The Political Adventures of John Henry
Author: Ernest Alexander Cruikshank
Publisher: Macmillan Company of Canada
Published: 1936
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13:
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John Henry Days
Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2009-06-03
Total Pages: 402
ISBN-13: 0307486672
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the bestselling, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, a novel that is "funny and wise and sumptuously written" (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times Book Review). Colson Whitehead’s triumphant novel is on one level a multifaceted retelling of the story of John Henry, the black steel-driver who died outracing a machine designed to replace him. On another level it’s the story of a disaffected, middle-aged black journalist on a mission to set a record for junketeering who attends the annual John Henry Days festival. It is also a high-velocity thrill ride through the tunnel where American legend gives way to American pop culture, replete with p. r. flacks, stamp collectors, blues men , and turn-of-the-century song pluggers. John Henry Days is an acrobatic, intellectually dazzling, and laugh-out-loud funny book that will be read and talked about for years to come. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!
The Virginia Dynasty
Author: Lynne Cheney
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2021-09-21
Total Pages: 449
ISBN-13: 1101980052
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“The narrative offers informed, exacting characterizations of the uncertain political alliances, strained interactions and ideological growing pains that elites of the post-revolutionary decades put the country through.”—Andrew Burstein, The Washington Post A vivid account of leadership focusing on the first four Virginia presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe—from the bestselling historian and author of James Madison. From a small expanse of land on the North American continent came four of the nation's first five presidents—a geographic dynasty whose members led a revolution, created a nation, and ultimately changed the world. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were born, grew to manhood, and made their homes within a sixty-mile circle east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Friends and rivals, they led in securing independence, hammering out the United States Constitution, and building a working republic. Acting together, they doubled the territory of the United States. From their disputes came American political parties and the weaponizing of newspapers, the media of the day. In this elegantly conceived and insightful new book from bestselling author Lynne Cheney, the four Virginians are not marble icons but vital figures deeply intent on building a nation where citizens could be free. Focusing on the intersecting roles these men played as warriors, intellectuals, and statesmen, Cheney takes us back to an exhilarating time when the Enlightenment opened new vistas for humankind. But even as the Virginians advanced liberty, equality, and human possibility, they held people in slavery and were slaveholders when they died. Lives built on slavery were incompatible with a free and just society; their actions contradicted the very ideals they espoused. They managed nonetheless to pass down those ideals, and they became powerful weapons for ending slavery. They inspired Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and today undergird the freest nation on earth. Taking full measure of strengths and failures in the personal as well as the political lives of the men at the center of this book, Cheney offers a concise and original exploration of how the United States came to be.
Prologue to War
Author: Bradford Perkins
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2023-04-28
Total Pages: 480
ISBN-13: 0520316061
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.
Serpent in Eden
Author: Tyson Reeder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2024-07
Total Pages: 441
ISBN-13: 0197628591
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Between Dissent and Disloyalty traces early America's troubled history of foreign meddling and political conflict through the career of James Madison. Spanning the period from the American Revolution to the War of 1812, it reveals a nation ensnared by partisanship and foreign hostility. Foreign governments exploited party distrust and interfered in U.S. elections to advance their own agendas and weaken the United States. As political hostility mounted, Americans confused dissent with disloyalty, imperiling the United States. As a leading delegate at the Constitutional Convention, Republican congressional leader, secretary of state, and president, Madison grappled with foreign meddling over three decades. At the same time, he emerged as a party leader, feeding the very partisanship that bred foreign intrigues. His career embodies the calamitous barrage of accusations and counteraccusations of foreign collusion that culminated in the War of 1812. Madison left a complicated legacy as a fierce adversary of foreign meddling and determined champion of political debate-but also as a partisan operative who facilitated the first by inflaming the second. Forged in partisan conflict, the United States remains vulnerable to foreign powers that aggravate political discord. Americans continue to test whether the constitutional system Madison was so central in implementing can withstand foreign interference while accommodating intense political hostility. That question remained inconclusive during his lifetime, but his successes and failures, along with his original vision of the Constitution and party politics, may help Americans chart a path away from political hysteria and polarization"--
The Civil War of 1812
Author: Alan Taylor
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2011-10-04
Total Pages: 642
ISBN-13: 0679776737
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the early nineteenth century, Britons and Americans renewed their struggle over the legacy of the American Revolution, leading to a second confrontation that redefined North America. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor’s vivid narrative tells the riveting story of the soldiers, immigrants, settlers, and Indians who fought to determine the fate of a continent. Would revolutionary republicanism sweep the British from Canada? Or would the British contain, divide, and ruin the shaky republic? In a world of double identities, slippery allegiances, and porous boundaries, the leaders of the republic and of the empire struggled to control their own diverse peoples. The border divided Americans—former Loyalists and Patriots—who fought on both sides in the new war, as did native peoples defending their homelands. And dissident Americans flirted with secession while aiding the British as smugglers and spies. During the war, both sides struggled to sustain armies in a northern land of immense forests, vast lakes, and stark seasonal swings in the weather. After fighting each other to a standstill, the Americans and the British concluded that they could safely share the continent along a border that favored the United States at the expense of Canadians and Indians. Moving beyond national histories to examine the lives of common men and women, The Civil War of 1812 reveals an often brutal (sometimes comic) war and illuminates the tangled origins of the United States and Canada. Moving beyond national histories to examine the lives of common men and women, The Civil War of 1812 reveals an often brutal (sometimes comic) war and illuminates the tangled origins of the United States and Canada.
Warring for America
Author: Nicole Eustace
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2017-08-08
Total Pages: 513
ISBN-13: 1469631768
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe War of 1812 was one of a cluster of events that left unsettled what is often referred to as the Revolutionary settlement. At once postcolonial and neoimperial, the America of 1812 was still in need of definition. As the imminence of war intensified the political, economic, and social tensions endemic to the new nation, Americans of all kinds fought for country on the battleground of culture. The War of 1812 increased interest in the American democratic project and elicited calls for national unity, yet the essays collected in this volume suggest that the United States did not emerge from war in 1815 having resolved the Revolution's fundamental challenges or achieved a stable national identity. The cultural rifts of the early republican period remained vast and unbridged. Contributors: Brian Connolly, University of South Florida Anna Mae Duane, University of Connecticut Duncan Faherty, Queens College, CUNY James M. Greene, Pittsburg State University Matthew Rainbow Hale, Goucher College Jonathan Hancock, Hendrix College Tim Lanzendoerfer, University of Mainz Karen Marrero, Wayne State University Nathaniel Millett, St. Louis University Christen Mucher, Smith College Dawn Peterson, Emory University Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, University of Michigan David Waldstreicher, The Graduate Center, CUNY Eric Wertheimer, Arizona State University
1812
Author: Jon Latimer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009-07-01
Total Pages: 664
ISBN-13: 9780674039957
DOWNLOAD EBOOKListen to a short interview with Jon Latimer Host: Chris Gondek - Producer: Heron & Crane In the first complete history of the War of 1812 written from a British perspective, Jon Latimer offers an authoritative and compelling account that places the conflict in its strategic context within the Napoleonic wars. The British viewed the War of 1812 as an ill-fated attempt by the young American republic to annex Canada. For British Canada, populated by many loyalists who had fled the American Revolution, this was a war for survival. The Americans aimed both to assert their nationhood on the global stage and to expand their territory northward and westward. Americans would later find in this war many iconic moments in their national story--the bombardment of Fort McHenry (the inspiration for Francis Scott Key's Star Spangled Banner); the Battle of Lake Erie; the burning of Washington; the death of Tecumseh; Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans--but their war of conquest was ultimately a failure. Even the issues of neutrality and impressment that had triggered the war were not resolved in the peace treaty. For Britain, the war was subsumed under a long conflict to stop Napoleon and to preserve the empire. The one lasting result of the war was in Canada, where the British victory eliminated the threat of American conquest, and set Canadians on the road toward confederation. Latimer describes events not merely through the eyes of generals, admirals, and politicians but through those of the soldiers, sailors, and ordinary people who were directly affected. Drawing on personal letters, diaries, and memoirs, he crafts an intimate narrative that marches the reader into the heat of battle.
American Nationalisms
Author: Benjamin E. Park
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-01-11
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 1108355994
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmerica was born in an age of political revolution throughout the Atlantic world, a period when the very definition of 'nation' was transforming. Benjamin E. Park traces how Americans imagined novel forms of nationality during the country's first five decades within the context of European discussions taking place at the same time. Focusing on three case studies - Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina - Park examines the developing practices of nationalism in three specific contexts. He argues for a more elastic connection between nationalism and the nation-state by demonstrating that ideas concerning political and cultural allegiance to a federal body developed in different ways and at different rates throughout the nation. American Nationalisms explores how ideas of nationality permeated political disputes, religious revivals, patriotic festivals, slavery debates, and even literature.
North of America
Author: Jeffers Lennox
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-08-30
Total Pages: 364
ISBN-13: 0300268777
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow the United States was created—a complex and surprising story of patriots, Indigenous peoples, loyalists, visionaries and scoundrels The story of the Thirteen Colonies’ struggle for independence from Britain is well known to every American schoolchild. But at the start of the Revolutionary War, there were more than thirteen British colonies in North America. Patriots were surrounded by Indigenous homelands and loyal provinces. Independence had its limits. Upper Canada, Lower Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and especially the homelands that straddled colonial borders, were far less foreign to the men and women who established the United States than Canada is to those who live here now. These northern neighbors were far from inactive during the Revolution. The participation of the loyal British provinces and Indigenous nations that largely rejected the Revolution—as antagonists, opponents, or bystanders—shaped the progress of the conflict and influenced the American nation’s early development. In this book, historian Jeffers Lennox looks north, as so many Americans at that time did, and describes how Loyalists and Indigenous leaders frustrated Patriot ambitions, defended their territory, and acted as midwives to the birth of the United States while restricting and redirecting its continental aspirations.
