Download or read book Killing over Land written by Robert M. Owens and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early America, interracial homicide—whites killing Native Americans, Native Americans killing whites—might result in a massive war on the frontier; or, if properly mediated, it might actually facilitate diplomatic relations, at least for a time. In Killing over Land, Robert M. Owens explores why and how such murders once played a key role in Indian affairs and how this role changed over time. Though sometimes clearly committed to stoke racial animus and incite war, interracial murder also gave both Native and white leaders an opportunity to improve relations, or at least profit from conflict resolution. In the seventeenth century, most Indigenous people held and used enough leverage to dictate the terms on which such conflicts were resolved; but after the mid-eighteenth century, population and material advantages gave white settlers the upper hand. Owens describes the ways settler colonialism, as practiced by Anglo-Americans, put tremendous pressure on Native peoples, culturally, socially, and politically, forcing them to adapt in the face of violence and overwhelming numbers. By the early nineteenth century, many Native leaders recognized that, with population and power so heavily skewed against them, it was only practical to negotiate for the best possible terms; lex talionis justice—blood for blood—proved an unrealistic goal. Consequently, Indigenous and white leaders alike became all too willing to overlook murder if it led to some kind of gain—if, for instance, justice might be traded for financial compensation or land cessions. Ultimately, what Owens analyzes in Killing over Land is nothing less than the commodification of human life in return for a sense of order—as defined and accepted, however differently, by both Native and white authorities as the contest for land and resources intensified in the European colonization of North America.

Download or read book Guide to the Microfilm Edition of the Timothy Pickering Papers written by Roy Bartolomei and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Washington s End written by Jonathan Horn and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular historian and former White House speechwriter Jonathan Horn “provides a captivating and enlightening look at George Washington’s post-presidential life and the politically divided country that was part of his legacy” (New York Journal of Books). Beginning where most biographies of George Washington leave off, Washington’s End opens with the first president exiting office after eight years and entering what would become the most bewildering stage of his life. Embittered by partisan criticism and eager to return to his farm, Washington assumed a role for which there was no precedent at a time when the kings across the ocean yielded their crowns only upon losing their heads. In a different sense, Washington would lose his head, too. In this riveting read, bestselling author Jonathan Horn reveals that the quest to surrender power proved more difficult than Washington imagined and brought his life to an end he never expected. The statesman who had staked his legacy on withdrawing from public life would feud with his successors and find himself drawn back into military command. The patriarch who had dedicated his life to uniting his country would leave his name to a new capital city destined to become synonymous with political divisions. A “movable feast of a book” (Jay Winik, New York Times bestselling author of 1944), immaculately researched, and powerfully told through the eyes not only of Washington but also of his family members, friends, and foes, Washington’s End is “an outstanding biographical work on one of America’s most prominent leaders (Library Journal).

Download or read book Criminal Dissent written by Wendell Bird and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first complete account of prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts, dozens of previously unknown cases come to light, revealing the lengths to which the John Adams administration went in order to criminalize dissent. The campaign to prosecute dissenting Americans under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 ignited the first battle over the Bill of Rights. Fearing destructive criticism and “domestic treachery” by Republicans, the administration of John Adams led a determined effort to safeguard the young republic by suppressing the opposition. The acts gave the president unlimited discretion to deport noncitizens and made it a crime to criticize the president, Congress, or the federal government. In this definitive account, Wendell Bird goes back to the original federal court records and the papers of Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and finds that the administration’s zeal was far greater than historians have recognized. Indeed, there were twice as many prosecutions and planned deportations as previously believed. The government went after local politicians, raisers of liberty poles, and even tavern drunks but most often targeted Republican newspaper editors, including Benjamin Franklin’s grandson. Those found guilty were sent to prison or fined and sometimes forced to sell their property to survive. The Federalists’ support of laws to prosecute political opponents and opposition newspapers ultimately contributed to the collapse of the party and left a large stain on their record. The Alien and Sedition Acts launched a foundational debate on press freedom, freedom of speech, and the legitimacy of opposition politics. The result was widespread revulsion over the government’s attempt to deprive Americans of their hard-won liberties. Criminal Dissent is a potent reminder of just how fundamental those rights are to a stable democracy.

