Download or read book In Hock written by Wendy A. Woloson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-12-16 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of pawnbroking in the United States from the nation’s founding through the Great Depression, In Hock demonstrates that the pawnshop was essential to the rise of capitalism. The class of working poor created by this economic tide could make ends meet only, Wendy Woloson argues, by regularly pawning household objects to supplement inadequate wages. Nonetheless, businessmen, reformers, and cultural critics claimed that pawnshops promoted vice, and employed anti-Semitic stereotypes to cast their proprietors as greedy and cold-hearted. Using personal correspondence, business records, and other rich archival sources to uncover the truth behind the rhetoric, Woloson brings to life a diverse cast of characters and shows that pawnbrokers were in fact shrewd businessmen, often from humble origins, who possessed sophisticated knowledge of a wide range of goods in various resale markets. A much-needed new look at a misunderstood institution, In Hock is both a first-rate academic study of a largely ignored facet of the capitalist economy and a resonant portrait of the economic struggles of generations of Americans.
Download or read book Rare American History Being the Library of William Fisher Lewis Esq written by William Fisher Lewis and published by . This book was released on 1693 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Catalogue of the American books in the library of the British museum at Christmas mdccclvi With Catalogue of the Canadian and other British North American books in the library of the British museum at Christmas mdccclvi and Catalogue of the Mexican and other Spanish American West Indian books in the library of the British museum at Christmas 1856 and Catalogue of the American maps in the library of the British museum at Christmas 1856 written by Henry Stevens and published by . This book was released on 1866 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Catalogue of the American Books in the Library of the British Museum at Christmas MDCCCLVI written by Henry Stevens and published by London : C. Whittingham. This book was released on 1866 with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series Volume 9 written by Thomas Jefferson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 842 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Retirement Series documents Jefferson's written legacy between his return to private life on 4 March 1809 and his death on 4 July 1826. During this period Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and sold his extraordinary library to the nation, but his greatest legacy from these years is the astonishing depth and breadth of his correspondence with statesmen, inventors, scientists, philosophers, and ordinary citizens on topics spanning virtually every field of human endeavor.--From publisher description.
Download or read book The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Volume 45 written by Thomas Jefferson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive scholarly edition of the correspondence and papers of Thomas Jefferson This volume opens soon after the start of the second session of the Eighth Congress and ends a few days after the session closes. During the period, Jefferson receives twice as many documents as he writes. He sits for portraits by Charles Févret de Saint-Mémin and Rembrandt Peale. The nation endures an extreme winter. William Dunbar begins to send information from the exploration of the Ouachita River. Acts of Congress create new territories and give Orleans Territory an assembly and a path to statehood. The Senate ratifies a treaty to acquire an estimated 50 million acres of land from the Sac and Fox tribes. Levi Lincoln resigns, Robert Smith asks to succeed him as attorney general, and Jefferson seeks a new secretary of the navy. Jefferson and vice-presidential candidate George Clinton receive 162 electoral ballots against 14 for their opponents, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and Rufus King. Napoleon is crowned emperor of the French, and Spain declares war on Great Britain. The Senate acquits Samuel Chase of eight articles of impeachment. Jefferson prepares his inaugural address and is sworn into office for his second term on 4 March. He refuses to consider serving a third term.
Download or read book The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series Volume 5 written by Thomas Jefferson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 798 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume Five of the definitive edition of Thomas Jefferson's papers from the end of his presidency until his death includes 592 documents from 1 May 1812 to 10 March 1813. America declares war on Great Britain on 18 June 1812. Jefferson counsels domestic reconciliation while suggesting that America recruit British incendiaries to burn London if British ships attack American cities. He passes on to President James Madison a long and discouraging letter from Isaac A. Coles describing American military bungling in the Niagara Campaign. An unofficial proposal that Jefferson return to public life as secretary of state does not gain the retired statesman's support. Jefferson receives many requests for governmental patronage, responds insightfully to a colorful assortment of authors and inventors, is mildly diverted by a fraudulent perpetual-motion machine, and spends considerable time on legal troubles. A dispute with David Michie over land in Albemarle County nearly leads to a duel between Michie and Jefferson's agent. A conflict with Samuel Scott over property in Campbell County further vexes Jefferson, who prepares an extensively researched answer to Scott's complaint. Despite the conflict, Jefferson graciously writes a letter of introduction for Scott's son. Jefferson remains accessible to the public, receives anonymous letters urging him to convert to Christianity, and settles a wager for one correspondent who asks if Jefferson ever met the British king. Jefferson gloomily observes that "the hand of age is upon me" and complains that his faculties are failing. He still has thirteen years to live.
Download or read book The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Volume 40 written by Thomas Jefferson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 851 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume opens on 4 March 1803, the first day of Jefferson's third year as president. Still shaken by the closing of the right of deposit at New Orleans, he confronts the potential political consequences of a cession of Louisiana to France that might result in a denial of American access to the Mississippi. But he resists pressures to seize New Orleans by force, urging patience instead. The cabinet determines in April that "all possible procrastinations" should be used in dealing with France, but that discussions with Great Britain move forward as well. In Paris, a treaty for the cession of the Louisiana Territory to the United States is signed, and in May the right of deposit is restored. On 3 July, word reaches Jefferson in Washington of the agreement that France has sold the entire Territory for $15 million. The glorious news, which may be the most momentous that Jefferson receives while president, appears in the National Intelligencer the following day. Having received congressional approval to send an expedition to locate a continental route to the Pacific, Jefferson drafts instructions and a cipher for Meriwether Lewis and arranges for the needed instruments. Following through on a promise to a friend to give his views of Christianity, Jefferson puts his religious creed on paper, a "Syllabus" of the morals of Jesus and the comparative merits of Christianity. He intends it only for a few trusted friends.
Download or read book Sex among the Rabble written by Clare A. Lyons and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Placing sexual culture at the center of power relations in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia, Clare A. Lyons uncovers a world where runaway wives challenged their husbands' patriarchal rights and where serial and casual sexual relationships were commonplace. By reading popular representations of sex against actual behavior, Lyons reveals the clash of meanings given to sex and illuminates struggles to recast sexuality in order to eliminate its subversive potential. Sexuality became the vehicle for exploring currents of liberty, freedom, and individualism in the politics of everyday life among groups of early Americans typically excluded from formal systems of governance--women, African Americans, and poor classes of whites. Lyons shows that men and women created a vibrant urban pleasure culture, including the eroticization of print culture, as eighteenth-century readers became fascinated with stories of bastardy, prostitution, seduction, and adultery. In the post-Revolutionary reaction, white middle-class men asserted their authority, Lyons argues, by creating a gender system that simultaneously allowed them the liberty of their passions, constrained middle-class women with virtue, and projected licentiousness onto lower-class whites and African Americans. Lyons's analysis shows how class and racial divisions fostered new constructions of sexuality that served as a foundation for gender. This gendering of sexuality in the new nation was integral to reconstituting social hierarchies and subordinating women and African Americans in the wake of the Revolution.
Download or read book The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series Volume 18 written by Thomas Jefferson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new definitive volume of the retirement papers of Thomas Jefferson This volume’s 627 documents feature a vast assortment of topics. Jefferson writes of his dread of “a doting old age.” He inserts an anonymous note in the Richmond Enquirer denying that he has endorsed a candidate for the next presidential election, and he publishes two letters in that newspaper under his own name to refute a Federalist claim that he once benefited by overcharging the United States Treasury. Jefferson does not reply to unsolicited letters seeking his opinion on constitutional matters, judicial review, and a call for universal white male suffrage in Virginia. Fearing that it would set a dangerous precedent, he declines appointment as patron of a new society “for the civilisation of the Indians.” Jefferson is also asked to comment on proposed improvements to stoves, lighthouses, telescopes, and navigable balloons. Citing his advanced age and stiffened wrist, he avoids detailed replies and allows his complaint to John Adams about the volume of incoming correspondence to be leaked to the press in hopes that strangers will stop deluging them both with letters. Jefferson approves of the growth of Unitarianism and predicts that “there is not a young man now living in the US. who will not die an Unitarian.”
Download or read book The Fires of Philadelphia written by Zachary M. Schrag and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping and masterful account of the moment one of America's founding cities turned on itself, giving the nation a preview of the Civil War to come. America is in a state of deep unrest, grappling with xenophobia, racial, and ethnic tension a national scale that feels singular to our time. But it also echoes the earliest anti-immigrant sentiments of the country. In 1844, Philadelphia was set aflame by a group of Protestant ideologues—avowed nativists—who were seeking social and political power rallied by charisma and fear of the immigrant menace. For these men, it was Irish Catholics they claimed would upend morality and murder their neighbors, steal their jobs, and overturn democracy. The nativists burned Catholic churches, chased and beat people through the streets, and exchanged shots with a militia seeking to reinstate order. In the aftermath, the public debated both the militia’s use of force and the actions of the mob. Some of the most prominent nativists continued their rise to political power for a time, even reaching Congress, but they did not attempt to stoke mob violence again. Today, in an America beset by polarization and riven over questions of identity and law enforcement, the 1844 Philadelphia Riots and the circumstances that caused them demand new investigation. At a time many envision America in flames, The Fires of Philadelphia shows us a city—one that embodies the founding of our country—that descended into open warfare and found its way out again.
