Download or read book The Older Middle West 1840 1880 written by Henry Clyde Hubbart and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Democracy in the Middle West 1840 1940 written by Jeannette Paddock Nichols and published by . This book was released on 1941 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Frontier Women written by Julie Jeffrey and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1998-02-28 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic history of women on America's frontiers, now updated and thoroughly revised. FRONTIER WOMEN is an imaginative and graceful account of the extraordinarily diverse contributions of women to the development of the American frontier. Author Julie Roy Jeffrey has expanded her original analysis to include the perspectives of African American and Native American women.

Download or read book The American Civil War written by Peter J. Parish and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-06 with total page 806 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1975, this assessment of the American Civil War is a broad treatment of the war as a major historical event, set in the context of a detailed picture of two governments, economies and societies at war. It discusses many controversial topics - the uncertainty and hesitation that surrounded the origins of the war, for example, its economic impact, the Radicals and their relationship with Lincoln and reconstruction as a wartime issue. It offers acute analysis of Lincoln’s political skills, and an evaluation of emancipation and Lincoln’s approach to it; the problems and performance of the opposition during the war; international reactions; an assessment of some of the leading generals like McClellan and Lee and the impact of the war on both Southern and Northern society.

Download or read book Empire on the Pacific written by Norman Arthur Graebner and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-12 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stimulating volume, which was originally published in 1955, Professor Norman A. Graebner argues that historians have exaggerated the role played by the spirit of manifest destiny in the expansionism of the 1840s. In his view, neither the overland migrations nor eastern public opinion had any direct bearing on the diplomacy that won Oregon and California for the United States. Instead, the principal objective of every statesman from Jackson on was maritime: the acquisition of the harbors at San Diego, San Francisco, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca as gateways to the trade of the Orient. “Land was necessary to them merely as a right of way to ocean ports—a barrier to be spanned by improved avenues of commerce.” This diplomacy reached a climax under Polk and triumphed with the Trist mission and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, giving America “its empire on the Pacific.” It is upon this premise that Professor Graebner has built a reinterpretation of the diplomacy of the 1840s. An invaluable addition to any American History library.

Download or read book Routledge Library Editions America Revolution and Civil War written by Various Authors and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 3476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volumes in this set, originally published between 1967 and 2011, available as ebooks for the first time, include succinct, accessible books on two of the most important periods of American history which offer concise treatment of these major historical topics, as well as some lengthier, finest single-volume studies of the American Civil and Revolutionary Wars ever written and an outstanding reference tool in a 2 volume Encyclopedia. Among other things they: Bring central themes and problems into sharper focus. Discuss the pivotal roles played by Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln. Examine the role of medical doctors in the northern campaigns during the revolutionary war. Elucidate the character of the underlying moral and political problem of slavery. Discuss the social and political experience of the civil war whilst examining the centrality of what happened on the battlefield. Evaluate the legacy of the Civil War for America and for the world and emphasize its relationship to many of the dominating themes of modern history – democracy, freedom, equality and nationalism.

Download or read book When Slavery and Rebellion Are Destroyed written by Jack Dempsey and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The voices of rural midwestern women are missing from the relatively new field of Civil War-era women's history. This growing literature has focused on women of the Confederacy, and the voice of northern women traditionally only subsumes those in urban settings or of the middleclass who participated in aid societies. Rural northern women, especially from the Midwest, are largely absent from scholarly publications. When Slavery and Rebellion Are Destroyedmakes a groundbreaking contribution to the comprehension of gender issues by making an extensive collection of intimate letters between Ellen Preston Woodworth and her husband, Samuel, accessible to the scholarly field and all readers interested in the Civil War, homefront challenges, military family struggles, and gender roles. The journal collection of this correspondence invites comparison between Ellen's encounters with Indigenous peoples in her rural, recently settled community and Samuel's experiences with AfricanAmericans in the Deep South-unique in such a collection of letters. Wife and husband also delve into spiritual matters as they confront their lengthy separation. Scholars will find value in Samuel's service in a "construction battalion" that is frequently in harm's way. The national struggle over slavery and freedom becomes personal for this couple and is revealed powerfully to the reader.

