ideology of female patriotism. They promoted the notion that women could guarantee the continuing health of the republic by nurturing public-spirited sons and husbands. This limited ideology of "Republican Motherhood" is a measure of the political and social conservatism of the Revolution. The subsequent history of women in America is the story of women's efforts to accomplish for themselves what the Revolution did not.