The City-State of Boston
The City-State of Boston

Author: Mark Peterson

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 764

ISBN-13: 0691209170

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A groundbreaking history of early America that shows how Boston built and sustained an independent city-state in New England before being folded into the United States In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this revered metropolis from these misleading, tired clichés, The City-State of Boston highlights Boston’s overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a pathbreaking and brilliant new history of early America. Following Boston’s development over three centuries, Mark Peterson discusses how this self-governing Atlantic trading center began as a refuge from Britain’s Stuart monarchs and how—through its bargain with the slave trade and ratification of the Constitution—it would tragically lose integrity and autonomy as it became incorporated into the greater United States. The City-State of Boston peels away layers of myth to offer a startlingly fresh understanding of this iconic urban center.

The Common School Awakening
The Common School Awakening

Author: David Komline

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0190085177

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A statue of Horace Mann, erected in front of the Boston State House in 1863, declares him the "Father of the American Public School System." For over a century and a half, most narratives about early American education have taken this epithet as the truth. As Mann looms over the Boston Common, so he has also loomed over discussions of early American schooling. Other scholarship has emphasized economic factors as the main reason for the emergence of public schools. The Common School Awakening offers a new narrative about the rise of public schools in America that counters these conceptions. In this book, David Komline explains how a broad and distinctly American religious consensus emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, allowing people from across the religious spectrum to cooperate in systematizing and professionalizing America's schools in an effort to Christianize the country. At the height of this movement, several states introduced state-sponsored teacher training colleges and concentrated government oversight of schools in offices such as the one held by Mann. Shortly thereafter, the religious consensus that had served as the foundation for this common school system disintegrated. But the system itself remained, the legacy of not just one man, but of a whole network of reformers who put into motion a transatlantic and transdenominational religious movement - the "Common School Awakening."

America’s Great Age of Rhetoric, 1770-1860
America’s Great Age of Rhetoric, 1770-1860

Author: Merrill D. Whitburn

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-05-23

Total Pages: 726

ISBN-13: 9004696601

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This book analyzes the advocacy, conceptualization, and institutionalization of rhetoric from 1770 to 1860. Among the forces promoting advocacy was the need for oratory calling for independence, the belief that using rhetoric was the way to succeed in biblical interpretation and preaching, and the desire for rhetoric as entertainment. Conceptually, leaders followed classical and German rhetoricians in viewing rhetoric as an art of ethical choice. Institutionally, a rhetorician such as Ebenezer Porter called for the development of organizations at all levels, a “sociology of rhetoric.” Orville Dewey highlighted the passion for rhetoric, calling his times “the age of eloquence.”

The Emerson Brothers
The Emerson Brothers

Author: Ronald A. Bosco

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 453

ISBN-13: 0195140362

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The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters is a narrative and epistolary biography drawn from the unpublished lifelong correspondence exchanged among four brothers: Charles Chauncy, Edward Bliss, Ralph Waldo, and William Emerson. This is an extensive correspondence, for not counting Waldo's previously published letters, there are 768 letters exchanged among the brothers and an additional 483 unpublished letters from the brothers to their aunt Mary Moody Emerson, mother Ruth Haskins Emerson, and Charles' fiancee Elizabeth Hoar, among others.While lesser figures might have faltered under the burden of having been born an Emerson, with social, political, and ecclesiastic roots extending back to the first century of New England settlement, the brothers' letters reveal that all were invigorated by a shared sense of origin and aspired to make a significant reputation for themselves. Across six richly developed chapters, the signal events and friendships that shaped the Emerson brothers' lives are strung together to reveal a remarkable family culture. For the first time, The Emerson Brothers treats the illustrious history of the Emerson family in America as a foreshadowing of expectations the brothers inherited; defines the extent of Waldo's debt to William for his encounter with German Biblical Criticism; develops Charles' and Edward's incredibly promising but ultimately tragic lives; examines the profound emotional and intellectual impact of Aunt Mary on the younger Emersons; considers the three-year courtship between Charles and Elizabeth Hoar in the context of Waldo's own marriages; and studies the brothers' preoccupation with financial security for "the family" (revealing, too, that finances were at least as powerful a motivation behind Waldo's 1832 resignation from Boston's Second Church as were the death of his first wife and his religious doubts).This biography approaches Waldo's inner life in a way that makes him a figure to imagine personally by portraying him in relation to his brothers who are his intellectual equals. It offers an imaginative social and cultural history of one of our oldest and most gifted families, unique players in a period often considered to be the "American Renaissance."

John Jacob Astor
John Jacob Astor

Author: John Denis Haeger

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2017-12-01

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 0814343430

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Biography of John Jacob Astor's life and his career as a merchant, fur trader, and land speculator as vehicles for examining several important themes and issues in American economic and urban development between 1790 and 1860. John Jacob Astor was the best-known and most important American businessman for more than a half-century. His career encompassed the country's formative economic years from the precarious days following the American Revolution to the emergence of an urban-centered manufacturing economy in the late 1840s. Change was the dominant motif of the period, and Astor either exemplified the varied economic, social, and political changes in his business career or he directly affected the course of events. In this biography of John Jacob Astor, John Denis Haeger uses Astor's life and his career as a merchant, fur trader, and land speculator as vehicles for examining several important themes and issues in American economic and urban development between 1790 and 1860. Haeger addresses, in fascinating detail, the complexity of Astor's business endeavors, his extensive connections with the country's dominant political figures, and the "modern" business strategies and managerial techniques that he used to build his business empire. Astor was clearly not a business revolutionary who radically altered an existing system. He was, however, an entrepreneur who exerted a profound change on an industry. He fascinated his contemporaries precisely because he so mirrored his age and its changing business and economic patterns. He grasped the greater size and complexity of an emerging commercial economy in post-Revolutionary America and adopted strategies and structures that transformed the fur and China trades. His investment in city real estate, stocks, bonds, and even a western city made him part of America's evolution into an urbanindustrial society. For his era, John Astor's career was remarkable for its modernity, vision, and reflection of American economic and political values. More than just a personal biography, John Jacob Astor combines economic theories with a fascinating narrative that demonstrates, like no other book has, Astor's impact on the early republic.