Download or read book Thaddeus Stevens and the Fight for Negro Rights written by Milton Meltzer and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life story of the fire-eating Congressman who fought long and hard for the abolition of slavery and often had to endure hatred for his convictions.

Download or read book Thaddeus Stevens written by Bruce Levine and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “powerful” (The Wall Street Journal) biography of one of the 19th century’s greatest statesmen, encompassing his decades-long fight against slavery and his postwar struggle to bring racial justice to America. Thaddeus Stevens was among the first to see the Civil War as an opportunity for a second American revolution—a chance to remake the country as a genuine multiracial democracy. As one of the foremost abolitionists in Congress in the years leading up to the war, he was a leader of the young Republican Party’s radical wing, fighting for anti-slavery and anti-racist policies long before party colleagues like Abraham Lincoln endorsed them. These policies—including welcoming black men into the Union’s armies—would prove crucial to the Union war effort. During the Reconstruction era that followed, Stevens demanded equal civil and political rights for Black Americans—rights eventually embodied in the 14th and 15th amendments. But while Stevens in many ways pushed his party—and America—towards equality, he also championed ideas too radical for his fellow Congressmen ever to support, such as confiscating large slaveholders’ estates and dividing the land among those who had been enslaved. In Thaddeus Stevens, acclaimed historian Bruce Levine has written a “vital” (The Guardian), “compelling” (James McPherson) biography of one of the most visionary statesmen of the 19th century and a forgotten champion for racial justice in America.

Download or read book The Unknown Architects of Civil Rights written by Barry M. Goldenberg and published by . This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the prestigious Carey McWilliams Prize for best Undergraduate Honors History Thesis at the University of California, Los Angeles, The Unknown Architects of Civil Rights is a groundbreaking book that re-examines three of the most influential-but largely forgotten-civil rights leaders in American history. As civil rights history continues to hold a prominent place in American society, it is only through the courageous actions of Thaddeus Stevens, Ulysses S. Grant, and Charles Sumner that America's most prized Civil Rights gains are emblazoned in our Constitution. Without these powerful and then-famous politicians, the 1960's Civil Rights Movement would not have occurred the way it did--or possibly even at all. During the Reconstruction Era when racism and prejudice was at its height, Stevens, Grant, and Sumner valiantly fought for African American equality only years following the institution of slavery. The Unknown Architects of Civil Rights brings to life the personalities, the struggles, and the legacies of three men who strove towards America's claim of "liberty and justice for all" during this unprecedented time in our nation's history. Review "The Unknown Architects of Civil Rights is a model of excellent research, astute analysis, and engaging discourse....[Goldenberg] succeeds in both differentiating and connecting the efforts of these men to keep America on its uncertain course towards democracy." --UCLA Department of History

Download or read book Thaddeus Stevens written by Hans L. Trefousse and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most controversial figures in nineteenth-century American history, Thaddeus Stevens is best remembered for his role as congressional leader of the radical Republicans and as a chief architect of Reconstruction. Long painted by historians as a vindictive 'dictator of Congress,' out to punish the South at the behest of big business and his own ego, Stevens receives a more balanced treatment in Hans L. Trefousse's biography, which portrays him as an impassioned orator and a leader in the struggle against slavery. Trefousse traces Stevens's career through its major phases: from his days in the Pennsylvania state legislature, when he antagonized Freemasons, slaveholders, and Jacksonian Democrats, to his political involvement during Reconstruction, when he helped author the Fourteenth Amendment and spurred on the passage of the Reconstruction Acts and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Throughout, Trefousse explores the motivations for Stevens's lifelong commitment to racial equality, thus furnishing a fuller portrait of the man whose fervent opposition to slavery helped move his more moderate congressional colleagues toward the implementation of egalitarian policies.