Download or read book The Crusade Against Slavery written by Louis Filler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps no other crusade in the history of the U.S. provoked so much passion and fury as the struggle over slavery. Many of the problems that were a part of that great debate are still with us. Louis Filler has brought together much information both known and new on those who organized to defeat slavery. He has also re-examined the anti-slavery movement's ideals, heroes, and martyrs with historical perspective and precision. Contrary to popular belief, the anti-slavery movement was far from united. It included abolitionists as well as a variety of reformers whose activities place them among the anti-slavery forces. These included men as different in background and temperament as William Lloyd Garrison and John Quincy Adams. Portraits of the many protagonists, their hardships, and their quarrels with Southerners and Northerners alike, bring to life this exciting and tumultuous period. Filler also examines the many related reform movements that characterized the period: feminism, spiritualism, utopian societies, and educational reform. The volume traces the relationship of the antislavery movement to abolition and probes their connection with the several reforms that dominated the period. He brilliantly recaptures a sense of the contemporary consequences of the reformers efforts. This is an absorbing and important survey of the problems--political, social, and economic--that made this period so crucial in the history of the U.S.

Download or read book The Saints and the State written by James Simeone and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-05 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling history of the 1846 Mormon expulsion from Illinois that exemplifies the limits of American democracy and religious tolerance. When members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (known as Mormons) settled in Illinois in 1839, they had been persecuted for their beliefs from Ohio to Missouri. Illinoisans viewed themselves as religiously tolerant egalitarians and initially welcomed the Mormons to their state. However, non-Mormon locals who valued competitive individualism perceived the saints‘ western Illinois settlement, Nauvoo, as a theocracy with too much political power. Amid escalating tensions in 1844, anti-Mormon vigilantes assassinated church founder Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. Two years later, the state expelled the saints. Illinois rejected the Mormons not for their religion, but rather for their effort to create a self-governing state in Nauvoo. Mormons put the essential aspirations of American liberal democracy to the test in Illinois. The saints’ inward group focus and their decision to live together in Nauvoo highlight the challenges strong group consciousness and attachment pose to democratic governance. The Saints and the State narrates this tragic story as an epic failure of governance and shows how the conflicting demands of fairness to the Mormons and accountability to Illinois’s majority became incompatible.

Download or read book The Rivers Ran Backward written by Christopher Phillips and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most Americans imagine the Civil War in terms of clear and defined boundaries of freedom and slavery: a straightforward division between the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri and the free states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas. However, residents of these western border states, Abraham Lincoln's home region, had far more ambiguous identities-and contested political loyalties-than we commonly assume. In The Rivers Ran Backward, Christopher Phillips sheds light on the fluid political cultures of the "Middle Border" states during the Civil War era. Far from forming a fixed and static boundary between the North and South, the border states experienced fierce internal conflicts over their political and social loyalties. White supremacy and widespread support for the existence of slavery pervaded the "free" states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, which had much closer economic and cultural ties to the South, while those in Kentucky and Missouri held little identification with the South except over slavery. Debates raged at every level, from the individual to the state, in parlors, churches, schools, and public meeting places, among families, neighbors, and friends. Ultimately, the pervasive violence of the Civil War and the cultural politics that raged in its aftermath proved to be the strongest determining factor in shaping these states' regional identities, leaving an indelible imprint on the way in which Americans think of themselves and others in the nation. The Rivers Ran Backward reveals the complex history of the western border states as they struggled with questions of nationalism, racial politics, secession, neutrality, loyalty, and even place-as the Civil War tore the nation, and themselves, apart. In this major work, Phillips shows that the Civil War was more than a conflict pitting the North against the South, but one within the West that permanently reshaped American regions.

Download or read book Free Soil Free Labor Free Men written by Eric Foner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-04-20 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its publication twenty-five years ago, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarship, reassessing the concept of free labor in the light of the last twenty-five years of writing on such issues as work, gender, economic change, and political thought. A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner's study looks beyond the North's opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 1861. Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war's start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party's formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine the nation's destiny. In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks. Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.

Download or read book Border War written by Stanley Harrold and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noted historian Harrold examines the nation's fight over slavery that occurred before the Civil War.

Download or read book William Worth Belknap written by Edward S. Cooper and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It would be easy to blame Belknap's downfall on his hedonistic wives, as his apologists have suggested. He was easily manipulated by women, but he also possessed other more ominous flaws. Belknap turned obligation into suspicion, distrust, and finally hatred. William Tecumseh Sherman and Oliver Otis Howard had both helped advance Belknap's career. Now as Secretary of War, he would drive Sherman into exile and hound Howard through the courts. He was also capable of gloating over the death of an opponent. George Armstrong Custer testified against Belknap a few weeks before leading the Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn. Belknap received the news of the massacre, not as a tragedy, but as the settling of the score with at least one enemy. Belknap relished the pomp of the canon salutes as he arrived at West Point, his name in the newspapers, and the power to appoint his cronies to lucrative positions. And if, to maintain his position as Secretary of War, lavish expenditures were required, he would willingly accept bribes.".

