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Books > Humanities > History > American history
From cooking ?coon and ?possum to recalling the heyday of Melrose
Plantation, these are the heartwarming stories of Hilton Head,
Bluffton and Daufuskie before, as the Gullahs might say, ?it all
change up.? In this second volume of personal memories collected by
Hilton Head journalist Fran Heyward Marscher, area old-timers tell
of the adventures, the industry and the heart of the Lowcountry
itself. Before the golf courses and resorts, the residents of
Beaufort and Jasper Counties often scraped to make a living, but
they left behind stories of enduring devotion and perseverance.
Keeping lighthouses on the coast, developing a method for catching
crabs with only sticks and hunting quail in Hilton Head are only a
few of the tales preserved by local old-timers from the early days
of the twentieth century to the times of economic transition after
World War II. In ice cream and butter beans, picking oysters and
exploring the beach, these memories of the Lowcountry will last for
generations.
The twentieth century has been popularly seen as "the American
Century," as publisher Henry Luce dubbed it, a long period in which
the United States had amassed the economic resources, the political
and military strength, and the moral prestige to assume global
leadership. By century's end, the trajectory of American politics,
the sense of ever waxing federal power, and the nation's place in
the world seemed less assured. Americans of many stripes came to
contest the standard narratives of nation building and
international hegemony that generations of historians dutifully
charted. In this volume, a group of distinguished junior and senior
historians-including John McGreevy, James Campbell, Elizabeth
Borgwardt, Eric Rauchway, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, and James
Kloppenberg- revisit and revise many of the chestnuts of American
political history. First and foremost, the contributors challenge
the teleological view of the inexorable transformation of the
United States into a modern nation. To be sure, chain stores
replaced mom-and-pop businesses, interstate highways knit together
once isolated regions, national media shaped debate from coast-to
coast, and the IRS, the EPA, the Federal Reserve, the Social
Security Administration and other instruments of national power
became daily presences in the lives of ordinary Americans. But the
local and the parochial did not inexorably give way to the national
and eventually to global integration. Instead, the contributors to
this volume illustrate the ongoing dialectic between centrifugal
and centripetal forces in the development of the twentieth century
United States. The essays analyze a host of ways in which local
places are drawn into a wider polity and culture. At the same time,
they reveal how national and international structures and ideas
repeatedly create new kinds of local movements and local energies.
The authors also challenge the tendency to view American politics
as a series of conflicts between liberalism and conservatism, which
Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. and Jr. codified as the idea that American
national politics routinely experienced roughly fifteen year
periods of liberal reform followed by similar intervals of
conservative reaction. For generations, American political history
remained the story of reform, the rise and fall, triumphs and
setbacks of successive waves of reformers-Jacksonian Democrats and
abolitionists, Populists and Progressives, New Dealers and Great
Society poverty warriors-and, recently, equally rich scholarship
has explored the origins and development of American conservatism.
The contributors do not treat the left and right as separate
phenomena, as the dominant forces of different eras. Instead they
assert the liberal and the conservative are always and essentially
intertwined, mutually constituted and mutually constituting. Modern
American liberalism operates amid tenacious, recurring forces that
shape and delimit the landscape of social reform and political
action just as conservatives layered their efforts over the
cumulative achievements of twentieth century liberalism,
necessarily accommodating themselves to shifts in the instruments
of government, social mores and popular culture. These essays also
unravel a third traditional polarity in twentieth century U.S.
history, the apparent divide between foreign policy and domestic
politics. Notwithstanding its proud anti-colonial heritage and its
enduring skepticism about foreign entanglements, the United States
has been and remains a robustly international (if not imperial)
nation. The authors in this volume-with many formative figures in
the ongoing internationalization of American history represented
among them-demonstrate that international connections (not only in
the realm of diplomacy but also in matters of migration, commerce,
and culture) have transformed domestic life in myriad ways and, in
turn, that the American presence in the world has been shaped by
its distinctive domestic political culture. Blurring the boundaries
between political, cultural, and economic history, this collective
volume aims to raise penetrating questions and challenge readers'
understanding of the broader narrative of twentieth-century U.S.
history.