Download or read book Monumento del general Bartolome Mitre written by Agnes McEnery and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Attitude of Thaddeus Stevens Toward the Conduct of the Civil War written by James Albert Woodburn and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Radical Republicans written by Hans L. Trefousse and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2014-10-29 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of the men who, as political realists, fought for the cause of racial reform in America before, during, and after the Civil War. Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin F. Wade, and Zachariah Chandler are the central figures in Mr. Trefousse's study of the Radical Republicans who steered a course between the extreme abolitionists on the one hand and the more cautious gradualists on the other, as they strove to break the slaveholder's domination of the federal government andthen to wrest from the postbellum South an acknowledgment of the civil rights of the Negro. The author delineates their key role in founding the Republican party and follows their struggle to keep the party firm in its opposition to the expansion of slavery, to commit it to emancipation, and finally to make it the party of racial justice. This is the story as well of the tangled relationship of the Radical Republicans with Abraham Lincoln—a relationship of both quarrels and mutual support. The author stresses the similarity between Lincoln's ultimate aims and those of the Radical Republicans, demonstrating that without Lincoln's support Sumner and his colleagues could never have accomplished their ends—and that without their help Lincoln might not have succeeded in crushing the rebellion and putting an end to the slavery. And he argues that by 1865 Lincoln's Reconstruction policies were nearing those of the Radicals and that, had he lived, they would not have broken with him as they did with his successor. Lincoln's assassination left the Radicals with no means to translate their demands into effective action. Their efforts to remake the South in such a way as to secure justice for the Negro brought them into conflict with President Johnson, in whose impeachment they played a leading role. Although they succeeded in initiating congressional Reconstruction and adding the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, the Radicals lost power after the failure of the Johnson impeachment. Mr. Trefousse shows how, despite their declining influence throughout the 1870s, their accomplishments helped make possible—a century later—the resumption of the struggle for civil rights.

Download or read book Thaddeus Stevens in Gettysburg written by Bradley R. Hoch and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Slavery by Another Name written by Douglas A. Blackmon and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2012-10-04 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

Download or read book Stony the Road written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Stony the Road presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white nationalism. . . . In our current politics we recognize African-American history—the spot under our country’s rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. Stony the Road lifts the rug." —Nell Irvin Painter, New York Times Book Review A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, by the bestselling author of The Black Church. The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked "a new birth of freedom" in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the "nadir" of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance. Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. Bringing a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a "New Negro" to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to America as it hurtled toward the modern age. The story Gates tells begins with great hope, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Union victory, and the liberation of nearly 4 million enslaved African-Americans. Until 1877, the federal government, goaded by the activism of Frederick Douglass and many others, tried at various turns to sustain their new rights. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and a loss of Northern will, restored "home rule" to the South. The retreat from Reconstruction was followed by one of the most violent periods in our history, with thousands of black people murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation. An essential tour through one of America's fundamental historical tragedies, Stony the Road is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells fought to create a counter-narrative, and culture, inside the lion's mouth. As sobering as this tale is, it also has within it the inspiration that comes with encountering the hopes our ancestors advanced against the longest odds.

Download or read book The Second Founding How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution written by Eric Foner and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation’s foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time. The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed all persons due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. They established the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of all citizens. The federal government, not the states, was charged with enforcement, reversing the priority of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, these revolutionary changes marked the second founding of the United States. Eric Foner’s compact, insightful history traces the arc of these pivotal amendments from their dramatic origins in pre–Civil War mass meetings of African-American “colored citizens” and in Republican party politics to their virtual nullification in the late nineteenth century. A series of momentous decisions by the Supreme Court narrowed the rights guaranteed in the amendments, while the states actively undermined them. The Jim Crow system was the result. Again today there are serious political challenges to birthright citizenship, voting rights, due process, and equal protection of the law. Like all great works of history, this one informs our understanding of the present as well as the past: knowledge and vigilance are always necessary to secure our basic rights.

Download or read book On the Edge of Freedom written by David G. Smith and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking Civil War history illuminates the unique development of antislavery sentiment in the border region of south central Pennsylvania. During the antebellum decades every single fugitive slave escaping by land east of the Appalachian Mountains had to pass through south central Pennsylvania, where they faced both significant opportunities and substantial risks. While the hundreds of fugitives traveling through Adams, Franklin, and Cumberland counties were aided by an effective Underground Railroad, they also faced slave catchers and informers. In On the Edge of Freedom, historian David G. Smith traces the victories of antislavery activists in south central Pennsylvania, including the achievement of a strong personal liberty law and the aggressive prosecution of kidnappers who seized African Americans as fugitives. He also documents how their success provoked Southern retaliation and the passage of a strengthened Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. Smith explores the fugitive slave issue through fifty years of sectional conflict, war, and reconstruction in south central Pennsylvania and provocatively questions what was gained by emphasizing fugitive protection over immediate abolition and full equality. Smith argues that after the war, social and demographic changes in southern Pennsylvania worked against African Americans’ achieving equal opportunity. Although local literature portrayed this area as a vanguard of the Underground Railroad, African Americans still lived “on the edge of freedom.” Winner of the Hortense Simmons Prize

Download or read book The Radical and the Republican written by James Oakes and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opponents at first, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln gradually became allies, each influenced by and attracted to the other. James Oakes brings these two iconic figures to life and sheds new light on the central issues of slavery, race and equality in Civil War America.

