Download or read book American Homicide written by Randolph Roth and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In American Homicide, Randolph Roth charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. Roth argues that the United States is distinctive in its level of violence among unrelated adults—friends, acquaintances, and strangers. America was extraordinarily homicidal in the mid-seventeenth century, but it became relatively non-homicidal by the mid-eighteenth century, even in the slave South; and by the early nineteenth century, rates in the North and the mountain South were extremely low. But the homicide rate rose substantially among unrelated adults in the slave South after the American Revolution; and it skyrocketed across the United States from the late 1840s through the mid-1870s, while rates in most other Western nations held steady or fell. That surge—and all subsequent increases in the homicide rate—correlated closely with four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy. Those four factors, Roth argues, best explain why homicide rates have gone up and down in the United States and in other Western nations over the past four centuries, and why the United States is today the most homicidal affluent nation.

Download or read book Every Home a Distillery written by Sarah H. Meacham and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-10-12 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original examination of alcohol production in early America, Sarah Hand Meacham uncovers the crucial role women played in cidering and distilling in the colonial Chesapeake. Her fascinating story is one defined by gender, class, technology, and changing patterns of production. Alcohol was essential to colonial life; the region’s water was foul, milk was generally unavailable, and tea and coffee were far too expensive for all but the very wealthy. Colonists used alcohol to drink, in cooking, as a cleaning agent, in beauty products, and as medicine. Meacham finds that the distillation and brewing of alcohol for these purposes traditionally fell to women. Advice and recipes in such guidebooks as The Accomplisht Ladys Delight demonstrate that women were the main producers of alcohol until the middle of the 18th century. Men, mostly small planters, then supplanted women, using new and cheaper technologies to make the region’s cider, ale, and whiskey. Meacham compares alcohol production in the Chesapeake with that in New England, the middle colonies, and Europe, finding the Chesapeake to be far more isolated than even the other American colonies. She explains how home brewers used new technologies, such as small alembic stills and inexpensive cider pressing machines, in their alcoholic enterprises. She links the importation of coffee and tea in America to the temperance movement, showing how the wealthy became concerned with alcohol consumption only after they found something less inebriating to drink. Taking a few pages from contemporary guidebooks, Every Home a Distillery includes samples of historic recipes and instructions on how to make alcoholic beverages. American historians will find this study both enlightening and surprising.

Download or read book County Courthouse Book written by Elizabeth Petty Bentley and published by Genealogical Publishing Com. This book was released on 2009 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The County Courthouse Book is a concise guide to county courthouses and courthouse records. It is an important book because the genealogical researcher needs a reliable guide to American county courthouses, the main repositories of county records. To proceed in his investigations, the researcher needs current addresses and phone numbers, information about the coverage and availability of key courthouse records such as probate, land, naturalization, and vital records, and timely advice on the whole range of services available at the courthouse. Where available he will also need listings of current websites and e-mail addresses." -- Publisher website.

Download or read book Murder at Montpelier written by Douglas Brent Chambers and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Notorious Woman written by Elizabeth J. Clapp and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During her long career as a public figure in Jacksonian America, Anne Royall was called everything from an "enemy of religion" to a "Jackson man" to a "common scold." In her search for the source of such strong reactions, Elizabeth Clapp has uncovered the story of a widely read woman of letters who asserted her right to a political voice without regard to her gender. Widowed and in need of a livelihood following a disastrous lawsuit over her husband’s will, Royall decided to earn her living through writing--first as a travel writer, journeying through America to research and sell her books, and later as a journalist and editor. Her language and forcefully expressed opinions provoked people at least as much as did her inflammatory behavior and aggressive marketing tactics. An ardent defender of American liberties, she attacked the agents of evangelical revivals, the Bank of the United States, and corruption in government. Her positions were frequently extreme, directly challenging the would-be shapers of the early republic’s religious and political culture. She made many enemies, but because she also attracted many supporters, she was not easily silenced. The definitive account of a passionate voice when America was inventing itself, A Notorious Woman re-creates a fascinating stage on which women’s roles, evangelical hegemony, and political involvement were all contested.

Download or read book Back to Old Virginia with Dillard Daniel and Kin written by and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Dillard (ca. 1706-1774) of Spotsylvania County, Virginia was married first to Elizabeth Holloway, by whom he had nine children. His second wife was Sarah Mason. They had three children. James Daniel (ca. 1700-1763) emigrated from Ireland in about 1730. He married Jean (Kelso) in about 1738 and settled in Virginia. They had six children. Descendants and relatives lived in Virginia, Pennsyl- vania, Georgia and elsewhere.

Download or read book The Researcher written by Robert Armistead Stewart and published by . This book was released on 1926 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Notes on Southside Virginia written by Walter Allen Watson and published by Genealogical Publishing Com. This book was released on 1977 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Watson's Notes contain important genealogical materials on Nottoway and Amelia counties, including a selection of genealogies.

