Download or read book Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century written by David Womersley and published by Amagi Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century presents ten new essays on central themes of the American Founding period by some of today's preeminent scholars of American history. The writers explore various aspects of the zeitgeist, among them Burke's theories on property rights and government, the relations between religious and legal understandings of liberty, the significance of Protestant beliefs on the founding, the economic background to the Founders' thought on governance, moral sense theory contrasted with natural rights, and divisions of thought on the nature of liberty and how it was to be preserved. The articles provide a rich basis for discussion of the American Founding, its background, and its development over the first few decades of the United States' existence. David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on English literature from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. He is the editor of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (2012) for Cambridge University Press.
Download or read book Fighting for Liberty and Virtue written by Marvin N. Olasky and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New insights into the interplay of American politics, religion, sex, and revolution in the 18th century.
Download or read book The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth Century America written by Richard R. Beeman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the eve of the American Revolution there existed throughout the British-American colonial world a variety of contradictory expectations about the political process. Not only was there disagreement over the responsibilities of voters and candidates, confusion extended beyond elections to the relationship between elected officials and the populations they served. So varied were people's expectations that it is impossible to talk about a single American political culture in this period. In The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America, Richard R. Beeman offers an ambitious overview of political life in pre-Revolutionary America. Ranging from Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania to the backcountry regions of the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and northern New England, Beeman uncovers an extraordinary diversity of political belief and practice. In so doing, he closes the gap between eighteenth-century political rhetoric and reality. Political life in eighteenth-century America, Beeman demonstrates, was diffuse and fragmented, with America's British subjects and their leaders often speaking different political dialects altogether. Although the majority of people living in America before the Revolution would not have used the term "democracy," important changes were underway that made it increasingly difficult for political leaders to ignore "popular pressures." As the author shows in a final chapter on the Revolution, those popular pressures, once unleashed, were difficult to contain and drove the colonies slowly and unevenly toward a democratic form of government. Synthesizing a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Beeman offers a coherent account of the way politics actually worked in this formative time for American political culture.
Download or read book Liberty in America 1600 to the Present Liberty and power 1600 1760 written by Oscar Handlin and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1986 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the effects of power, space, church, government, and business on American freedom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Download or read book A Peculiar Mixture written by Jan Stievermann and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and fresh avenues of inquiry, the nine essays collected in A Peculiar Mixture endeavor to transform how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity that characterized the experience of German-speaking people in the middle colonies. They explore how the various cultural expressions of German speakers helped them bridge regional, religious, and denominational divides and eventually find a way to partake in America’s emerging national identity. Instead of thinking about early American culture and literature as evolving continuously as a singular entity, the contributions to this volume conceive of it as an ever-shifting and tangled “web of contact zones.” They present a society with a plurality of different native and colonial cultures interacting not only with one another but also with cultures and traditions from outside the colonies, in a “peculiar mixture” of Old World practices and New World influences. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Marie Basile McDaniel, Philip Otterness, Liam Riordan, Matthias Schönhofer, and Marianne S. Wokeck.
Download or read book Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution written by Michal Jan Rozbicki and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his new book, Michal Jan Rozbicki undertakes to bridge the gap between the political and the cultural histories of the American Revolution. Through a careful examination of liberty as both the ideological axis and the central metaphor of the age, he is able to offer a fresh model for interpreting the Revolution. By establishing systemic linkages between the histories of the free and the unfree, and between the factual and the symbolic, this framework points to a fundamental reassessment of the ways we think about the American Founding. Rozbicki moves beyond the two dominant interpretations of Revolutionary liberty—one assuming the Founders invested it with a modern meaning that has in essence continued to the present day, the other highlighting its apparent betrayal by their commitment to inequality. Through a consistent focus on the interplay between culture and power, Rozbicki demonstrates that liberty existed as an intricate fusion of political practices and symbolic forms. His deeply historicized reconstruction of its contemporary meanings makes it clear that liberty was still understood as a set of privileges distributed according to social rank rather than a universal right. In fact, it was because the Founders considered this assumption self-evident that they felt confident in publicizing a highly liberal, symbolic narrative of equal liberty to represent the Revolutionary endeavor. The uncontainable success of this narrative went far beyond the circumstances that gave birth to it because it put new cultural capital—a conceptual arsenal of rights and freedoms—at the disposal of ordinary people as well as political factions competing for their support, providing priceless legitimacy to all those who would insist that its nominal inclusiveness include them in fact.
