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Author: Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville
Publisher: Urbana : University of Illinois Press
Published: 1974
Total Pages: 448
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKConsists of papers originally presented at a conference held at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, in Apr. 1970.
Author: Robert D. Bush
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-15
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 113507772X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1803, the United States purchased 828,000 square miles of land from France at a price of approximately three cents per acre, dramatically altering the young nation’s geography and its political future. President Thomas Jefferson had struggled for three years over the purchase, which many believed to be unconstitutional, during which time the land changed hands between the French and the Spanish. In perhaps the nation's most formative development since the Revolutionary War, the deal secured the U.S. territory that would become fifteen new states, sparked intense public argument about the American Frontier, and ensured Jefferson a complicated legacy in American history. With special attention to the diplomatic and constitutional background of the purchase, The Louisiana Purchase examines the event in the context of the Atlantic world, including the impact of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars in Europe, colonial revolutions in the Caribbean, and the westward expansion of the U.S. population. In five concise chapters bolstered by primary documents including treaties, letters, and first-hand observations, Robert D. Bush introduces students to the political history of this momentous land acquisition.
Author: George R. Matthews
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2016-02-22
Total Pages: 215
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThrough careful examination of primary documents, this book reveals that the true purpose of Zebulon Pike's western expedition in 1806–1807 was not innocent exploration of the West but an espionage mission in preparation for an American invasion of New Mexico. In 1806, the United States was on the brink of war with Spain over the disputed western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase and anticipated invading New Mexico. Possessing only meager information on the terrain as well as Spanish troop numbers and fortifications, President Thomas Jefferson and General James Wilkinson needed an agent who could cross the continent to Spanish territory all the way to the capital of Santa Fe, provide a plausible "cover story" for being there, and return with the vital information. Zebulon Pike: Thomas Jefferson's Agent for Empire is the story of how Pike carried out his mission as a prelude to an American invasion of New Mexico. This unique book is the first to fully chronicle Pike's 1806–1807 expedition to the Rocky Mountains and beyond, addressing both the exploratory and the clandestine purposes of Pike's western journey. By carefully examining the evidence available in primary documents, which shows that Pike prepared and carried a map showing a route to Santa Fe on his journey, the author overturns the conventional wisdom that Pike became lost searching for the Red River and mistakenly wandered into Spanish territory. This book also presents the Spanish perspective and response to Pike's invasion of Spanish territory and provides historical context to understand the role of Pike's expedition in Thomas Jefferson's quest to build an American "empire for liberty."
Author:
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 252
ISBN-13: 9781610754590
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Kathleen DuVal
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2011-06-03
Total Pages: 338
ISBN-13: 0812201825
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn The Native Ground, Kathleen DuVal argues that it was Indians rather than European would-be colonizers who were more often able to determine the form and content of the relations between the two groups. Along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, far from Paris, Madrid, and London, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. Rather than being colonized, Indians drew European empires into local patterns of land and resource allocation, sustenance, goods exchange, gender relations, diplomacy, and warfare. Placing Indians at the center of the story, DuVal shows both their diversity and our contemporary tendency to exaggerate the influence of Europeans in places far from their centers of power. Europeans were often more dependent on Indians than Indians were on them. Now the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, this native ground was originally populated by indigenous peoples, became part of the French and Spanish empires, and in 1803 was bought by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Drawing on archaeology and oral history, as well as documents in English, French, and Spanish, DuVal chronicles the successive migrations of Indians and Europeans to the area from precolonial times through the 1820s. These myriad native groups—Mississippians, Quapaws, Osages, Chickasaws, Caddos, and Cherokees—and the waves of Europeans all competed with one another for control of the region. Only in the nineteenth century did outsiders initiate a future in which one people would claim exclusive ownership of the mid-continent. After the War of 1812, these settlers came in numbers large enough to overwhelm the region's inhabitants and reject the early patterns of cross-cultural interdependence. As citizens of the United States, they persuaded the federal government to muster its resources on behalf of their dreams of landholding and citizenship. With keen insight and broad vision, Kathleen DuVal retells the story of Indian and European contact in a more complex and, ultimately, more satisfactory way.