Download or read book Religion and the Radical Republican Movement written by Victor B. Howard and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A distinctive contribution on the influence of Christians on Union politics during the Civil War era.” —Ohio History Religion and the Radical Republican Movement, 1860–1870 is a study of the interplay of religion and politics during the Civil War era. More specifically, it examines the extent to which religion set the moral tone of the North during the period of 1860 through 1870. Howard focuses on the growing influence of the evangelical and liberal churches during the period. This influence was largely exerted through the agency of the radical Republicans, a faction that took an extreme position on war measures and on reconstruction after the war. This book examines the degree to which radicalism was inspired by moral motivation and the action that followed the moral commitment. “The author’s prodigious research and stacks of quotations convincingly display the northern church’s commitment to black suffrage and to the era’s important congressional legislation bearing on black rights and other central Reconstruction issues.” —Choice

Download or read book The Greatest Nation of the Earth written by Heather Cox Richardson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While fighting a war for the Union, the Republican party attempted to construct the world's most powerful and most socially advanced nation. Rejecting the common assumption that wartime domestic legislation was a series of piecemeal reactions to wartime necessities, Heather Cox Richardson argues that party members systematically engineered pathbreaking laws to promote their distinctive theory of political economy. Republicans were a dynamic, progressive party, the author shows, that championed a specific type of economic growth. They floated billions of dollars in bonds, developed a national currency and banking system, imposed income taxes and high tariffs, passed homestead legislation, launched the Union Pacific railroad, and eventually called for the end of slavery. Their aim was to encourage the economic success of individual Americans and to create a millennium for American farmers, laborers, and small capitalists. However, Richardson demonstrates, while Republicans were trying to construct a nation of prosperous individuals, they were laying the foundation for rapid industrial expansion, corporate corruption, and popular protest. They created a newly active national government that they determined to use only to promote unregulated economic development. Unwittingly, they ushered in the Gilded Age.

Download or read book The Coming of the Civil War written by Avery Craven and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1957 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stimulating and profound analysis of the factors which brought a nation into war with itself.

Download or read book Stephen Douglas written by Damon Wells and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-09-10 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Douglas and the old Union lived out their last years together. It was the most critical time in the life of both the Illinois senator and his country. During most of the period 1857–1861 the American nation could still choose between adjustment of its sectional differences and civil war, and the man they called the Little Giant seemed the one statesman most likely to lead the country onto a course of compromise and reconciliation. But Douglas’ intense involvement with the American political scene—his great accomplishments in enacting the Compromises of 1850 and 1854, and his victory in the senatorial campaign of 1858—tended at times to disguise a growing alienation from the mainstream of American political life. By 1857 that alienation had reached acute proportions. In part, Douglas fell victim to his own virtues. He sought to be a nationalist in an age of sectionalism; he preached the value of compromise when most Americans questioned its worth. In other respects, Douglas’ political failures are less excusable. His attempt to convert an apparently amoral attitude toward slavery into a principle—popular sovereignty—found him dismissed by antislavery citizens as immoral and by proslavery citizens as unreliable. For too long, Douglas, professing to “care not” about the future of slavery, overlooked how much Americans could care once their consciences had been aroused or their way of life supposedly threatened. Douglas failed to win the presidential campaign of 1860 largely because he could satisfy neither the proponents nor the enemies of slavery. Yet if the last years of Douglas’ life were marred by failure, he was not ultimately the tragic figure some historians have suggested. During the campaign of 1860 a profound change began to take place in Stephen Douglas. The outmoded nationalism he had preached for so long began to give way to Unionism. In his eventual support of Lincoln and his defense of the Union, Douglas at last found a policy worthy of his great talents. Damon Wells first became interested in Stephen Douglas in 1959 after seeing a Broadway dramatization of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Later, his studies convinced him that playwright and historian alike were often unfair to Douglas. If Lincoln was to be a hero, then Douglas had to be cast as a villain. This study fills the need for a fresh and dispassionate look at Douglas and provides a fairer assessment than can be reached by simply endorsing contradictory views of apologists and critics. It places particular emphasis on the Little Giant’s struggle with President James Buchanan, the debates with Lincoln, the presidential campaign of 1860, Douglas’ complex relationship with the South, and a careful analysis of the elusive and at times exasperating principle of popular sovereignty.