|
Showing 1 - 14 of
14 matches in All Departments
The Human Tradition in America from the Colonial Era through
Reconstruction is a collection of the best biographical sketches
from several volumes in SR Books' popular Human Tradition in
America Series. Compiled by Series Editor Charles W. Calhoun, this
book brings American history to life by illuminating the lives of
ordinary Americans. This examination of common individuals helps
personalize the nation's past in a way that examining only broad
concepts and forces cannot. By including a wide range of people
with respect to ethnicity, race, gender and geographic region,
Prof. Calhoun has developed a text that highlights the diversity of
the American experience.
During the revolutionary era, in the midst of the struggle for
liberty from Great Britain, Americans up and down the Atlantic
seaboard confronted the injustice of holding slaves. Lawmakers
debated abolition, masters considered freeing their slaves, and
slaves emancipated themselves by running away. But by 1800, of
states south of New England, only Pennsylvania had extricated
itself from slavery, the triumph, historians have argued, of Quaker
moralism and the philosophy of natural rights. With exhaustive
research of individual acts of freedom, slave escapes, legislative
action, and anti-slavery appeals, Nash and Soderlund penetrate
beneath such broad generalizations and find a more complicated
process at work. Defiant runaway slaves joined Quaker abolitionists
like Anthony Benezet and members of the Pennsylvania Abolition
Society to end slavery and slave owners shrewdly calculated how to
remove themselves from a morally bankrupt institution without
suffering financial loss by freeing slaves as indentured servants,
laborers, and cottagers.
Warner Mifflin-energetic, uncompromising, and reviled-was the key
figure connecting the abolitionist movements before and after the
American Revolution. A descendant of one of the pioneering families
of William Penn's "Holy Experiment," Mifflin upheld the Quaker
pacifist doctrine, carrying the peace testimony to Generals Howe
and Washington across the blood-soaked Germantown battlefield and
traveling several thousand miles by horse up and down the Atlantic
seaboard to stiffen the spines of the beleaguered Quakers, harried
and exiled for their neutrality during the war for independence.
Mifflin was also a pioneer of slave reparations, championing the
radical idea that after their liberation, Africans in America were
entitled to cash payments and land or shared crop arrangements.
Preaching "restitution," Mifflin led the way in making Kent County,
Delaware, a center of reparationist doctrine. After the war,
Mifflin became the premier legislative lobbyist of his generation,
introducing methods of reaching state and national legislators to
promote antislavery action. Detesting his repeated exercise of the
right of petition and hating his argument that an all-seeing and
affronted God would punish Americans for "national sins," many
Southerners believed Mifflin was the most dangerous man in
America-"a meddling fanatic" who stirred the embers of sectionalism
after the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. Yet he inspired
those who believed that the United States had betrayed its founding
principles of natural and inalienable rights by allowing the cancer
of slavery and the dispossession of Indian lands to continue in the
1790s. Writing in beautiful prose and marshaling fascinating
evidence, Gary B. Nash constructs a convincing case that Mifflin
belongs in the Quaker antislavery pantheon with William Southeby,
Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Anthony Benezet.
The most profound crisis of conscience for white Americans at the
end of the eighteenth century became their most tragic failure.
Race and Revolution is a trenchant study of the revolutionary
generation's early efforts to right the apparent contradiction of
slavery and of their ultimate compromises that not only left the
institution intact but provided it with the protection of a vastly
strengthened government after 1788. Reversing the conventional view
that blames slavery on the South's social and economic structures,
Nash stresses the role of the northern states in the failure to
abolish slavery. It was northern racism and hypocrisy as much as
southern intransigence that buttressed "the peculiar institution."
Nash also shows how economic and cultural factors intertwined to
result not in an apparently judicious decision of the new American
nation but rather its most significant lost opportunity. Race and
Revolution describes the free black community's response to this
failure of the revolution's promise, its vigorous and articulate
pleas for justice, and the community's successes in building its
own African-American institutions within the hostile environment of
early nineteenth-century America. Included with the text of Race
and Revolution are nineteen rare and crucial documents-letters,
pamphlets, sermons, and speeches-which provide evidence for Nash's
controversial and persuasive claims. From the words of Anthony
Benezet and Luther Martin to those of Absalom Jones and Caesar
Sarter, readers may judge the historical record for themselves. "In
reality," argues Nash, "the American Revolution represents the
largest slave uprising in our history." Race and Revolution is the
compelling story of that failed quest for the promise of freedom.