Download or read book Genealogical Local History Books in Print written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Blessed Company written by John K. Nelson and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-01-14 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, John Nelson reconstructs everyday Anglican religious practice and experience in Virginia from the end of the seventeenth century to the start of the American Revolution. Challenging previous characterizations of the colonial Anglican establishment as weak, he reveals the fundamental role the church played in the political, social, and economic as well as the spiritual lives of its parishioners. Drawing on extensive research in parish and county records and other primary sources, Nelson describes Anglican Virginia's parish system, its parsons, its rituals of worship and rites of passage, and its parishioners' varied relationships to the church. All colonial Virginians--men and women, rich and poor, young and old, planters and merchants, servants and slaves, dissenters and freethinkers--belonged to a parish. As such, they were subject to its levies, its authority over marriage, and other social and economic dictates. In addition to its religious functions, the parish provided essential care for the poor, collaborated with the courts to handle civil disputes, and exerted its influence over many other aspects of community life. A Blessed Company demonstrates that, by creatively adapting Anglican parish organization and the language, forms, and modes of Anglican spirituality to the Chesapeake's distinctive environmental and human conditions, colonial Virginians sustained a remarkably effective and faithful Anglican church in the Old Dominion.

Download or read book Virginia Military Records written by and published by Genealogical Publishing Com. This book was released on 1983 with total page 1036 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is essentially a compilation of articles that deal wholly or in part with muster and pay rolls, court order books, pension records, land claims, depositions, petitions, militia lists, orderly books, and service records. The majority of the articles focus on the records of the colonial and Revolutionary War periods, but there also are some that relate to the War of 1812. In the aggregate these comprise data of almost unequaled variety and magnitude. Produced over the years by an army of specialists, they were spread throughout the three periodicals named in the title. This varied and immense body of data is brought together in a handy and well-indexed volume, which will make its use by the researcher very easy.

Download or read book William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine written by College of William and Mary and published by . This book was released on 1918 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publishes refereed scholarship in history and related disciplines from initial Old World-New World contacts to the early nineteenth century and beyond. Its articles, notes and documents, and reviews range from British North America and the United States to Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, and the Spanish American borderlands. Forums and topical issues address topics of active interest in the field.

Download or read book Bell and Estes Families written by Mary Gant Bell and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2014-03-27 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roy Wheeler Bell, son of William Edward Bell and Mary Ann Wheeler, was born in 1897 in Arkansas or Texas. He married Lydia Reola Estes (1900-1950), daughter of Ambrose Wickersham Estes and Mary Bell Noe, in 1922. They had two children. He died in 1958 in Harris County, Texas.

Download or read book Poisoned Relations written by Chelsea Berry and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events. In Poisoned Relations, Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one’s relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational nature of ideas about poison meant that the power struggles that emerged in poison cases, while unfolding in the extreme context of slavery, were not solely between enslavers and the enslaved—they also involved social conflict within enslaved communities. Poisoned Relations examines more than five hundred investigations and trials in four colonial contexts—British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas—bringing a groundbreaking application of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Illuminating competing understandings of poison and power in this way, Berry opens new avenues of evidence through which to navigate the violence of colonial archival silences.

Download or read book White Women Rape and the Power of Race in Virginia 1900 1960 written by Lisa Lindquist Dorr and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, historians have primarily analyzed charges of black-on-white rape in the South through accounts of lynching or manifestly unfair trial proceedings, suggesting that white southerners invariably responded with extralegal violence and sham trials when white women accused black men of assault. Lisa Lindquist Dorr challenges this view with a careful study of legal records, newspapers, and clemency files from early-twentieth-century Virginia. White Virginians' inflammatory rhetoric, she argues, did not necessarily predict black men's ultimate punishment. While trials were often grand public spectacles at which white men acted to protect white women and to police interracial relationships, Dorr points to cracks in white solidarity across class and gender lines. At the same time, trials and pardon proceedings presented African Americans with opportunities to challenge white racial power. Taken together, these cases uncover a world in which the mandates of segregation did not always hold sway, in which whites and blacks interacted in the most intimate of ways, and in which white women and white men saw their interests in conflict. In Dorr's account, cases of black-on-white rape illuminate the paradoxes at the heart of segregated southern society: the tension between civilization and savagery, the desire for orderly and predictable racial boundaries despite conflicts among whites and relationships across racial boundaries, and the dignity of African Americans in a system dependent on their supposed inferiority. The rhetoric of protecting white women spoke of white supremacy and patriarchy, but its practice revealed the limits of both.

Download or read book Family Bonds written by Ted Maris-Wolf and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-04-20 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1854 and 1864, more than a hundred free African Americans in Virginia proposed to enslave themselves and, in some cases, their children. Ted Maris-Wolf explains this phenomenon as a response to state legislation that forced free African Americans to make a terrible choice: leave enslaved loved ones behind for freedom elsewhere or seek a way to remain in their communities, even by renouncing legal freedom. Maris-Wolf paints an intimate portrait of these people whose lives, liberty, and use of Virginia law offer new understandings of race and place in the upper South. Maris-Wolf shows how free African Americans quietly challenged prevailing notions of racial restriction and exclusion, weaving themselves into the social and economic fabric of their neighborhoods and claiming, through unconventional or counterintuitive means, certain basic rights of residency and family. Employing records from nearly every Virginia county, he pieces together the remarkable lives of Watkins Love, Jane Payne, and other African Americans who made themselves essential parts of their communities and, in some cases, gave up their legal freedom in order to maintain family and community ties.

Download or read book Historical Notes on Amelia County Virginia written by Kathleen Halverson Hadfield and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: