Download or read book The Rivers Ran Backward written by Christopher Phillips and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work argues that historians have largely ignored the West's centrality to perhaps the Civil War's most lasting outcome: the rise of regionalism as a force in postwar domestic politics.
Download or read book Where the Rivers Ran Backward written by William E. Merritt and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1990 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From out of memory and set against a background of rock-and-roll music, Where the Rivers Ran Backward captures and transcribes the moments of the Vietnam War from the red line that leads through the induction center to the slow days and night watches to the black wall that records the names of the missing and the dead.
Download or read book When the Mississippi Ran Backwards written by Jay Feldman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Jay Feldmen comes an enlightening work about how the most powerful earthquakes in the history of America united the Indians in one last desperate rebellion, reversed the Mississippi River, revealed a seamy murder in the Jefferson family, and altered the course of the War of 1812. On December 15, 1811, two of Thomas Jefferson's nephews murdered a slave in cold blood and put his body parts into a roaring fire. The evidence would have been destroyed but for a rare act of God—or, as some believed, of the Indian chief Tecumseh. That same day, the Mississippi River's first steamboat, piloted by Nicholas Roosevelt, powered itself toward New Orleans on its maiden voyage. The sky grew hazy and red, and jolts of electricity flashed in the air. A prophecy by Tecumseh was about to be fulfilled. He had warned reluctant warrior-tribes that he would stamp his feet and bring down their houses. Sure enough, between December 16, 1811, and late April 1812, a catastrophic series of earthquakes shook the Mississippi River Valley. Of the more than 2,000 tremors that rumbled across the land during this time, three would have measured nearly or greater than 8.0 on the not-yet-devised Richter Scale. Centered in what is now the bootheel region of Missouri, the New Madrid earthquakes were felt as far away as Canada; New York; New Orleans; Washington, DC; and the western part of the Missouri River. A million and a half square miles were affected as the earth's surface remained in a state of constant motion for nearly four months. Towns were destroyed, an eighteen-mile-long by five-mile-wide lake was created, and even the Mississippi River temporarily ran backwards. The quakes uncovered Jefferson's nephews' cruelty and changed the course of the War of 1812 as well as the future of the new republic. In When the Mississippi Ran Backwards, Jay Feldman expertly weaves together the story of the slave murder, the steamboat, Tecumseh, and the war, and brings a forgotten period back to vivid life. Tecumseh's widely believed prophecy, seemingly fulfilled, hastened an unprecedented alliance among southern and northern tribes, who joined the British in a disastrous fight against the U.S. government. By the end of the war, the continental United States was secure against Britain, France, and Spain; the Indians had lost many lives and much land; and Jefferson's nephews were exposed as murderers. The steamboat, which survived the earthquake, was sunk. When the Mississippi Ran Backwards sheds light on this now-obscure yet pivotal period between the Revolutionary and Civil wars, uncovering the era's dramatic geophysical, political, and military upheavals. Feldman paints a vivid picture of how these powerful earthquakes made an impact on every aspect of frontier life—and why similar catastrophic quakes are guaranteed to recur. When the Mississippi Ran Backwards is popular history at its best.
Download or read book Rebels on the Border written by Aaron Astor and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rebels on the Border offers a remarkably compelling and significant study of the Civil War South's highly contested and bloodiest border states: Kentucky and Missouri. By far the most complex examination to date, the book sharply focuses on the "borderland" between the free North and the Confederate South. As a result, Rebels on the Border deepens and enhances understanding of the sectional conflict, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. After slaves in central Kentucky and Missouri gained their emancipation, author Aaron Astor contends, they transformed informal kin and social networks of resistance against slavery into more formalized processes of electoral participation and institution building. At the same time, white politics in Kentucky's Bluegrass and Missouri's Little Dixie underwent an electoral realignment in response to the racial and social revolution caused by the war and its aftermath. Black citizenship and voting rights provoked a violent white reaction and a cultural reinterpretation of white regional identity. After the war, the majority of wartime Unionists in the Bluegrass and Little Dixie joined former Confederate guerrillas in the Democratic Party in an effort to stifle the political ambitions of former slaves. Rebels on the Border is not simply a story of bitter political struggles, partisan guerrilla warfare, and racial violence. Like no other scholarly account of Kentucky and Missouri during the Civil War, it places these two crucial heartland states within the broad context of local, southern, and national politics.
