Download or read book Moralists and Modernizers written by Steven Mintz and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1995-08 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moralists and Modernizers tells the fascinating story of America's first age of reform, combining incisive portraits of leading reformers and movements with perceptive analyses of religion, politics, and society.
Download or read book Moralists and Modernizers written by Steven Mintz and published by . This book was released on 1995-08 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a broad array of innovative print and technology resources, "Glencoe Science" helps teachers differentiate and accommodate all learners! The range of labs, content area reading, discussion strategies, note-taking tools, and activities provides students with multiple experiences of each Science Standard. They give teachers flexibility and the ability to monitor student progress through ongoing assessment..
Download or read book Women and the Work of Benevolence written by Lori D. Ginzberg and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century middle-class Protestant women were fervent in their efforts to "do good." Rhetoric--especially in the antebellum years--proclaimed that virtue was more pronounced in women than in men and praised women for their benevolent influence, moral excellence, and religious faith. In this book, Lori D. Ginzberg examines a broad spectrum of benevolent work performed by middle- and upper-middle-class women from the 1820s to 185 and offers a new interpretation of the shifting political contexts and meanings of this long tradition of women's reform activism. During the antebellum period, says Ginzberg, the idea of female moral superiority and the benevolent work it supported contained both radical and conservative possibilities, encouraging an analysis of femininity that could undermine male dominance as well as guard against impropriety. At the same time, benevolent work and rhetoric were vehicles for the emergence of a new middle-class identity, one which asserts virtue--not wealth--determined status. Ginzberg shows how a new generation that came of age during the 1850s and the Civil War developed new analyses of benevolence and reform. By post-bellum decades, the heirs of antebellum benevolence referred less to a mission of moral regeneration and far more to a responsibility to control the poor and "vagrant," signaling the refashioning of the ideology of benevolence from one of gender to one of class. According to Ginzberg, these changing interpretations of benevolent work throughout the century not only signal an important transformation in women's activists' culture and politics but also illuminate the historical development of American class identity and of women's role in constructing social and political authority.
Download or read book A Fierce Discontent written by Michael McGerr and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Progressive Era, a few brief decades around the turn of the last century, still burns in American memory for its outsized personalities: Theodore Roosevelt, whose energy glinted through his pince-nez; Carry Nation, who smashed saloons with her axe and helped stop an entire nation from drinking; women suffragists, who marched in the streets until they finally achieved the vote; Andrew Carnegie and the super-rich, who spent unheard-of sums of money and became the wealthiest class of Americans since the Revolution. Yet the full story of those decades is far more than the sum of its characters. In Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent America's great political upheaval is brilliantly explored as the root cause of our modern political malaise. The Progressive Era witnessed the nation's most convulsive upheaval, a time of radicalism far beyond the Revolution or anything since. In response to the birth of modern America, with its first large-scale businesses, newly dominant cities, and an explosion of wealth, one small group of middle-class Americans seized control of the nation and attempted to remake society from bottom to top. Everything was open to question -- family life, sex roles, race relations, morals, leisure pursuits, and politics. For a time, it seemed as if the middle-class utopians would cause a revolution. They accomplished an astonishing range of triumphs. From the 1890s to the 1910s, as American soldiers fought a war to make the world safe for democracy, reformers managed to outlaw alcohol, close down vice districts, win the right to vote for women, launch the income tax, take over the railroads, and raise feverish hopes of making new men and women for a new century. Yet the progressive movement collapsed even more spectacularly as the war came to an end amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red scare. It is an astonishing and moving story. McGerr argues convincingly that the expectations raised by the progressives' utopian hopes have nagged at us ever since. Our current, less-than-epic politics must inevitably disappoint a nation that once thought in epic terms. The New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and now the war on terrorism have each entailed ambitious plans for America; and each has had dramatic impacts on policy and society. But the failure of the progressive movement set boundaries around the aspirations of all of these efforts. None of them was as ambitious, as openly determined to transform people and create utopia, as the progressive movement. We have been forced to think modestly ever since that age of bold reform. For all of us, right, center, and left, the age of "fierce discontent" is long over.
Download or read book Men and Women of Their Own Kind written by Glenn M. Harden and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2003-09 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis traces the historiography of antebellum reform from its origins in Gilbert Barnes's rebellion from the materialist reductionism of the Progressives to the end of the twentieth century. The focus is the ideas of the historians at the center of the historiography, not a summary of every work in the field. The works of Gilbert Barnes, Alice Felt Tyler, Whitney Cross, C. S. Griffin, Donald Mathews, Paul Johnson, Ronald Walters, George Thomas, Robert Abzug, Steven Mintz, and John Quist, among many others, are discussed. In particular, the thesis examines the social control interpretation and its transformation into social organization under more sympathetic historians in the 1970s. The author found the state of the historiography at century's end to be healthy with a promising future.
Download or read book Race Social Reform and the Making of a Middle Class written by Joseph O. Jewell and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Periods of time characterized by large scale social change encourage reinterpretations of the meanings of categories like race and class, strategies for their reproduction, and their relationship to one another as social structures. The racialized nature of class identities makes movements which attempt to redistribute class resources along racial lines a challenge to both racial boundaries and class boundaries, highlighting their intersection through the strategies and resources associated with social reproduction.
Download or read book Unfinished Revolution written by Sam Walter Haynes and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a clear, incisively written narrative history of American anxiety about British domination---political, military, economic, cultural---from the War of 1812 to the mid-nineteenth century. Unfinished Revolution's predominant thoughtfulness and readable verve across a very extensive canvass should commend it to a wide range of readers as a valuable reconnaissance of what was arguably the most consequential national anxiety faced by the `young republic' during its middle period."---Lawrence Buell, Harvard University --
Download or read book Ambition A History written by William Casey King and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is “ambitious” a compliment? It depends: “[A] masterpiece of intellectual and cultural history.”—David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World From rags to riches, log house to White House, enslaved to liberator, ghetto to CEO, ambition fuels the American Dream. Yet at the time of the nation's founding, ambition was viewed as a dangerous vice, everything from “a canker on the soul” to the impetus for original sin. This engaging book explores ambition’s surprising transformation, tracing attitudes from classical antiquity to early modern Europe to the New World and America’s founding. From this broad historical perspective, William Casey King deepens our understanding of the American mythos and offers a striking reinterpretation of the introduction to the Declaration of Independence. Through an innovative array of sources and authors—Aquinas, Dante, Machiavelli, the Geneva Bible, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, and many others—King demonstrates that a transformed view of ambition became possible the moment Europe realized that Columbus had discovered not a new route but a new world. In addition the author argues that reconstituting ambition as a virtue was a necessary precondition of the American republic. The book suggests that even in the twenty-first century, ambition has never fully lost its ties to vice and continues to exhibit a dual nature—positive or negative depending upon the ends, the means, and the individual involved.
Download or read book Signatures of Citizenship written by Susan Zaeske and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of women's antislavery petitioning shows how this form of activism not only contributed to the success of the abolitionist movement but also proved to be a watershed moment in the emergence of American women as political actors.
Download or read book Privilege and Creative Destruction written by Stanley I. Kutler and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 1989-12-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this now-classic work in legal and constitutional theory, Stanley I. Kutler examines one of the Supreme Court's most celebrated decisions. In 1837, the Court rules that the state of Massachusetts had the right to erect a free bridge over the Charles River even though it had previously chartered a privately owned toll bridge at the same location. The Court's decision fostered the idea of "creative destruction," a process that encourages new forms of property at the expense of older ones. Exploring the origins, context, and impact of this decision, Kutler integrates traditional American constitutional history with the "new legal history: that emphasizes the social and economic bases of legal change.
Download or read book Notorious in the Neighborhood written by Joshua D. Rothman and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-12-04 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laws and cultural norms militated against interracial sex in Virginia before the Civil War, and yet it was ubiquitous in cities, towns, and plantation communities throughout the state. In Notorious in the Neighborhood, Joshua Rothman examines the full spectrum of interracial sexual relationships under slavery--from Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the intertwined interracial families of Monticello and Charlottesville to commercial sex in Richmond, the routinized sexual exploitation of enslaved women, and adultery across the color line. He explores the complex considerations of legal and judicial authorities who handled cases involving illicit sex and describes how the customary toleration of sex across the color line both supported and undermined racism and slavery in the early national and antebellum South. White Virginians allowed for an astonishing degree of flexibility and fluidity within a seemingly rigid system of race and interracial relations, Rothman argues, and the relationship between law and custom regarding racial intermixture was always shifting. As a consequence, even as whites never questioned their own racial supremacy, the meaning and significance of racial boundaries, racial hierarchy, and ultimately of race itself always stood on unstable ground--a reality that whites understood and about which they demonstrated increasing anxiety as the nation's sectional crisis intensified.