Author Prudy Taylor Board has compiled a collection of historical
articles about the intriguing, but little known, people and events
in the history of Fort Myers. Board traces the development of the
city's prestigious neighborhoods and parks, while introducing
readers to some of the most captivating and eccentric characters.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was growing
by fits and starts into its new role as a global power. Unlike
European empires, it sought to distinguish itself as a new kind of
power. Corporations and media outlets were spreading American
brands, ideas, and commodities worldwide, increasing we would today
call soft power. Meanwhile, American citizens and government
officials grappled with their nation's rising prominence and
debated how best to engage with the wider world. One of those ways
was to use foreign aid to define the nation's new role and
responsibilities with regards to the international community. This
first book narrates the early history of American foreign relief
and assistance as a way of guiding the international community in
peaceful cooperation and modernization towards greater stability
and democracy. It tells the story of how the United States
government came to realize the value of overseas aid as a tool of
statecraft. A prime case in point is the American Red Cross, a
quasi-private, quasi-state organization. Established in 1882, the
ARC was a privately funded and staffed organization, primarily
dependent on volunteer labor. However, it shared a special
relationship with the U.S. government, formalized by Congressional
charters, which made it the "official voluntary" aid association of
the United States in times of war and natural disaster. Together,
international-minded American progressives-a generation of American
health professionals, social scientists, and public
intellectuals-made the ARC into a vehicle for the global
dissemination of their ideas about health, social welfare, and
education. They urged their fellow citizens to reject their
traditional attachments to isolationism and non-entanglement and to
commit to "humanitarian internationalism." Their international
activities included feeding, housing, and anti-epidemic projects in
wartime France, Italy, Russia, and Serbia; the development of
playgrounds, education initiatives, and child health clinics in
postwar Poland and Czechoslovakia; correspondence programs to unite
American children and their international peers; and the extension
of all of these efforts to U.S. territories, sites where the
conceptual lines between foreign and domestic blurred in the U.S.
imagination. This history calls attention to the ways that private
organizations have served the diplomatic needs of the U.S. state,
as well as been an institutional space for Americans who wanted to
participate in international affairs in ways that deviated from
official state agendas. By the mid-1920s, voluntary humanitarian
interventionism had become the basis for a new set of American
civic and political obligations to the world community.
From the days of early tribes that hunted and fished to the
tourists who later relaxed on the beaches, St. Simons Island has
been part of the changing landscape of Georgia's coast. When Gen.
James E. Oglethorpe established Fort Frederica to protect Savannah
and the Carolinas from the threat of Spain, it was, for a short
time, a vibrant hub of British military operations. During the
latter part of the 1700s, a plantation society thrived on the
island until the outbreak of the War Between the States. Never
returning to an agricultural community, by 1870 St. Simons
re-established itself with the development of a booming timber
industry. And by the 1870s, the pleasant climate and proximity to
the sea drew visitors to St. Simons as a year-round resort.
Although the causeway had brought large numbers of summer people to
the island, St. Simons remained a sleepy little place with only a
few hundred permanent residents until 1941.
Two distinct communities which share equally vibrant histories, the
twin cities of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor possess a rich heritage
rooted in agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and tourism.
Through more than 200 photographs, this book documents the cities'
development from the time when pioneers first struggled to create a
community in the wilderness. It pays tribute to the men and women
who labored to establish farms and industries, and celebrates the
delightful beaches and amusement parks-such as the House of David
and Silver Beach-that have brought joy to generations of residents
and visitors alike.
For jazz historians, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven
recordings mark the first revolution in the history of a music
riven by upheaval. Yet few traces of this revolution can be found
in the historical record of the late 1920s, when the records were
made. Even black newspapers covered Armstrong as just one name
among many, and descriptions of his playing, while laudatory, bear
little resemblance to those of today. For this reason, the
perspective of Armstrong's first listeners is usually regarded as
inadequate, as if they had missed the true significance of his
music. This attitude overlooks the possibility that those early
listeners might have heard something valuable on its own terms,
something we ourselves have lost. If we could somehow recapture
their perspective-without abandoning our own-how might it change
our understanding of these seminal recordings? In Louis Armstrong's
Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Harker selects seven exceptional
records to study at length: "Cornet Chop Suey," "Big Butter and Egg
Man," "Potato Head Blues," "S.O.L. Blues"/"Gully Low Blues," "Savoy
Blues," and "West End Blues." The world of vaudeville and show
business provide crucial context, revealing how the demands of
making a living in a competitive environment could catalyze
Armstrong's unique artistic gifts. Technical achievements such as
virtuosity, structural coherence, harmonic improvisation, and
high-register playing are all shown to have a basis in the workaday
requirements of Armstrong's profession. Invoking a breadth of
influences ranging from New Orleans clarinet style to Guy Lombardo,
and from tap dancing to classical music, this book offers bold
insights, fresh anecdotes, and, ultimately, a new interpretation of
Louis Armstrong and his most influential body of recordings.
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Eerie Oklahoma
(Paperback)
Heather Woodward, Rebecca Lindsey; Foreword by Stephanie Carrell
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R501
R469
Discovery Miles 4 690
Save R32 (6%)
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Ships in 18 - 22 working days
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The role of religion in the founding of America has long been a
hotly debated question. Some historians have regarded the faith of
a few famous founders, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison, and Thomas Paine, as evidence that the founders were
deists who advocated the strict separation of church and state.