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 496 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 The Civil War in the Border South written by Christopher Phillips and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-07-16 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The border states during the Civil War have long been ignored or misunderstood in general histories. This book corrects that oversight, explaining how many border state residents used wartime realities to redefine their politics and culture as "Southern." By studying the characteristics of those positioned along this fault line during the Civil War, the centrality of the war issue of slavery, which border residents long eschewed as being divisive, became apparent. This book explains how the process of Southernization occurred during and after the Civil War—a phenomenon largely unexplained by historians. Beyond the broader, more traditional narrative of the clash of arms, within these border slave states raged an inner civil war that shaped the military and political outcomes of the war as well as these states' cultural landscapes. Author Christopher Phillips describes how the Civil War experience in the border states served to form new loyalties and communities of identity that both deeply divided these states and distorted the meaning of the war for postwar generations.
Download or read book River Out of Eden written by Richard Dawkins and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-04 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the replication bomb we call ”life” begin and where in the world, or rather, in the universe, is it heading? Writing with characteristic wit and an ability to clarify complex phenomena (the New York Times described his style as ”the sort of science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius”), Richard Dawkins confronts this ancient mystery.
Download or read book Remember Me to Miss Louisa written by Sharony Green and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is generally recognized that antebellum interracial relationships were "notorious" at the neighborhood level. But we have yet to fully uncover the complexities of such relationships, especially from freedwomen's and children's points of view. While it is known that Cincinnati had the largest per capita population of mixed race people outside the South during the antebellum period, historians have yet to explore how geography played a central role in this outcome. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers made it possible for Southern white men to ferry women and children of color for whom they had some measure of concern to free soil with relative ease. Some of the women in question appear to have been "fancy girls," enslaved women sold for use as prostitutes or "mistresses." Green focuses on women who appear to have been the latter, recognizing the problems with the term "mistress," given its shifting meaning even during the antebellum period. Remember Me to Miss Louisa, among other things, moves the life of the fancy girl from New Orleans, where it is typically situated, to the Midwest. The manumission of these women and their children—and other enslaved women never sold under this brand—occurred as America's frontiers pushed westward, and urban life followed in their wake. Indeed, Green's research examines the tensions between the urban Midwest and the rising Cotton Kingdom. It does so by relying on surviving letters, among them those from an ex-slave mistress who sent her "love" to her former master. This relationship forms the crux of the first of three case studies. The other two concern a New Orleans young woman who was the mistress of an aging white man, and ten Alabama children who received from a white planter a $200,000 inheritance (worth roughly $5.1 million in today's currency). In each case, those freed people faced the challenges characteristic of black life in a largely hostile America. While the frequency with which Southern white men freed enslaved women and their children is now generally known, less is known about these men's financial and emotional investments in them. Before the Civil War, a white Southern man's pending marriage, aging body, or looming death often compelled him to free an African American woman and their children. And as difficult as it may be for the modern mind to comprehend, some kind of connection sometimes existed between these individuals. This study argues that such men—though they hardly stand excused for their ongoing claims to privilege—were hidden actors in freedwomen's and children's attempts to survive the rigors and challenges of life as African Americans in the years surrounding the Civil War. Green examines many facets of this phenomenon in the hope of revealing new insights about the era of slavery. Historians, students, and general readers of US history, African American studies, black urban history, and antebellum history will find much of interest in this fascinating study.
Download or read book Where the River Runs written by Patti Callahan Henry and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-05-03 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Patti Callahan Henry delivers an engaging novel about a South Carolina woman who goes back home to face the past—and discovers herself. Meridy Dresden was once a free-spirited, fun-loving girl. All that changed when the boy she loved was killed in a tragic fire. Since then, she alone has carried the burden of a terrible secret. Now, years later, married to a wonderful man and mother of a teenage son, she is shocked to learn that a childhood friend is being blamed for that long-ago fire. Fearful but determined, Meridy returns to the South Carolina Lowcountry and summons the courage to make a decision that may destroy her well-ordered life, her family’s reputation, her contented marriage, and everything she’s worked so hard to protect…including her heart. “Brilliant. Powerful. Magical. Do not miss this book.”—New York Times bestselling author Haywood Smith
Download or read book Freedom s Port written by Christopher Phillips and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baltimore's African-American population--nearly 27,000 strong and more than 90 percent free in 1860--was the largest in the nation at that time. Christopher Phillips's Freedom's Port, the first book-length study of an urban black population in the antebellum Upper South, chronicles the growth and development of that community. He shows how it grew from a transient aggregate of individuals, many fresh from slavery, to a strong, overwhelmingly free community less wracked by class and intraracial divisions than were other cities. Almost from the start, Phillips states, Baltimore's African Americans forged their own freedom and actively defended it--in a state that maintained slavery and whose white leadership came to resent the liberties the city's black people had achieved.