Download or read book Water Tossing Boulders written by Adrienne Berard and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A generation before Brown v. Board of Education struck down America’s “separate but equal” doctrine, one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawyer fought for desegregation in one of the greatest legal battles never told On September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese American and considered by the school to be “colored”; the school was for whites. This event would lead to the first US Supreme Court case to challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation in Southern public schools, an astonishing thirty years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Unearthing one of the greatest stories never told, journalist Adrienne Berard recounts how three unlikely heroes sought to shape a new South. A poor immigrant from southern China, Jeu Gong Lum came to America with the hope of a better future for his family. Unassuming yet boldly determined, his daughter Martha would inhabit that future and become the face of the fight to integrate schools. Earl Brewer, their lawyer and staunch ally, was once a millionaire and governor of Mississippi. When he took the family’s case, Brewer was both bankrupt and a political pariah—a man with nothing left to lose. By confronting the “separate but equal” doctrine, the Lum family fought for the right to educate Chinese Americans in the white schools of the Jim Crow South. Using their groundbreaking lawsuit as a compass, Berard depicts the complicated condition of racial otherness in rural Southern society. In a sweeping narrative that is both epic and intimate, Water Tossing Boulders evokes a time and place previously defined by black and white, a time and place that, until now, has never been viewed through the eyes of a forgotten third race. In vivid prose, the Mississippi Delta, an empire of cotton and a bastion of slavery, is reimagined to reveal the experiences of a lost immigrant community. Through extensive research in historical documents and family correspondence, Berard illuminates a vital, forgotten chapter of America’s past and uncovers the powerful journey of an oppressed people in their struggle for equality.

Download or read book America s Constitution written by Akhil Reed Amar and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In America’s Constitution, one of this era’s most accomplished constitutional law scholars, Akhil Reed Amar, gives the first comprehensive account of one of the world’s great political texts. Incisive, entertaining, and occasionally controversial, this “biography” of America’s framing document explains not only what the Constitution says but also why the Constitution says it. We all know this much: the Constitution is neither immutable nor perfect. Amar shows us how the story of this one relatively compact document reflects the story of America more generally. (For example, much of the Constitution, including the glorious-sounding “We the People,” was lifted from existing American legal texts, including early state constitutions.) In short, the Constitution was as much a product of its environment as it was a product of its individual creators’ inspired genius. Despite the Constitution’s flaws, its role in guiding our republic has been nothing short of amazing. Skillfully placing the document in the context of late-eighteenth-century American politics, America’s Constitution explains, for instance, whether there is anything in the Constitution that is unamendable; the reason America adopted an electoral college; why a president must be at least thirty-five years old; and why–for now, at least–only those citizens who were born under the American flag can become president. From his unique perspective, Amar also gives us unconventional wisdom about the Constitution and its significance throughout the nation’s history. For one thing, we see that the Constitution has been far more democratic than is conventionally understood. Even though the document was drafted by white landholders, a remarkably large number of citizens (by the standards of 1787) were allowed to vote up or down on it, and the document’s later amendments eventually extended the vote to virtually all Americans. We also learn that the Founders’ Constitution was far more slavocratic than many would acknowledge: the “three fifths” clause gave the South extra political clout for every slave it owned or acquired. As a result, slaveholding Virginians held the presidency all but four of the Republic’s first thirty-six years, and proslavery forces eventually came to dominate much of the federal government prior to Lincoln’s election. Ambitious, even-handed, eminently accessible, and often surprising, America’s Constitution is an indispensable work, bound to become a standard reference for any student of history and all citizens of the United States.

Download or read book Freedom s Shore written by Russell Duncan and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-07 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book An Uncommon Woman written by Mark Kelley and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: