The first American frontier lay just beyond the Appalachian Mountains and along the Gulf Coast. Here, successive groups of pioneers built new societies and developed new institutions to cope with life in the wilderness. In this thorough revision of his classic account, Malcolm J. Rohrbough tells the dramatic story of these men and women from the first Kentucky settlements to the closing of the frontier. Rohrbough divides his narrative into major time periods designed to establish categories of description and analysis, presenting case studies that focus on the county, the town, the community, and the family, as well as politics and urbanization. He also addresses Spanish, French, and Native American traditions and the anomalous presence of African slaves in the making of this story.
The first American frontier lay just beyond the Appalachian Mountains and along the Gulf Coast. Here, successive groups of pioneers built new societies and developed new institutions to cope with life in the wilderness. In this thorough revision of his classic account, Malcolm J. Rohrbough tells the dramatic story of these men and women from the first Kentucky settlements to the closing of the frontier. Rohrbough divides his narrative into major time periods designed to establish categories of description and analysis, presenting case studies that focus on the county, the town, the community, and the family, as well as politics and urbanization. He also addresses Spanish, French, and Native American traditions and the anomalous presence of African slaves in the making of this story.
Most history concentrates on the broad sweep of events, battles and political decisions, economic advance or decline, landmark issues and events, and the people who lived and made these events tend to be lost in the big picture. Cayton's lively new history of the frontier period in Indiana puts the focus on people, on how they lived, how they viewed their world, and what motivated them. Here are the stories of Jean-Baptiste Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes; George Croghan, the ultimate frontier entrepreneur; the world as seen by George Rogers Clark; Josiah Hamar and John Francis Hamtramck; Little Turtle; Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison and William Henry Harrison; Tenskwatawa; Jonathan Jennings; Calvin Fletcher; and many others. Focusing his account on these and other representative individuals, Cayton retells the story of Indiana's settlement in a human and compelling narrative which makes the experience of exploration and settlement real and exciting. Here is a book that will appeal to the general reader and scholar alike while going a long way to reinfusing our understanding of history and the historical process with the breath of life itself.
As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated in the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government directed billions of dollars to American universities to promote higher enrollments, studies of foreign languages and cultures, and, especially, scientific research. In Cold War University, Matthew Levin traces the paradox that developed: higher education became increasingly enmeshed in the Cold War struggle even as university campuses became centers of opposition to Cold War policies. The partnerships between the federal government and major research universities sparked a campus backlash that provided the foundation, Levin argues, for much of the student dissent that followed. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, one of the hubs of student political activism in the 1950s and 1960s, the protests reached their flashpoint with the 1967 demonstrations against campus recruiters from Dow Chemical, the manufacturers of napalm. Levin documents the development of student political organizations in Madison in the 1950s and the emergence of a mass movement in the decade that followed, adding texture to the history of national youth protests of the time. He shows how the University of Wisconsin tolerated political dissent even at the height of McCarthyism, an era named for Wisconsin's own virulently anti-Communist senator, and charts the emergence of an intellectual community of students and professors that encouraged new directions in radical politics. Some of the events in Madison—especially the 1966 draft protests, the 1967 sit-in against Dow Chemical, and the 1970 Sterling Hall bombing—have become part of the fabric of "The Sixties," touchstones in an era that continues to resonate in contemporary culture and politics.
This second volume of President McKinley, War and Empire assesses five theories that have dominated analysis of modern societies in the last century--liberalism, Marxism, mass society, pluralism, and elitism--in accounting for an aberrant event in American history: the Spanish-American War. President McKinley and the Coming of the War 1898, volume 1 of this definitive history, considered the origins of that war. This second volume is concerned with the war's outcome; the settlement in which the U.S. gained an "empire." The book begins by reviewing various expansionist episodes in U.S. history--some successes, some failures--and by analyzing the complexities, support, and opposition involved in expansionism. It then examines the work of expansionist writers, men said to have "driven" the 1898-99 movement, finding these claims to be questionable. Hamilton assesses McKinley's decision-making in regard to the settlement of the Spanish-American War, including the influences that might have moved him, as well as his own justifications. He then reviews the subsequent achievements: the size and character of the new American "empire;" trade flows the Philippine experience and U.S. efforts in China--supposedly the prime goal of the new imperialism. Many contemporary writers anticipated great possibilities in China, but that "fabled" market remained minuscule throughout the following century. Much American trade continued to be with Western Europe, while the biggest change in U.S. exports went largely unnoticed--Canada became the nation's number one trading partner. In much historical writing, McKinley is portrayed as little more than a "front man" for Mark Hanna, the adept businessman-politician who organized and led his presidential campaign, aided by generous financial contributions from business leaders across the nation. Hanna certainly was a leading figure in McKinley's career, but the assumption that his influence was controlling is not justified, as has been shown in recent research. McKinley was far more than a figurehead easily manipulated by representatives of "the interests."
From French coureurs de bois coursing through its waterways in the seventeenth century to the lumberjacks who rode logs down those same rivers in the late nineteenth century, settlers came to Wisconsin's frontier seeking wealth and opportunity. Indians mixed with these newcomers, sometimes helping and sometimes challenging them, often benefiting from their guns, pots, blankets, and other trade items. The settlers' frontier produced a state with enormous ethnic variety, but its unruliness worried distant governmental and religious authorities, who soon dispatched officials and missionaries to help guide the new settlements. By 1900 an era was rapidly passing, leaving Wisconsin's peoples with traditions of optimism and self-government, but confronting them also with tangled cutover lands and game scarcities that were a legacy of the settlers' belief in the inexhaustible resources of the frontier.