First City Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory Gary
B. Nash "A wonderful volume, filled with stories of historical
discovery, describing the preservation of Philadelphia's past for
the benefit of all. . . . "First City" is a first-rate piece of
historical interpretation that will be a great contribution to
America's cultural history."--"Journal of the Early Republic" "A
synthetic history of what is arguably the nation's most
historically conscious city. . . . It represents well the tensions
and opportunities that await writers seeking to push the craft of
history to a new level of self-awareness and
creativity."--"American Historical Review" "A remarkable
book."--"Public Historian" With its rich foundation stories,
Philadelphia may be the most important city in America's collective
memory. By the middle of the eighteenth century William Penn's
"greene countrie town" was, after London, the largest city in the
British Empire. The two most important documents in the history of
the United States, the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution, were drafted and signed in Philadelphia. The city
served off and on as the official capital of the young country
until 1800, and was also the site of the first American university,
hospital, medical college, bank, paper mill, zoo, sugar refinery,
public school, and government mint. In "First City," acclaimed
historian Gary B. Nash examines the complex process of memory
making in this most historic of American cities. Though history is
necessarily written from the evidence we have of the past, as Nash
shows, rarely is that evidence preserved without intent, nor is it
equally representative. Full of surprising anecdotes, "First City"
reveals how Philadelphians--from members of elite cultural
institutions, such as historical societies and museums, to
relatively anonymous groups, such as women, racial and religious
minorities, and laboring people--have participated in the very
partisan activity of transmitting historical memory from one
generation to the next. Gary B. Nash is Professor of History at the
University of California, Los Angeles, and author of many books,
including "The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of
Democracy and the Struggle to Create America" and "History on
Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past." Early American
Studies 2001 392 pages 7 x 10 134 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3630-9
Cloth $59.95s 39.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-1942-5 Paper $26.50s 17.50 ISBN
978-0-8122-0288-5 Ebook $26.50s 17.50 World Rights American History
Short copy: Covering more than two centuries of social, economic,
and political change, and offering a challenging, innovative
approach to urban as well national history, "First City" tells the
Philadelphia story through the wealth of material culture its
citizens have chosen to preserve.
As the United States gained independence, a full fifth of the
country's population was African American. The experiences of these
men and women have been largely ignored in the accounts of the
colonies' glorious quest for freedom. In this compact volume, Gary
B. Nash reorients our understanding of early America, and reveals
the perilous choices of the founding fathers that shaped the
nation's future. Nash tells of revolutionary fervor arousing a
struggle for freedom that spiraled into the largest slave rebellion
in American history, as blacks fled servitude to fight for the
British, who promised freedom in exchange for military service. The
Revolutionary Army never matched the British offer, and most
histories of the period have ignored this remarkable story. The
conventional wisdom says that abolition was impossible in the
fragile new republic. Nash, however, argues that an unusual
convergence of factors immediately after the war created a unique
opportunity to dismantle slavery. The founding fathers' failure to
commit to freedom led to the waning of abolitionism just as it had
reached its peak. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century,
as Nash demonstrates, their decision enabled the ideology of white
supremacy to take root, and with it the beginnings of an
irreparable national fissure. The moral failure of the Revolution
was paid for in the 1860s with the lives of the 600,000 Americans
killed in the Civil War. The Forgotten Fifth is a powerful story of
the nation's multiple, and painful, paths to freedom.
Born into one of the wealthiest families in Philadelphia and raised
and educated in that vital center of eighteenth-century American
Quakerism, Anne Emlen Mifflin was a progressive force in early
America. This detailed and engaging biography, which features
Anne's collected writings and selected correspondence, revives her
legacy. Anne grew up directly across the street from the
Pennsylvania statehouse, where the Continental Congress was leading
the War of Independence. A Quaker minister whose busy pen, agile
mind, and untiring moral energy produced an extensive corpus of
writings, Anne was an ardent abolitionist and social reformer
decades before the establishment of women's anti-slavery societies.
And at a time when most Americans never ventured beyond their own
village, hamlet, or farm, Anne journeyed thousands of miles. She
traveled to settlements of Friends on the frontier and met with
Native Americans in the rough country of northwestern Pennsylvania,
New York, and Canada. Our Beloved Friend provides a unique window
onto the lives of Quakers during the pre-Revolutionary era, the
establishment of the New Republic, and the War of 1812.
