Download or read book The Minutemen and Their World Revised and Expanded Edition written by Robert A. Gross and published by Picador USA. This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The classic work on one town's American Revolution--now with a new preface and afterword by the author"--

Download or read book The Minutemen and Their World written by Robert A. Gross and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bancroft Prize–winning classic of American history now in a revised and expanded edition with a new preface and afterword by the author. On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The “shot heard round the world” catapulted this sleepy New England town into the height of revolutionary fervor, and Concord went on to become the intellectual capital of the new republic. The town—future home to Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne—soon came to symbolize devotion to liberty, intellectual freedom, and the stubborn integrity of rural life. In The Minutemen and Their World, Robert A. Gross has written a remarkably subtle and detailed reconstruction of the lives and community of this special place, and a compelling interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement.

Download or read book The Transcendentalists and Their World written by Robert A. Gross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021 One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021 Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers. The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand–plus souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant today. The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

Download or read book Waiting for Jos written by Harel Shapira and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing look inside a controversial movement They live in the suburbs of Tennessee and Indiana. They fought in Vietnam and Desert Storm. They speak about an older, better America, an America that once was, and is no more. And for the past decade, they have come to the U.S. / Mexico border to hunt for illegal immigrants. Who are the Minutemen? Patriots? Racists? Vigilantes? Harel Shapira lived with the Minutemen and patrolled the border with them, seeking neither to condemn nor praise them, but to understand who they are and what they do. Challenging simplistic depictions of these men as right-wing fanatics with loose triggers, Shapira discovers a group of men who long for community and embrace the principles of civic engagement. Yet these desires and convictions have led them to a troubling place. Shapira takes you to that place—a stretch of desert in southern Arizona, where he reveals that what draws these men to the border is not simply racism or anti-immigrant sentiments, but a chance to relive a sense of meaning and purpose rooted in an older life of soldiering. They come to the border not only in search of illegal immigrants, but of lost identities and experiences. Now with a new afterword by the author, Waiting for José brings understanding to a group of people in search of lost identities and experiences.

Download or read book 1774 written by Mary Beth Norton and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of our most acclaimed and original colonial historians, a groundbreaking book tracing the critical "long year" of 1774 and the revolutionary change that took place from the Boston Tea Party and the First Continental Congress to the Battles of Lexington and Concord. A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR In this masterly work of history, the culmination of more than four decades of research and thought, Mary Beth Norton looks at the sixteen months leading up to the clashes at Lexington and Concord in mid-April 1775. This was the critical, and often overlooked, period when colonists traditionally loyal to King George III began their discordant “discussions” that led them to their acceptance of the inevitability of war against the British Empire. Drawing extensively on pamphlets, newspapers, and personal correspondence, Norton reconstructs colonial political discourse as it took place throughout 1774. Late in the year, conservatives mounted a vigorous campaign criticizing the First Continental Congress. But by then it was too late. In early 1775, colonial governors informed officials in London that they were unable to thwart the increasing power of local committees and their allied provincial congresses. Although the Declaration of Independence would not be formally adopted until July 1776, Americans had in effect “declared independence ” even before the outbreak of war in April 1775 by obeying the decrees of the provincial governments they had elected rather than colonial officials appointed by the king. Norton captures the tension and drama of this pivotal year and foundational moment in American history and brings it to life as no other historian has done before.

Download or read book Deerskins and Duffels written by Kathryn E. Braund and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1996-03-28 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deerskins and Duffels documents the trading relationship between the Creek Indians in what is now the southeastern United States and the Anglo-American peoples who settled there. The Creeks were the largest native group in the Southeast, and through their trade alliance with the British colonies they became the dominant native power in the area. The deerskin trade became the economic lifeblood of the Creeks after European contact. This book is the first to examine extensively the Creek side of the trade, especially the impact of commercial hunting on all aspects of Indian society. British trade is detailed here, as well: the major traders and trading companies, how goods were taken to the Indians, how the traders lived, and how trade was used as a diplomatic tool. The author also discusses trade in Indian slaves, a Creek-Anglo cooperation that resulted in the virtual destruction of the native peoples of Florida.