Download or read book Dominance by Design written by Michael Adas and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before the United States became a major force in global affairs, Americans believed in their superiority over others due to their inventiveness, productivity, and economic and social well-being. U.S. expansionists assumed a mandate to civilize non-Western peoples by demanding submission to American technological prowess and design. As an integral part of America's national identity and sense of itself in the world, this civilizing mission provided the rationale to displace the Indians from much of our continent, to build an island empire in the Pacific and Caribbean, and to promote unilateral--at times military--interventionism throughout Asia. In our age of smart bombs and mobile warfare, technological aptitude remains preeminent in validating America's global mission. Michael Adas brilliantly pursues the history of this mission through America's foreign relations over nearly four centuries from North America to the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. The belief that it is our right and destiny to remake foreign societies in our image has endured from the early decades of colonization to our current crusade to implant American-style democracy in the Muslim Middle East. Dominance by Design explores the critical ways in which technological superiority has undergirded the U.S.'s policies of unilateralism, preemption, and interventionism in foreign affairs and raised us from an impoverished frontier nation to a global power. Challenging the long-held assumptions and imperatives that sustain the civilizing mission, Adas gives us an essential guide to America's past and present role in the world as well as cautionary lessons for the future.
Download or read book Theatre Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth Century America written by John W. Frick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-21 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the role of temperance drama in American theatre and compares the American genre to its British counterpart.
Download or read book Sword of the Spirit Shield of Faith written by Andrew Preston and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 779 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly detailed, profoundly engrossing story of how religion has influenced American foreign relations, told through the stories of the men and women—from presidents to preachers—who have plotted the country’s course in the world. Ever since John Winthrop argued that the Puritans’ new home would be “a city upon a hill,” Americans’ role in the world has been shaped by their belief that God has something special in mind for them. But this is a story that historians have mostly ignored. Now, in the first authoritative work on the subject, Andrew Preston explores the major strains of religious fervor—liberal and conservative, pacifist and militant, internationalist and isolationist—that framed American thinking on international issues from the earliest colonial wars to the twenty-first century. He arrives at some startling conclusions, among them: Abraham Lincoln’s use of religion in the Civil War became the model for subsequent wars of humanitarian intervention; nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries made up the first NGO to advance a global human rights agenda; religious liberty was the centerpiece of Franklin Roosevelt’s strategy to bring the United States into World War II. From George Washington to George W. Bush, from the Puritans to the present, from the colonial wars to the Cold War, religion has been one of America’s most powerful sources of ideas about the wider world. When, just days after 9/11, George W. Bush described America as “a prayerful nation, a nation that prays to an almighty God for protection and for peace,” or when Barack Obama spoke of balancing the “just war and the imperatives of a just peace” in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, they were echoing four hundred years of religious rhetoric. Preston traces this echo back to its source. Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith is an unprecedented achievement: no one has yet attempted such a bold synthesis of American history. It is also a remarkable work of balance and fair-mindedness about one of the most fraught subjects in America.
Download or read book Slavery and the American West written by Michael A. Morrison and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-15 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy. Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step--from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War--the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition.
Download or read book The Webster Hayne Debate written by Christopher Childers and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this illuminating history, a senatorial debate about states’ rights exemplifies the growing rift within pre-Civil War America. Two generations after the founding, Americans still disagreed on the nature of the Union. Was it a confederation of sovereign states or a nation headed by a central government? To South Carolina Senator Robert Y. Hayne, only the vigilant protection of states’ rights could hold off an attack on a southern way of life built on slavery. Meanwhile, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster believed that the political and economic ascendancy of New England—and the nation—required a strong, activist national government. In The Webster-Hayne Debate, historian Christopher Childers examines a sharp dispute in January 1830 that came to define the dilemma of America’s national identity. During Senate discussion of western land policy, the senators’ increasingly heated exchanges led to the question of union—its nature and its value in a federal republic. Childers argues that both Webster and Hayne, and the factions they represented, saw the West as key to the success of their political plans and sought to cultivate western support for their ideas. A short, accessible account of the conflict and the related issues it addressed, The Webster-Hayne Debate captures an important moment in the early republic.
Download or read book The Intellectual Origins of Mass Parties and Mass Schools in the Jacksonian Period written by Julie M. Walsh and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1998 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that in the 1830s and 1840s, all three main US political parties, despite their rhetorical differences, maintained consensus about citizenship training through educating children, which produced the first generation of politically passive Americans content to vote loyally for their party and demand little or no input into the formation of its platform. This in turn, is seen as essential for building the type of political party that has endured since. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