The Urban Crucible boldly reinterprets colonial life and the
origins of the American Revolution. Through a century-long history
of three seaport towns-Boston, New York, and Philadelphia-Gary Nash
discovers subtle changes in social and political awareness and
describes the coming of the revolution through popular collective
action and challenges to rule by custom, law and divine will. A
reordering of political power required a new consciousness to
challenge the model of social relations inherited from the past and
defended by higher classes. While retaining all the main points of
analysis and interpretation, the author has reduced the full
complement of statistics, sources, and technical data contained in
the original edition to serve the needs of general readers and
undergraduates.
The distinguished historian Gary B. Nash recasts the legacy of one
of America's most enduring icons of freedom Each year, more than
two million visitors line up near Philadelphia's Independence Hall
and wait to gaze upon a flawed mass of metal forged more than two
and a half centuries ago. Since its original casting in England in
1751, the Liberty Bell has survived a precarious journey on the
road to becoming a symbol of the American identity, and in this
masterful work, Gary B. Nash reveals how and why this voiceless
bell continues to speak such volumes about our nation. A serious
cultural history rooted in detailed research, Nash's book explores
the impetus behind the bell's creation, as well as its evolutions
in meaning through successive generations. With attention to
Pennsylvania's Quaker roots, he analyzes the biblical passage from
Leviticus that provided the bell's inscription and the valiant
efforts of Philadelphia's unheralded brass founders who attempted
to recast the bell after it cracked upon delivery from London's
venerable Whitechapel Foundry. Nash fills in much-needed context
surrounding the bell's role in announcing the Declaration of
Independence and recounts the lesser-known histories of its seven
later trips around the nation, when it served as a reminder of
America's indomitable spirit in times of conflict. Drawing upon
fascinating primary source documents, Nash's book continues a
remarkable dialogue about a symbol of American patriotism second
only in importance to the Stars and Stripes.
This book is the first to trace the good and bad fortunes, over
more than a century, of the earliest large free black community in
the United States. Gary Nash shows how, from colonial times through
the Revolution and into the turbulent 1830s, blacks in the City of
Brotherly Love struggled to shape a family life, gain occupational
competence, organize churches, establish neighborhoods and social
networks, advance cultural institutions, educate their children in
schools, forge a political consciousness, and train black leaders
who would help abolish slavery. These early generations of urban
blacks--many of them newly emancipated--constructed a rich and
varied community life.
Nash's account includes elements of both poignant triumph and
profound tragedy. Keeping in focus both the internal life of the
black community and race relations in Philadelphia generally, he
portrays first the remarkable vibrancy of black
institution-building, ordinary life, and relatively amicable race
relations, and then rising racial antagonism. The promise of a
racially harmonious society that took form in the postrevolutionary
era, involving the integration into the white republic of African
people brutalized under slavery, was ultimately unfulfilled. Such
hopes collapsed amid racial conflict and intensifying racial
discrimination by the 1820s. This failure of the great and
much-watched "Philadelphia experiment" prefigured the course of
race relations in America in our own century, an enduringly tragic
part of this country's past.
Here are the fascinating stories of twenty-three little-known but
remarkable inhabitants of the Spanish, English, and Portuguese
colonies of the New World between the 16th and the 19th centuries.
Women and men of all the races and classes of colonial society may
be seen here dealing creatively and pragmatically (if often not
successfully) with the challenges of a harsh social
environment.
Such extraordinary "ordinary" people as the native priest Diego
Vasicuio; the millwright Thomas Peters; the rebellious slave
Gertrudis de Escobar; Squanto, the last of the Patuxets; and
Micaela Angela Carillo, the pulque dealer, are presented in
original essays. Works of serious scholarship, they are also
written to catch the fancy and stimulate the historical imagination
of readers. The stories should be of particular interest to
students of the history of women, of Native Americans, and of Black
people in the Americas.
The Editors' introduction points out the fundamental unities in the
histories of colonial societies in the Americas, and the usefulness
of examining ordinary individual human experiences as a means both
of testing generalizations and of raising new questions for
research.
|
American People, Brief Edition, The, Volume II, Books a la Carte Plus Myhistorylab Blackboard/Webct (Book, 5th ed.)
Gary B. Nash, Julie Roy Jeffrey, John R. Howe, Peter J. Frederick, Allen F Davis, …
|
R1,556
Discovery Miles 15 560
|
Out of stock
|
|
You may like...
Goldfinger
Honor Blackman, Lois Maxwell, …
Blu-ray disc
R51
Discovery Miles 510
Catan
(16)
R889
Discovery Miles 8 890
|