Author: Herman J. Viola
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780806199351
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Here is...one of the most important books in modern times on Indian-white relations." ---Western Historical Quarterly "Dr. Viola has...provided us with what will undoubtedly be the last word on the topic." ---American Indian Quarterly "Diplomats in Buckskins is loaded with historical fact, but this does not make it dry reading. Beyond being extremely entertained we can be educated by a work that tells us a lot more about ourselves as a nation. We are a people of so many origins. It gives perspective to know that a part of us once negotiated with another part as separate and soverign nations." ---Minnesota History "This volume is a soundly-represented and imaginative study of the delegations of tribal representatives who visited Washington largely between 1800 and 1900....The diligence with which Dr. Viola pursued his research has enabled him to write a most rewarding book which captures the agonies and pleasures, successes and defeats, and humor and pathos of the delegates as they conferred with Washington's sympathetic bur mostly patronizing and diffident bureaucracy." ---Journal of the West
Author: Marion Bragg
Publisher: USACE, Vicksburg District
Published: 1977-06-01
Total Pages: 294
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Marion Bragg
Publisher:
Published: 1977
Total Pages: 300
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: J.M. Opal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-05-01
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 0190660260
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMost Americans know Andrew Jackson as a frontier rebel against political and diplomatic norms, a "populist" champion of ordinary people against the elitist legacy of the Founding Fathers. Many date the onset of American democracy to his 1829 inauguration. Despite his reverence for the "sovereign people," however, Jackson spent much of his career limiting that sovereignty, imposing new and often unpopular legal regimes over American lands and markets. He made his name as a lawyer, businessman, and official along the Carolina and Tennessee frontiers, at times ejecting white squatters from native lands and returning slaves to native planters in the name of federal authority and international law. On the other hand, he waged total war on the Cherokees and Creeks who terrorized western settlements and raged at the national statesmen who refused to "avenge the blood" of innocent colonists. During the long war in the south and west from 1811 to 1818 he brushed aside legal restraints on holy genocide and mass retaliation, presenting himself as the only man who would protect white families from hostile empires, "heathen" warriors, and rebellious slaves. He became a towering hero to those who saw the United States as uniquely lawful and victimized. And he used that legend to beat back a range of political, economic, and moral alternatives for the republican future. Drawing from new evidence about Jackson and the southern frontiers, Avenging the People boldly reinterprets the grim and principled man whose version of American nationhood continues to shape American democracy.
Author: Michael R. Allen
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 1994-04-01
Total Pages: 284
ISBN-13: 9780807119075
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWestern Rivermen, the first documented sociocultural history of its subject, is a fascinating book. Michael Allen explores the rigorous lives of professional boatmen who plied non-steam vessels—flatboats, keelboats, and rafts—on the Ohio and lower Mississippi rivers from 1763-1861. Allen first considers the mythical “half horse, half alligator” boatmen who were an integral part of the folklore of the time. Americans of the Jacksonian and pre-Civil War period perceived the rivermen as hard-drinking, straight-shooting adventurers on the frontier. Their notions were reinforced by romanticized portrayals of the boatmen in songs, paintings, newspaper humor, and literature. Allen contends that these mythical depictions of the boatmen were a reflection of the yearnings of an industrializing people for what they thought to be a simpler time. Allen demonstrates, however, that the actual lives of the rivermen little resembled their portrayals in popular culture. Drawing on more than eighty firsthand accounts—ranging from a short letter to a four-volume memoir—he provides a rounded view of the boatmen that reveals the lonely, dangerous nature of their profession. He also discusses the social and economic aspects of their lives, such as their cargoes, the river towns they visited, and the impact on their lives of the steamboat and advancing civilization. Allen’s comprehensive, highly informative study sheds new light on a group of men who played an important role in the development of the trans-Appalachian West and the ways in which their lives were transformed into one of the enduring themes of American folk culture.