Download or read book The Lamp of Experience written by H. Trevor Colbourn and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a landmark work, a leading scholar of the eighteenth century examines the ways in which an understanding of the nature of history influenced the thinking of the founding fathers. As Jack P. Greene has observed, " The Whig] conception saw the past as a continual struggle between liberty and virtue on one hand and arbitrary power and corruption on the other." Many founders found in this intellectual tradition what Josiah Quincy, Jr., called the "true old English liberty," and it was this Whig tradition--this conception of liberty--that the champions of American independence and crafters of the new republic sought to perpetuate. Colbourn supports his thesis--that "Independence was in large measure the product of the historical concepts of the men who made it"--by documenting what books were read most widely by the founding generation. He also cites diaries, personal correspondence, newspapers, and legislative records. Trevor Colbourn is President Emeritus of the University of Central Florida. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.
Download or read book Experiencing Empire written by Patrick Griffin and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-07-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born of clashing visions of empire in England and the colonies, the American Revolution saw men and women grappling with power— and its absence—in dynamic ways. On both sides of the revolutionary divide, Americans viewed themselves as an imperial people. This perspective conditioned how they understood the exercise of power, how they believed governments had to function, and how they situated themselves in a world dominated by other imperial players. Eighteenth-century Americans experienced what can be called an "imperial-revolutionary moment." Over the course of the eighteenth century, the colonies were integrated into a broader Atlantic world, a process that forced common men and women to reexamine the meanings and influences of empire in their own lives. The tensions inherent in this process led to revolution. After the Revolution, the idea of empire provided order—albeit at a cost to many—during a chaotic period. Viewing the early republic from an imperial-revolutionary perspective, the essays in this collection consider subjects as far-ranging as merchants, winemaking, slavery, sex, and chronology to nostalgia, fort construction, and urban unrest. They move from the very center of the empire in London to the far western frontier near St. Louis, offering a new way to consider America’s most formative period.
Download or read book Stories of Independence written by Peter C. Messer and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter C. Messer demonstrates that a strong sense of a shared past transformed British subjects into American citizens. He traces the emergence of distinctively American attitudes about society, politics, and government through the written history of the American experience. Stories of Independence argues that the way early Americans wrote about their own history--from colonial times, to the heady days of the Revolution, to the uneasy decades following independence--helped shape the future of this young nation. Differences between American colonists and the British government became increasingly contentious over the course of the eighteenth century as distinctive American identities emerged among the colonists. Grounded in common values and the shared experiences of creating communities in a new world, these identities would eventually liberate Americans to declare their independence and experiment with new forms of government. During the colonial period, provincial historians celebrated the autonomous origins and local institutions of their communities as a way of arguing for greater independence from Great Britain. Imperial historians, on the other hand, stressed allegiance to the mother country and the English institutions that continued to sustain them. When relations with Britain reached a crisis, these visions of provincial pride and imperial loyalty came into open and irreconcilable conflict. The resulting debate produced not only a declaration of independence but a new political order grounded on the provincial vision of the origins and progress of America. When the political turmoil of the 1780s and 1790s threatened to fragment the new republic, historians turned to the provincial vision of history to fashion a past for their nation from which they could create a unifying national identity. Their stories of the drive for independence and the founding of the United States helped both cement and limit the innovations in political thought produced by their provincial and revolutionary predecessors.
Download or read book The Lamp of Experience written by Harold Trevor Colbourn and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Settlers Liberty and Empire written by Craig Yirush and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Settlers, Liberty, and Empire traces the emergence of a revolutionary conception of political authority on the far shores of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Based on the equal natural right of English subjects to leave the realm, claim indigenous territory, and establish new governments by consent, this radical set of ideas culminated in revolution and republicanism. But unlike most scholarship on early American political theory, Craig Yirush does not focus solely on the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century. Instead, he examines how the political ideas of settler elites in British North America emerged in the often-forgotten years between the Glorious Revolution in America and the American Revolution against Britain. By taking seriously an imperial world characterized by constitutional uncertainty, geo-political rivalry, and the ongoing presence of powerful Native American peoples, Yirush provides a long-term explanation for the distinctive ideas of the American Revolution.
Download or read book The Lamp of Experience written by H. Trevor Colbourn and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a landmark work, a leading scholar of the eighteenth century examines the ways in which an understanding of the nature of history influenced the thinking of the founding fathers. As Jack P. Greene has observed, " The Whig] conception saw the past as a continual struggle between liberty and virtue on one hand and arbitrary power and corruption on the other." Many founders found in this intellectual tradition what Josiah Quincy, Jr., called the "true old English liberty," and it was this Whig tradition--this conception of liberty--that the champions of American independence and crafters of the new republic sought to perpetuate. Colbourn supports his thesis--that "Independence was in large measure the product of the historical concepts of the men who made it"--by documenting what books were read most widely by the founding generation. He also cites diaries, personal correspondence, newspapers, and legislative records. Trevor Colbourn is President Emeritus of the University of Central Florida. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.
Download or read book The Nature of Rights at the American Founding and Beyond written by Barry Alan Shain and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have been claiming and defending rights since long before the nation achieved independence. But few Americans recognize how profoundly the nature of rights has changed over the past three hundred years. In The Nature of Rights at the American Founding and Beyond, Barry Alan Shain gathers together essays by some of the leading scholars in American constitutional law and history to examine the nature of rights claims in eighteenth-century America and how they differed, if at all, from today’s understandings. Was America at its founding predominantly individualistic or, in some important way, communal? Similarly, which understanding of rights was of greater centrality: the historical "rights of Englishmen" or abstract natural rights? And who enjoyed these rights, however understood? Everyone? Or only economically privileged and militarily responsible male heads of households? The contributors also consider how such concepts of rights have continued to shape and reshape the American experience of political liberty to this day. Beginning with the arresting transformation in the grounding of rights prompted by the American War of Independence, the volume moves through what the contributors describe as the "Founders’ Bill of Rights" to the "second" Bill of Rights that coincided with the Civil War, and ends with the language of rights erupting from the horrors of the Second World War and its aftermath in the Cold War. By asking what kind of nation the founding generation left us, or intended to leave us, the contributors are then able to compare that nation to the nation we have become. Most, if not all, of the essays demonstrate that the nature of rights in America has been anything but constant, and that the rights defended in the late eighteenth century stand at some distance from those celebrated today. Contributors:Akhil Reed Amar, Yale University * James H. Hutson, Library of Congress * Stephen Macedo, Princeton University * Richard Primus, University of Michigan * Jack N. Rakove, Stanford University * John Phillip Reid, New York University * Daniel T. Rodgers, Princeton University * A. Gregg Roeber, Pennsylvania State University * Barry Alan Shain, Colgate University * Rogers M. Smith, University of Pennsylvania * Leif Wenar, University of Sheffield * Gordon S. Wood, Brown University
Download or read book Liberty s Daughters written by Mary Beth Norton and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the lives of colonial women, particularly during the Revolutionary War years, arguing that eighteenth-century Americans had very clear notions of appropriate behavior for females and the functions they were expected to perform, and that most women suffered from low self-esteem, believing themselves inferior to men.
Download or read book Beacon of Freedom written by G. D. Lillibridge and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The faith of a people in their greater destiny has been a propelling force of considerable power in the history of the world. In it s more perfect form, this ideal has spurred on the American people to their own higher good and, at the same time, been an inspiration for good on the efforts of others as well. By the end of the eighteenth century, Americans were firmly committed to the belief that the fate of freedom here was to determine the fate of freedom everywhere. And in the nineteenth century, the American destiny to lead the world out of ignorance and misery and onto the high plateaus of human happiness was not only accepted in American but was welcomed with hosannas by innumerable Europeans. This volume studies the impact of American destiny on Great Britain in the middle years of the nineteenth century—a period during which an uneasy struggle for power and place was engulfing the masses of the people, the new industrial middle class, and the conservative defenders of the old landed regime. This book seeks to trace American influence by determining what English people of varied station and opinion thought about the American democracy and how their ideas about American became drawn into and influenced their own experiences. Here is the real American destiny.
Download or read book Unfreedom written by Jared Ross Hardesty and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Reveals the lived experience of slaves in eighteenth-century Boston Instead of relying on the traditional dichotomy of slavery and freedom, Hardesty argues we should understand slavery in Boston as part of a continuum of unfreedom. In this context, African slavery existed alongside many other forms of oppression, including Native American slavery, indentured servitude, apprenticeship, and pauper apprenticeship. In this hierarchical and inherently unfree world, enslaved Bostonians were more concerned with their everyday treatment and honor than with emancipation, as they pushed for autonomy, protected their families and communities, and demanded a place in society. Drawing on exhaustive research in colonial legal records – including wills, court documents, and minutes of governmental bodies – as well as newspapers, church records, and other contemporaneous sources, Hardesty masterfully reconstructs an eighteenth-century Atlantic world of unfreedom that stretched from Europe to Africa to America. By reassessing the lives of enslaved Bostonians as part of a social order structured by ties of dependence, Hardesty not only demonstrates how African slaves were able to decode their new homeland and shape the terms of their enslavement, but also tells the story of how marginalized peoples engrained themselves in the very fabric of colonial American society.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Eighteenth Century Political Thought written by Mark Goldie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-31 with total page 944 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