Popular Christian polemicists, on the other hand, have attempted to
show that virtually all of the founders were orthodox Christians in
favor of state support for religion. As the essays in this volume
demonstrate, a diverse array of religious traditions informed the
political culture of the American founding. Faith and the Founders
of the American Republic includes studies both of minority faiths,
such as Islam and Judaism, and of major traditions, such as
Calvinism. It also includes nuanced analysis of specific
founders-Quaker John Dickinson, prominent Baptists Isaac Backus and
John Leland, and Federalist Gouverneur Morris, among many
others-with attention to their personal histories, faiths,
constitutional philosophies, and views on the relationship between
religion and the state. This volume will be a crucial resource for
anyone interested in the place of faith in the founding of the
American constitutional republic, from political, religious,
historical, and legal perspectives.
Submerged stories from the inland seas The newest addition to Globe
Pequot's Shipwrecks series covers the sensational wrecks and
maritime disasters from each of the five Great Lakes. It is
estimated that over 30,000 sailors have lost their lives in Great
Lakes wrecks. For many, these icy, inland seas have become their
final resting place, but their last moments live on as a part of
maritime history. The tales, all true and well-documented, feature
some of the most notable tragedies on each of the lakes. Included
in many of these tales are legends of ghost ship sighting, ghostly
shipwreck victims still struggling to get to shore, and other
chilling lore. Sailors are a superstitious group, and the stories
are sprinkled with omens and maritime protocols that guide
decisions made on the water.
Progressive unions flourished in the 1930s by working alongside
federal agencies created during the New Deal. Yet in 1950, few
progressive unions remained. Why? Most scholars point to domestic
anti-communism and southern conservatives in Congress as the forces
that diminished the New Deal state, eliminated progressive unions,
and destroyed the radical potential of American liberalism. Rights
Delayed: The American State and the Defeat of Progressive Unions
argues that anti-communism and Congressional conservatism merely
intensified the main reason for the decline of progressive unions:
the New Deal state's focus on legal procedure. Initially,
progressive unions thrived by embracing the procedural culture of
New Deal agencies and the wartime American state. Between 1935 and
1945, unions mastered the complex rules of the NLRB and other
federal entities by working with government officials. In 1946 and
1947, however, the emphasis on legal procedure made the federal
state too slow to combat potentially illegal cooperation between
employers and the Teamsters. Workers who supported progressive
unions rallied around procedural language to stop what they
considered Teamster collusion, but found themselves dependent on an
ineffective federal state. The state became even less able to
protect employees belonging to left-led unions after the
Taft-Hartley Act's anti-communist provisions-and decisions by union
leaders-limited access to the NLRB's procedures. From 1946 until
1950, progressive unions withered and eventually disappeared from
the Pacific canneries as the unions failed to pay the cost of legal
representation before the NLRB. Workers supporting progressive
unions had embraced procedural language to claim their rights, but
by 1950, those workers discovered that their rights had vanished in
an endless legal discourse.
Making Slavery History focuses on how commemorative practices and
historical arguments about the American Revolution set the course
for antislavery politics in the nineteenth century. The particular
setting is a time and place in which people were hyperconscious of
their roles as historical actors and narrators: Massachusetts in
the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. This book
shows how local abolitionists, both black and white, drew on their
state's Revolutionary heritage to mobilize public opposition to
Southern slavery. When it came to securing the citizenship of free
people of color within the Commonwealth, though, black and white
abolitionists diverged in terms of how they idealized black
historical agency.
Although it is often claimed that slavery in New England is a
history long concealed, Making Slavery History finds it hidden in
plain sight. From memories of Phillis Wheatley and Crispus Attucks
to representations of black men at the Battle of Bunker Hill,
evidence of the local history of slavery cropped up repeatedly in
early national Massachusetts. In fixing attention on these
seemingly marginal presences, this book demonstrates that slavery
was unavoidably entangled in the commemorative culture of the early
republic-even in a place that touted itself as the "cradle of
liberty."
Transcending the particular contexts of Massachusetts and the early
American republic, this book is centrally concerned with the
relationship between two ways of making history, through social and
political transformation on the one hand and through commemoration,
narration, and representation on the other. Making Slavery History
examines the relationships between memory and social change,
between histories of slavery and dreams of freedom, and between the
stories we tell ourselves about who we have been and the
possibilities we perceive for who we might become.
Embodying Mexico examines two performative icons of
Mexicanness--the Dance of the Old Men and Night of the Dead of Lake
P tzcuaro--in numerous manifestations, including film, theater,
tourist guides, advertisements, and souvenirs. Covering a
ninety-year period from the postrevolutionary era to the present
day, Hellier-Tinoco's analysis is thoroughly grounded in Mexican
politics and history, and simultaneously incorporates
choreographic, musicological, and dramaturgical analysis.
Exploring multiple contexts in Mexico, the USA, and Europe,
Embodying Mexico expands and enriches our understanding of complex
processes of creating national icons, performance repertoires, and
tourist attractions, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic,
archival, and participatory experience. An extensive companion
website illustrates the author's arguments through audio and video.
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Chicago's Motor Row
(Paperback)
John F. Hogan, John S Maxson; Foreword by Jay Leno
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R541
R500
Discovery Miles 5 000
Save R41 (8%)
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