Download or read book The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin written by Gordon S. Wood and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-05-31 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I cannot remember ever reading a work of history and biography that is quite so fluent, so perfectly composed and balanced . . .” —The New York Sun “Exceptionally rich perspective on one of the most accomplished, complex, and unpredictable Americans of his own time or any other.” —The Washington Post Book World From the most respected chronicler of the early days of the Republic—and winner of both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes—comes a landmark work that rescues Benjamin Franklin from a mythology that has blinded generations of Americans to the man he really was and makes sense of aspects of his life and career that would have otherwise remained mysterious. In place of the genial polymath, self-improver, and quintessential American, Gordon S. Wood reveals a figure much more ambiguous and complex—and much more interesting. Charting the passage of Franklin’s life and reputation from relative popular indifference (his death, while the occasion for mass mourning in France, was widely ignored in America) to posthumous glory, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin sheds invaluable light on the emergence of our country’s idea of itself.

Download or read book Faces of Revolution written by Bernard Bailyn and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-29 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Bernard Bailyn brings us a book that combines portraits of American revolutionaries with a deft exploration of the ideas that moved them and still shape our society today.

Download or read book 1775 written by Kevin Phillips and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking account of the American Revolution—from the bestselling author of American Dynasty In this major new work, iconoclastic historian and political chronicler Kevin Phillips upends the conventional reading of the American Revolution by debunking the myth that 1776 was the struggle’s watershed year. Focusing on the great battles and events of 1775, Phillips surveys the political climate, economic structures, and military preparations of the crucial year that was the harbinger of revolution, tackling the eighteenth century with the same skill and perception he has shown in analyzing contemporary politics and economics. The result is a dramatic account brimming with original insights about the country we eventually became.

Download or read book The Missile Next Door written by Gretchen Heefner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s the Air Force buried 1,000 ICBMs in pastures across the Great Plains to keep U.S. nuclear strategy out of view. As rural civilians of all political stripes found themselves living in the Soviet crosshairs, a proud Plains individualism gave way to an economic dependence on the military-industrial complex that still persists today.

Download or read book The Indispensables written by Patrick K. O'Donnell and published by Grove Atlantic. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed combat historian and author of The Unknowns details the history of the Marbleheaders and their critical role in the Revolutionary War. On the stormy night of August 29, 1776, the Continental Army faced annihilation after losing the Battle of Brooklyn. The British had trapped George Washington’s army against the East River, and the fate of the Revolution rested upon the soldier-mariners from Marblehead, Massachusetts. One of the country’s first diverse units, they pulled off an “American Dunkirk” and saved the army by navigating the treacherous river to Manhattan. At the right time in the right place, the Marbleheaders, a group of white, black, Hispanic, and Native American soldiers, repeatedly altered the course of events, and their story shines new light on our understanding of the American Revolution. As historian Patrick K. O’Donnell recounts, beginning nearly a decade before the war started, Marbleheaders such as Elbridge Gerry and Azor Orne spearheaded the break with Britain and helped shape the United States through governing, building alliances, seizing British ships, forging critical supply lines, and establishing the origins of the US Navy. The Marblehead Regiment, led by John Glover, became truly indispensable. Marbleheaders battled at Lexington and on Bunker Hill and formed the elite Guard that protected George Washington, foreshadowing today’s Secret Service. Then the special operations–like regiment, against all odds, conveyed 2,400 of Washington’s men across the ice-filled Delaware River on Christmas night of 1776, delivering the surprise attack on Trenton that changed the course of history . . . The Marbleheaders’ story, never fully told before now, makes The Indispensables a vital addition to the literature of the American Revolution. Praise for The Indispensables “Perfectly paced and powerfully wrought, this is the story of common men who gave everything for an ideal—America. The product of meticulous research, The Indispensables is the perfect reminder of who we are, when we need it most.” —Adam Makos, author of the New York Times bestseller A Higher Call “O’Donnell’s gift for storytelling brings the once famous regiment back to life, as he takes readers from the highest war councils to the grime and grit of battle.” —Dr. James Lacey, author of The Washington War “Comprehensive . . . Revolutionary War buffs will delight in the copious details and vivid battle scenes.” —Publishers Weekly “A vivid account of an impressive Revolutionary War unit and a can’t-miss choice for fans of O’Donnell’s previous books.” —Kirkus Review

