How can Americans develop a coherent overview of the presidency? The Preamble of the Constitution provides a historical foundation to assess the major patterns, events, and policies of seven important presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman. From the 1790s to the 1950s, presidents have faced challenges to the meaning and existence of the Union, the definition and implementation of justice, the necessity of domestic tranquility, the formulation of defense policy to enhance national security, the advancement of general welfare, and the protection and promotion of liberty within the context of their times. This conceptual framework allows readers to study long-term continuity and change in the presidency and in America. In an age of specialization, when most historical studies of individual presidents are hundreds, even thousands of pages long, Saunders gives readers a brief, interpretive overview of select presidents. The elegant, flexible, and understandable framework of the Preamble provides the historical foundation for the assessment of the presidency and the individuals occupying this important office. Readers will be able to use this assessable framework to study other presidents, bringing the discussion of the presidency as an evolving institution up to the present day.

This book is an innovative comparative study of persons of African origin and descent in two urban environments of the early modern Atlantic world. The author follows these men and women as they struggle with slavery, negotiations of manumission, and efforts to adapt to a life in freedom, ultimately illustrating how their choices and actions placed them at the foreground of the development of Atlantic urban slavery and emancipation.

A readable and wide-ranging contribution to the social history of New England, this volume treats subjects as diverse as economic growth, wealth distribution, poor relief, local government, office-holding, leadership, urban development, and historiography. Each essay takes a comparative approach to its subject, identifying general patterns within New England society as well as significant regional, typological, and idiosyncratic variations and changes that occurred over the course of the eighteenth century. Collectively, the work creates a picture of an increasingly heterogeneous society fragmenting into competing economic, political, and social groups.

Although largely quantitative in approach, the book is written to be accessible both to undergraduates just beginning their study of social history and experienced researchers who seek a deeper understanding of particular aspects of New England's history. As such, it will be an ideal supplemental text for courses on American history, colonial history, and social, community, or New England history.

This work is a path-breaking study of the changing attitudes of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa to Britain and the Commonwealth in the 1940s and the effect of those changes on their individual and collective standing in international affairs. The focus is imperial preference, the largest discriminatory tariff system in the world, and a potent symbol of Commonwealth unity.

Colonial Transformations covers early modern English poetry and plays, Gaelic poetry, and a wide range of English colonial propaganda. In the book, Bach contends that England’s colonial ambitions surface in all of its literary texts. Those texts played multiple roles in England’s colonial expansions and emerging imperialism. Those roles included publicizing colonial efforts, defining some people as white and some as barbarians, constituting enduring stereotypes of native people, and resisting official versions of colonial encounters.

African slavery was pervasive in Spain's Atlantic empire yet remained in the margins of the imperial economy until the end of the eighteenth century when the plantation revolution in the Caribbean colonies put the slave traffic and the plantation at the center of colonial exploitation and conflict. The international group of scholars brought together in this volume explain Spain's role as a colonial pioneer in the Atlantic world and its latecomer status as a slave-trading, plantation-based empire. These contributors map the broad contours and transformations of slave-trafficking, the plantation, and antislavery in the Hispanic Atlantic while also delving into specific topics that include: the institutional and economic foundations of colonial slavery; the law and religion; the influences of the Haitian Revolution and British abolitionism; antislavery and proslavery movements in Spain; race and citizenship; and the business of the illegal slave trade.

Recent research has begun to highlight the importance of German arguments about legitimate resistance and self-defence for French, English and Scottish Protestants. This book systematically studies the reception of German thought in England, arguing that it played a much greater role than has hitherto been acknowledged. Both the Marian exiles, and others concerned with the fate of continental Protestantism, eagerly read what German reformers had to say about the possibility of resisting the religious policies of a monarch without compromising the institution of monarchy itself. However, the transfer of German arguments to England, with its individual political and constitutional environment, necessarily involved the subtle transformation of these arguments into forms compatible with local traditions. In this way, German arguments contributed significantly to the emergence of new theories, emphasising natural rights.

Settled for many thousands of years by Native Americans, who had developed extensive, varied and long-lasting cultures across the continent, North America's economic development on the eve of the European invasions was not hugely dissimilar to that of the European settlers themselves. 

A groundbreaking collection of oral histories, letters, interviews, and governmental reports related to the history of Latino education in the US. Victoria-María MacDonald examines the intersection of history, Latino culture, and education while simultaneously encouraging undergraduates and graduate students to reexamine their relationship to the world of education and their own histories.

Uniting twelve original studies by scholars of early modern history, literature, and the arts, this collection is the first that foregrounds the dialectical quality of early modern Orientalism by taking a broad interdisciplinary perspective. Dialectics of Orientalism demonstrates how texts and images of the sixteenth and seventeenth century from across Europe and the New World are better understood as part of a dynamic and transformative orientalist discourse rather than a manifestation of the supposed dichotomy between the 'East' and the 'West.' The volume's central claim is that early modern orientalist discourses are fundamentally open, self-critical, and creative. Analyzing a varied corpus-from German and Dutch travelogues to Spanish humanist treaties, French essays, Flemish paintings, and English diaries-this collection thus breathes fresh air into the critique of Orientalism and provides productive new perspectives for the study of east-west and indeed globalized exchanges in the early modern world.

The discipline of social history has for many decades focused on the lives of so-called "ordinary" people. Less studied, however, has been the ways in which the perceptions and roles of these individuals changed over time - both in historical theory and practice. In particular, in Europe beginning in the sixteenth century, they were no longer simply ignored, feared, or denigrated by elites: they came to be seen, however cautiously, as having value through their skills and crafts, or in their ability to reason, or even in their contributions to anchoring the stability of the state. It is not accidental that these sorts of practices on the part of ordinary people became valorized more visibly in the English and Dutch contexts. After 1550 the Dutch Revolt cast ordinary people, particularly in urban settings, as participants on either the Catholic Spanish side or among the Dutch rebels and their reformed churches. Meanwhile, the English civil wars of the 1640s did something similar, and also produced a body of theoretical literature on the capacities of ordinary men and even women that became central to Western democratic thinking. In the fascinating array of studies gathered here, we see how the study of these participants' social identities imparts historical texture and enables us to understand early modernity with greater clarity.

This work considers how Frenchwomen participated in Christian religious practice during the sixteenth century, with their words and their actions. Using extensive original and archival sources, it provides a comprehensive study of how women contributed to institutional, theological, devotional and political religious matters. Challenging the view of religious reforms and ideas imposed by male authorities upon women, this study argues instead that women, Catholic and Calvinist, lay and monastic, were deeply involved in the culture, meanings and development of contemporary religious practices.

This description of this very important book to the American Revolution, especially to the troops at Valley Forge, is best said by these famous words of Thomas Paine: "These are the times that try mens's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the services of their country, but he that stands now, desrves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the truimph. What we attain to cheap, we esteem to lightly; it is this dearness only that gives everything it's value." Many men at Valley Forge read this book and decided to fight rather than leave the service of the Revolution even tho their enlistments were up very soon. It can be said, that if Thomas Paine had not written this book at the time he did - The Revolution would have been lost American's 'today' need to know what our forefathers did while suffering everything - from the weather, the lack of food, bad medical condition, no boots and winter clothes and superiority of the English military in numbers and weapons in order to establish the United States of America. The American patriots had 100 times the motivation of the English as they fought for freedom and liberty. Not many American's today know that 40,000 of our brethern died in the fields of battle to give us what we have today The 4th of July is not only Independence Day but Patriots Day. Thomas Paine is one of the greatest heros of the Revolution and the Revolution did not come easy All Power To The People A Collector's Edition.

Starting in the 15th century, a fear of witchcraft and alternative practices grew into a hysteria. Because witches were suspected to be devil worshippers, they were considered heretics to the Christian church. Consequently, the Christians launched a crusade against these women and men. Matthew Hopkins was not only among the greatest supporters of this crusade, but also one of the most active participants. In just over a year, Matthew Hopkins, a self-proclaimed "Witchfinder General", killed over one hundred people. While the witch hunt hysteria infected much of the 17th century society in England, there were still those who opposed the accusations and discrimination against witches. After being criticized for his work, Hopkins decided to publish a guide to witch hunting, including methods to discover a witch, how to torture them into a confession, and how to prosecute them. Along with outlines of torture methods, such as sleep deprivation and forced physical activity, The Discovery of Witches also addressed the questions and concerns raised by those who did not support Hopkins. Under the guise of being a man of God, Hopkins claimed to have been sent on a divine mission to manipulate other religious groups into joining his cause. As Hopkin's practices brought him lucrative success, he rose to a short-lived power, but his published doctrine spread his influence for years after his death. The Discovery of Witches by Matthew Hopkins is a short text of immeasurable insight. Though now recognized as zealot propaganda, The Discovery of Witches depicts a chilling perspective of a heinous time in history, including the concerns of those who opposed it. While Hopkin's work immortalizes a fascinating yet repulsive historical movement, it also invites readers to reflect on the ways the spirit of his manipulation is still present in modern society. This edition of The Discovery of Witches by Matthew Hopkins features an eye-catching cover deign and is printed in an easy-to-read font, making it both readable and modern.