Download or read book A Private Family Matter written by Victor Rivas Rivers and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006-04-29 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a story about how I was saved by love at a time when most people considered me beyond rescue," begins Victor Rivas Rivers in this powerful chronicle of how he escaped the war zone of domestic violence -- too often regarded as a "private family matter" -- and went on to become a good man, a film star, and a prominent activist. The Cuban-born author begins by recalling when he was kidnapped, along with three of his siblings, by his own father, who abandoned Victor's pregnant mother and took the children on a cross-country hell-ride that nearly ended in a fatal collision. This journey of survival portrays with riveting detail how, instead of becoming a madman like his father, Victor was saved by a band of mortal angels. Miraculously, seven families stepped forward, along with teachers and coaches, to empower him on his road from gang member to class president, through harrowing and hilarious football adventures at Florida State and with the Miami Dolphins, to overcoming the Hollywood odds and becoming a champion for all those impacted by domestic violence. Though at times Victor's odyssey is heartbreaking and disturbing, A Private Family Matter is ultimately a triumphant testament to humanity, courage, and love. Profound and poignant, it is a compelling memoir with a cause. Victor Rivers's way of thanking all the angels and advocates who made a difference in his life is by trying to make a difference in all of ours.
Download or read book The Man Who Walked Backward written by Ben Montgomery and published by Little, Brown Spark. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery, the story of a Texas man who, during the Great Depression, walked around the world -- backwards. Like most Americans at the time, Plennie Wingo was hit hard by the effects of the Great Depression. When the bank foreclosed on his small restaurant in Abilene, he found himself suddenly penniless with nowhere left to turn. After months of struggling to feed his family on wages he earned digging ditches in the Texas sun, Plennie decided it was time to do something extraordinary -- something to resurrect the spirit of adventure and optimism he felt he'd lost. He decided to walk around the world -- backwards. In The Man Who Walked Backward, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery charts Plennie's backwards trek across the America that gave rise to Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, and the New Deal. With the Dust Bowl and Great Depression as a backdrop, Montgomery follows Plennie across the Atlantic through Germany, Turkey, and beyond, and details the daring physical feats, grueling hardships, comical misadventures, and hostile foreign police he encountered along the way. A remarkable and quirky slice of Americana, The Man Who Walked Backward paints a rich and vibrant portrait of a jaw-dropping period of history.
Download or read book Northern Borders written by Howard Frank Mosher and published by HMH. This book was released on 2014-08-12 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book: A novel about growing up in a remote corner of Vermont, from the author Richard Russo calls “one of our very best writers.” When six-year-old Austen Kittredge was sent up north to live on his grandparents’ farm in 1948, he didn’t know that he would spend the next twelve years of his life there—or that his remarkable stay would never leave him, no matter how far he traveled. The farm in Lost Nation Hollow would become a magical place for Austen, full of eccentric people—like his stubborn but loving grandparents, whose marriage was known as the Forty Years War—wild adventures, and festering family secrets. An enchanting, startling coming-of-age novel, Northern Borders evokes a world of county fairs, heirloom quilts, and timber forests, in “a touching and unforgettable portrait of a people and time that are past” (Fannie Flagg, The New York Times Book Review). “A contemporary classic . . . A complex, yet idyllic, story of childhood in Vermont.” —Los Angeles Times
Download or read book About Town written by Ben Yagoda and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2000 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminated by interviews with more than fifty people, including the late Joseph Mitchell, William Steig, Roger Angell, Calvin Trillin, Pauline Kael, John Updike, and Ann Beattie, About Town penetrates the inner workings of the New Yorker as no other book has done."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Down the Great Unknown written by Edward Dolnick and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on rarely examined diaries and journals, Down the Great Unknown is the first book to tell the full, dramatic story of the Powell expedition. On May 24, 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. The Grand Canyon, not explored before, was as mysterious as Atlantis—and as perilous. The ten men set out from Green River Station, Wyoming Territory down the Colorado in four wooden rowboats. Ninety-nine days later, six half-starved wretches came ashore near Callville, Arizona. Lewis and Clark opened the West in 1803, six decades later Powell and his scruffy band aimed to resolve the West’s last mystery. A brilliant narrative, a thrilling journey, a cast of memorable heroes—all these mark Down the Great Unknown, the true story of the last epic adventure on American soil.
Download or read book A River Ran Wild written by Lynne Cherry and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the beloved classic "The Great Kapok Tree," "A River Ran Wild "tells a story of restoration and renewal. Learn how the modern-day descendants of the Nashua Indians and European settlers were able to combat pollution and restore the beauty of the Nashua River in Massachusetts.
Download or read book Lincoln s Generals Wives written by Candice Shy Hooper and published by Civil War in the North. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 24: "Is this my destiny?"--Chapter 25: "secesh wives with their own little slaves"--Chapter 26: "Do stop digging at this old canal" -- Chapter 27: Lieutenant General's Wife -- Chapter 28: "I did not want to go to the theater" -- Chapter 29: "the sunlight of his loyal love