Download or read book The Road to Concord written by John Leonard Bell and published by Journal of the American Revolu. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early spring of 1775, on a farm in Concord, Massachusetts, British army spies located four brass cannon belonging to Boston's colonial militia that had gone missing months before. British general Thomas Gage had been searching for them, both to stymie New England's growing rebellion and to erase the embarrassment of having let cannon disappear from armories under redcoat guard. Anxious to regain those weapons, he drew up plans for his troops to march nineteen miles into unfriendly territory. The Massachusetts Patriots, meanwhile, prepared to thwart the general's mission. There was one goal Gage and his enemies shared: for different reasons, they all wanted to keep the stolen cannon as secret as possible. Both sides succeeded well enough that the full story has never appeared until now. The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War by historian J. L. Bell reveals a new dimension to the start of America's War for Independence by tracing the spark of its first battle back to little-known events beginning in September 1774. Drawing on archives in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, the book creates a lively, original, and deeply documented picture of a society perched on the brink of war.

Download or read book The Colonists American Revolution written by Guy Chet and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-09-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dissenting Companion to the U.S. History Textbook Most U.S. History textbooks track the origins and evolution of American identity. They therefore present the American Revolution as the product of a gradual cultural change in English colonists. Over time, this process of Americanization differentiated and alienated the settlers from their compatriots and their government in Britain. This widely-taught narrative encourages students to view American independence as a reflection of emerging American nationhood. The Colonists' American Revolution introduces readers to a competing narrative which presents the Revolution as a product of the colonists’ English identity and of English politics. This volume helps students recognize that the traditional narrative of the Revolution is an argument, not a just-the-facts account of this period in U.S. history. Written to make history interesting and relevant to students, this textbook provides a dissenting interpretation of America’s founding—the Revolution was not the result of an incremental process of Americanization, but rather an immediate reaction to sudden policy changes in London. It exposes students to dueling historical narratives of the American Revolution, encouraging them to debate and evaluate both narratives on the strength of evidence. This stimulating volume: Offers an account of the Revolution’s chronology, causes, ends, and accomplishments not commonly addressed in traditional textbooks Challenges the conventional narrative of Americanization with one of Anglicization Presents the Atlantic as a bridge, rather than a barrier, between England and its colonies Discusses the American Revolution as one in a series of British rebellions Uses a dual-perspective approach to spark discussions on what it means to study history Exposing students to two different ways of studying history, The Colonists' American Revolution: Preserving English Liberty, 1607-1783 is a thought-provoking resource for undergraduate and graduate students of early-American history, as well as historians and interested general readers.

Download or read book Rebels Rising written by Benjamin L. Carp and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-22 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cities of eighteenth-century America packed together tens of thousands of colonists, who met each other in back rooms and plotted political tactics, debated the issues of the day in taverns, and mingled together on the wharves or in the streets. In this fascinating work, historian Benjamin L. Carp shows how these various urban meeting places provided the tinder and spark for the American Revolution. Carp focuses closely on political activity in colonial America's five most populous cities--in particular, he examines Boston's waterfront community, New York tavern-goers, Newport congregations, Charleston's elite patriarchy, and the common people who gathered outside Philadelphia's State House. He shows how--because of their tight concentrations of people and diverse mixture of inhabitants--the largest cities offered fertile ground for political consciousness, political persuasion, and political action. The book traces how everyday interactions in taverns, wharves, and elsewhere slowly developed into more serious political activity. Ultimately, the residents of cities became the first to voice their discontent. Merchants began meeting to discuss the repercussions of new laws, printers fired up provocative pamphlets, and protesters took to the streets. Indeed, the cities became the flashpoints for legislative protests, committee meetings, massive outdoor gatherings, newspaper harangues, boycotts, customs evasion, violence and riots--all of which laid the groundwork for war. Ranging from 1740 to 1780, this groundbreaking work contributes significantly to our understanding of the American Revolution. By focusing on some of the most pivotal events of the eighteenth century as they unfolded in the most dynamic places in America, this book illuminates how city dwellers joined in various forms of political activity that helped make the Revolution possible.

Download or read book The Glorious Cause written by Robert Middlekauff and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-09 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to appear in the illustrious Oxford History of the United States, this critically acclaimed volume--a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--offers an unsurpassed history of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the American republic. Beginning with the French and Indian War and continuing to the election of George Washington as first president, Robert Middlekauff offers a panoramic history of the conflict between England and America, highlighting the drama and anguish of the colonial struggle for independence. Combining the political and the personal, he provides a compelling account of the key events that precipitated the war, from the Stamp Act to the Tea Act, tracing the gradual gathering of American resistance that culminated in the Boston Tea Party and "the shot heard 'round the world." The heart of the book features a vivid description of the eight-year-long war, with gripping accounts of battles and campaigns, ranging from Bunker Hill and Washington's crossing of the Delaware to the brilliant victory at Hannah's Cowpens and the final triumph at Yorktown, paying particular attention to what made men fight in these bloody encounters. The book concludes with an insightful look at the making of the Constitution in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and the struggle over ratification. Through it all, Middlekauff gives the reader a vivid sense of how the colonists saw these events and the importance they gave to them. Common soldiers and great generals, Sons of Liberty and African slaves, town committee-men and representatives in congress--all receive their due. And there are particularly insightful portraits of such figures as Sam and John Adams, James Otis, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and many others. This new edition has been revised and expanded, with fresh coverage of topics such as mob reactions to British measures before the War, military medicine, women's role in the Revolution, American Indians, the different kinds of war fought by the Americans and the British, and the ratification of the Constitution. The book also has a new epilogue and an updated bibliography. The cause for which the colonists fought, liberty and independence, was glorious indeed. Here is an equally glorious narrative of an event that changed the world, capturing the profound and passionate struggle to found a free nation. The Oxford History of the United States The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. The Atlantic Monthly has praised it as "the most distinguished series in American historical scholarship," a series that "synthesizes a generation's worth of historical inquiry and knowledge into one literally state-of-the-art book." Conceived under the general editorship of C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter, and now under the editorship of David M. Kennedy, this renowned series blends social, political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, and military history into coherent and vividly written narrative.

Download or read book Amusing the Million written by John F. Kasson and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coney Island: the name still resonates with a sense of racy Brooklyn excitement, the echo of beach-front popular entertainment before World War I. Amusing the Million examines the historical context in which Coney Island made its reputation as an amusement park and shows how America's changing social and economic conditions formed the basis of a new mass culture. Exploring it afresh in this way, John Kasson shows Coney Island no longer as the object of nostalgia but as a harbinger of modernity--and the many photographs, lithographs, engravings, and other reproductions with which he amplifies his text support this lively thesis.

Download or read book Rethinking America written by John M. Murrin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For five decades John M. Murrin has been the consummate historian's historian. This volume brings together his seminal essays on the American Revolution, the United States Constitution, and the early American Republic. Collectively, they rethink fundamental questions regarding American identity, the decision to declare independence in 1776, and the impact the American Revolution had on the nation it produced. By digging deeply into questions that have shaped the field for several generations, Rethinking America argues that high politics and the study of constitutional and ideological questions--broadly the history of elites--must be considered in close conjunction with issues of economic inequality, class conflict, and racial division. Bringing together different schools of history and a variety of perspectives on both Britain and the North American colonies, it explains why what began as a constitutional argument, that virtually all expected would remain contained within the British Empire, exploded into a truly subversive and radical revolution that destroyed monarchy and aristocracy and replaced them with a rapidly transforming and chaotic republic. This volume examines the period of the early American Republic and discusses why the Founders' assumptions about what their Revolution would produce were profoundly different than the society that emerged from the American Revolution. In many ways, Rethinking America suggests that the outcome of the American Revolution put the new United States on a path to a violent and bloody civil war. With an introduction by Andrew Shankman, this long-awaited work by one of the most important scholars of the Revolutionary era offers a coherent interpretation of the complex period that saw the breakdown of colonial British North America and the founding of the United States.