Download or read book The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series Volume 11 written by Thomas Jefferson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Retirement Series documents Jefferson's written legacy between his return to private life on 4 March 1809 and his death on 4 July 1826. During this period Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and sold his extraordinary library to the nation, but his greatest legacy from these years is the astonishing depth and breadth of his correspondence with statesmen, inventors, scientists, philosophers, and ordinary citizens on topics spanning virtually every field of human endeavor.--From publisher description.
Download or read book Mastering Iron written by Anne Kelly Knowles and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Veins of iron run deep in the history of America. Iron making began almost as soon as European settlement, with the establishment of the first ironworks in colonial Massachusetts. Yet it was Great Britain that became the Atlantic world’s dominant low-cost, high-volume producer of iron, a position it retained throughout the nineteenth century. It was not until after the Civil War that American iron producers began to match the scale and efficiency of the British iron industry. In Mastering Iron, Anne Kelly Knowles argues that the prolonged development of the US iron industry was largely due to geographical problems the British did not face. Pairing exhaustive manuscript research with analysis of a detailed geospatial database that she built of the industry, Knowles reconstructs the American iron industry in unprecedented depth, from locating hundreds of iron companies in their social and environmental contexts to explaining workplace culture and social relations between workers and managers. She demonstrates how ironworks in Alabama, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia struggled to replicate British technologies but, in the attempt, brought about changes in the American industry that set the stage for the subsequent age of steel. Richly illustrated with dozens of original maps and period art work, all in full color, Mastering Iron sheds new light on American ambitions and highlights the challenges a young nation faced as it grappled with its geographic conditions.
Download or read book National Genealogical Society Quarterly written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Secret Life of Bacon Tait a White Slave Trader Married to a Free Woman of Color written by Hank Trent and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2017-03-08 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians have long discussed the interracial families of prominent slave dealers in Richmond, Virginia, and elsewhere, yet, until now, the story of slave trader Bacon Tait remained untold. Among the most prominent and wealthy citizens of Richmond, Bacon Tait embarked upon a striking and unexpected double life: that of a white slave trader married to a free black woman. In The Secret Life of Bacon Tait, Hank Trent tells Tait’s complete story for the first time, reconstructing the hidden aspects of his strange and often paradoxical life through meticulous research in lawsuits, newspapers, deeds, and other original records. Active and ambitious in a career notorious even among slave owners for its viciousness, Bacon Tait nevertheless claimed to be married to a free woman of color, Courtney Fountain, whose extended family were involved in the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad. As Trent reveals, Bacon Tait maintained his domestic sphere as a loving husband and father in a mixed-race family in the North while running a successful and ruthless slave-trading business in the South. Though he possessed legal control over thousands of other black women at different times, Trent argues that Tait remained loyal to his wife, avoiding the predatory sexual practices of many slave traders. No less remarkably, Courtney Tait and their four children received the benefits of Tait’s wealth while remaining close to her family of origin, many of whom spoke out against the practice of slavery and even fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union. In a fascinating display of historical detective work, Trent illuminates the worlds Bacon Tait and his family inhabited, from the complex partnerships and rivalries among slave traders to the anxieties surrounding free black populations in Courtney and Bacon Tait’s adopted city of Salem, Massachusetts. Tait’s double life illuminates the complex interplay of control, manipulation, love, hate, denigration, and respect among interracial families, all within the larger context of a society that revolved around the enslavement of black Americans by white traders.
Download or read book Building Little Italy written by Richard N. Juliani and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2005-07-06 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philadelphia's first Italian immigrants arrived in the mid-eighteenth century. Artists and scholars, tradesmen and entrepreneurs, they established a new community&—one of the first &"Little Italies&" in America&—that would provide not just a home but a sense of belonging for later arrivals. Richard Juliani tells the story of early Italians in the City of Brotherly Love: why they chose that city, what their lives were like, where they lived, and how they interacted. Examining Italian settlement from pre-Revolutionary times up to the eve of mass migration in the 1870s, he shows how these early pioneers created the basic structure of the community that would continue into the twentieth century. Juliani has devoted thirty years of research&—combing through newspapers, public archives, religious records, business documents, and files of private organizations&—to recapturing the creation of a community. He describes such factors as regional origins, methods of migration, and population growth; patterns of age, sex, income, and occupation; family structure and living arrangements; and the formation of communal institutions. But more than providing data, Juliani explores the private lives of many individuals in the Italian community&—notably business leaders who spearheaded fraternal societies and political clubs&—and tells how early immigrants made a significant contribution to the city's life. He also compares the Philadelphia community with other Italian colonies, particularly in New York, and shows how, after years of being looked upon in a favorable light, a more negative view toward Italians began to emerge. The early Philadelphia Italian community has never before been studied despite the existence of a large body of records from this period. Building Little Italy provides a rare opportunity to witness the origins of an ethnic community. By presenting a meticulously detailed profile of the Italian immigrant experience through its early stages of development, it captures a piece of local history that has been too long ignored.
