The 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory was a watershed event for the fledgling United States. Adding some 829,000 square miles of territory, the Louisiana Purchase set a striking precedent of Presidential power and brought to the surface profound legal and constitutional questions. As the nation continued to expand westward and into the Pacific and Caribbean, critical social, political and constitutional questions arose that greatly tested American resolve and reshaped the nation's founding premises. In this exciting collection, Sanford Levinson and Bartholomew Sparrow bring together noted scholars in American history, constitutional law, and political science to examine role that the Louisiana Purchase played in shaping both the expansionist policies of the nineteenth century and critical interpretations of the Constitution. The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion, 1803–1898 provides a fascinating overview of how the U.S. Constitution and the American political system is inextricably tied to
When the United States won its independence from Great Britain, it also won new lands. Soon, the Louisiana Purchase doubled the country's size. These new lands had to be explored and settled. Brave explorers, such as Lewis and Clark, soon blazed a trail to the West. How did the United States grow after the American Revolution? Why did Thomas Jefferson buy Louisiana from France? What did Lewis and Clark discover on their journey?
A history of nineteenth-century New Orleans and the people who made it a vital, if unexpected, part of an emerging operatic world. New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859 explores the thriving operatic life of New Orleans in the first half of the nineteenth century, drawing out the transatlantic connections that animated it. By focusing on a variety of individuals, their extended webs of human contacts, and the materials that they moved along with them, this book pieces together what it took to bring opera to New Orleans and the ways in which the city’s operatic life shaped contemporary perceptions of global interconnection. The early chapters explore the process of bringing opera to the stage, taking a detailed look at the management of New Orleans’s Francophone theater, the Théâtre d’Orléans, as well as the performers who came to the city and the reception they received. But opera’s significance was not confined to the theater, and later chapters of the book examine how opera permeated everyday life in New Orleans, through popular sheet music, novels, magazines and visual culture, and dancing in its many ballrooms. Just as New Orleans helped to create transatlantic opera, opera in turn helped to create the city of New Orleans.
Kathleen M. Byrd’s Natchitoches, Louisiana, 1803–1840 is an examination of one French Creole community as it transitioned from a fur-trading and agricultural settlement under the control of Spain to a critical American outpost on the Spanish/American frontier and finally to a commercial hub and jumping-off point for those heading west. Byrd focuses on historic events in the area and the long-term French Creole residents as they adapted to the American presence. She also examines the effect of the arrival of the Americans, with their Indian trading house and Indian agency, on Native groups and considers how members of the enslaved population took advantage of opportunities for escape presented by a new international border. Byrd shows how the arrival of Americans forever changed Natchitoches, transforming it from a sleepy frontier settlement into a regional commercial center and staging point for pioneers heading into Texas.
The history of New Orleans at the turn of the nineteenth century In 1795, New Orleans was a sleepy outpost at the edge of Spain's American empire. By the 1820s, it was teeming with life, its levees packed with cotton and sugar. New Orleans had become the unquestioned urban capital of the antebellum South. Looking at this remarkable period filled with ideological struggle, class politics, and powerful personalities, Building the Land of Dreams is the narrative biography of a fascinating city at the most crucial turning point in its history. Eberhard Faber tells the vivid story of how American rule forced New Orleans through a vast transition: from the ordered colonial world of hierarchy and subordination to the fluid, unpredictable chaos of democratic capitalism. The change in authority, from imperial Spain to Jeffersonian America, transformed everything. As the city’s diverse people struggled over the terms of the transition, they built the foundations of a dynamic, contentious hybrid metropolis. Faber describes the vital individuals who played a role in New Orleans history: from the wealthy creole planters who dreaded the influx of revolutionary ideas, to the American arrivistes who combined idealistic visions of a new republican society with selfish dreams of quick plantation fortunes, to Thomas Jefferson himself, whose powerful democratic vision for Louisiana eventually conflicted with his equally strong sense of realpolitik and desire to strengthen the American union. Revealing how New Orleans was formed by America’s greatest impulses and ambitions, Building the Land of Dreams is an inspired exploration of one of the world’s most iconic cities.
Toussaint L’Ouverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth century, in which slaves rebelled against their masters and established the first black republic. In this collection of his writings and speeches, former Haitian politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide demonstrates L’Ouverture’s profound contribution to the struggle for equality.
Bound together by social, demographic, and economic commonalities, the territory extending from East Texas to West Florida occupies a unique space in early American history. A masterful synthesis of two decades of scholarly work, F. Todd Smith's Louisiana and the Gulf South Frontier, 1500-1821 examines the region's history from the eve of European colonization to the final imposition of American hegemony. The agricultural richness of the Gulf Coast gave rise to an extraordinarily diverse society: development of food crops rendered local indigenous groups wealthier and more powerful than their counterparts in New England and the West, and white demand for plantation slave labor produced a disproportionately large black population compared to other parts of the country. European settlers were a heterogeneous mix as well, creating a multinational blend of cultures and religions that did not exist on the largely Anglo-Protestant Atlantic Coast. Because of this diversity, which allowed no single group to gain primacy over the rest, Smith's study characterizes the Gulf South as a frontier from the sixteenth century to the early years of the nineteenth. Only in the twenty years following the Louisiana Purchase did Americans manage to remove most of the Indian tribes, overwhelm Louisiana's French Creoles numerically and politically, and impose a racial system in accordance with the rest of the Deep South. Moving fluently across the boundaries of colonial possessions and state lines, Louisiana and the Gulf South Frontier, 1500-1821 is a comprehensive and highly readable overview of the Gulf Coast's distinctive and enthralling history.
Our Documents is a collection of 100 documents that the staff of the National Archives has judged most important to the development of the United States. The entry for each document includes a short introduction, a facsimile, and a transcript of the document. Backmatter includes further reading, credits, and index. The book is part of the much larger Our Documents initiative sponsored by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), National History Day, the Corporation for National and Community Service, and the USA Freedom Corps.