For many years, scholars struggled to write the history of the constitution and political structure of the Holy Roman Empire. This book argues that this was because the political and social order could not be understood without considering the rituals and symbols that held the Empire together. What determined the rules (and whether they were followed) depended on complex symbolic-ritual actions. By examining key moments in the political history of the Empire, the author shows that it was a vocabulary of symbols, not the actual written laws, that formed a political language indispensable in maintaining the common order.

"High and Mighty Queens" of Early Modern England is a truly interdisciplinary anthology of essays including articles on such actual queen regnants as Mary I and Elizabeth I, and queen consorts such as Anne Boleyn, Anna of Denmark, and Henrietta Maria. The collection also deals with a number of literary representations of earlier historical queens such as Cleopatra, and semi-historical ones such as Gertrude, Tamora, and Lady Macbeth, and such fictional ones as Hermione and the queen of Cymbeline, all of them Shakespeare characters. This fascinating look at Renaissance queens also examines myth and folklore, Romantic or Victorian representations, and the depictions of queens like Catherine de Medici of France in twentieth century film.

Catalonia: A New History revises many traditional and romantic conceptions in the historiography of a small nation. This book engages with the scholarship of the past decade and separates nationalist myth-history from real historical processes. It is thus able to provide the reader with an analytical account, situating each historical period within its temporal context. Catalonia emerges as a territory where complex social forces interact, where revolts and rebellions are frequent. This is a contested terrain where political ideologies have sought to impose their interpretation of Catalan reality. This book situates Catalonia within the wider currents of European and Spanish history, from pre-history to the contemporary independence movement, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of nation-making.

Ships on maps in the sixteenth century were signs of European conquest of the seas. Cartographers commemorated the new found dominion over the oceans by putting the most technically advanced ships of the day all over oceans, estuaries, rivers, and lakes on all kinds of maps. Ships virtually never appeared on maps before 1375. The dramatic change from medieval practice had roots in practical problems but also in exploration and new geographical knowledge. Map makers produced beautiful works of art and decorated them with the accomplishments which set Europeans apart from their classical past and from all the other peoples of the world. "Ships on Maps" investigates how, long admired but little understood, the many ships big and small that came to decorate maps in the age when sailors began to sail around the world were an integral part of the information summarizing a new age.

Originally published in 1985 the English Civil War is a subject which continues to excite enormous interest throughout the world. This atlas consists of over fifty maps illustrating all the major - and many of the minor - bloody campaigns and battles of the War, including the campaigns of Montrose, the battle of Edgehill and Langport. Providing a complete introductory history to the turbulent period, it also includes maps giving essential background information; detailed accompanying explanations; a useful context to events.

Seafarers were the first workers to inhabit a truly international labour market, a sector of industry which, throughout the early modern period, drove European economic and imperial expansion, technological and scientific development, and cultural and material exchanges around the world. This volume adopts a comparative perspective, presenting current research about maritime labourers across three centuries, in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, to understand how seafarers contributed to legal and economic transformation within Europe and across the world. Focusing on the three related themes of legal systems, labouring conditions, and imperial power, these essays explore the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between seafarers' individual and collective agency, and the social and economic frameworks which structured their lives.

The Dutch revolt against Spanish rule in the sixteenth century was a formative event in European history. The Origins and Development of the Dutch Revolt brings together in one volume the latest scholarship from leading experts in the field, to illuminate why the Dutch revolted, the way events unfolded and how they gained independence. In exploring the desire of the Dutch to control their own affairs, it also questions whether Dutch identity came about by accident.
The book makes the most recent research available in English for the first time, focusing on:
* the role of the aristocracy religion
* the towns and provinces
* the Spanish perspective
* finance and ideology.