Download or read book Citizen Bachelors written by John Gilbert McCurdy and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1755 Benjamin Franklin observed "a man without a wife is but half a man" and since then historians have taken Franklin at his word. In Citizen Bachelors, John Gilbert McCurdy demonstrates that Franklin's comment was only one side of a much larger conversation. Early Americans vigorously debated the status of unmarried men and this debate was instrumental in the creation of American citizenship. In a sweeping examination of the bachelor in early America, McCurdy fleshes out a largely unexamined aspect of the history of gender. Single men were instrumental to the settlement of the United States and for most of the seventeenth century their presence was not particularly problematic. However, as the colonies matured, Americans began to worry about those who stood outside the family. Lawmakers began to limit the freedoms of single men with laws requiring bachelors to pay higher taxes and face harsher penalties for crimes than married men, while moralists began to decry the sexual immorality of unmarried men. But many resisted these new tactics, including single men who reveled in their hedonistic reputations by delighting in sexual horseplay without marital consequences. At the time of the Revolution, these conflicting views were confronted head-on. As the incipient American state needed men to stand at the forefront of the fight for independence, the bachelor came to be seen as possessing just the sort of political, social, and economic agency associated with citizenship in a democratic society. When the war was won, these men demanded an end to their unequal treatment, sometimes grudgingly, and the citizen bachelor was welcomed into American society. Drawing on sources as varied as laws, diaries, political manifestos, and newspapers, McCurdy shows that in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the bachelor was a simultaneously suspicious and desirable figure: suspicious because he was not tethered to family and household obligations yet desirable because he was free to study, devote himself to political office, and fight and die in battle. He suggests that this dichotomy remains with us to this day and thus it is in early America that we find the origins of the modern-day identity of the bachelor as a symbol of masculine independence. McCurdy also observes that by extending citizenship to bachelors, the founders affirmed their commitment to individual freedom, a commitment that has subsequently come to define the very essence of American citizenship.

Download or read book Constitutional Inquisitors written by Scott Ingram and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evolution of the federal prosecutor's role from a pragmatic necessity to a significant political figure. In the United States, federal prosecutors enjoy a degree of power unmatched elsewhere in the world. They are free to investigate and prosecute—or decline to prosecute—criminal cases without significant oversight. And yet, no statute grants them these powers; their role is not mentioned in the Constitution. How did they obtain this power, and are they truly independent from the political process? In Constitutional Inquisitors, Scott Ingram answers these questions by tracing the origins and development of federal criminal law enforcement. In the first book to examine the development of the federal law enforcement apparatus in the earliest part of the early republic, Ingram explains how federal prosecutors' roles began as an afterthought but quickly evolved into powerful political positions. He also addresses two long-held perceptions about early federal criminal prosecution: that prosecutors tried many more cases than historians thought and that the relationship between prosecution and executive power is much more complex and interwoven than commonly assumed. Drawing on materials at the National Archives as well as correspondence and trial reports, Ingram explores the first federal criminal case, the first use of presidential pardon power, the first federal prosecution of a female, and the first interstate criminal investigation. He also discloses internal Administration discussions involving major criminal cases, including those arising from the Whiskey Insurrection, Neutrality Crisis, Alien and Sedition Acts, and Fries' Rebellion. As the United States grapples today with political divisions and arguments over who should be prosecuted for what, Constitutional Inquisitors reveals that these problems began with the creation of the federal prosecutor role and have continued as the role gained power.

Download or read book Death or Liberty written by Douglas R. Egerton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Death or Liberty, Douglas R. Egerton offers a sweeping chronicle of African American history stretching from Britain's 1763 victory in the Seven Years' War to the election of slaveholder Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800. While American slavery is usually identified with antebellum cotton plantations, Egerton shows that on the eve of the Revolution it encompassed everything from wading in the South Carolina rice fields to carting goods around Manhattan to serving the households of Boston's elite. More important, he recaptures the drama of slaves, freed blacks, and white reformers fighting to make the young nation fulfill its republican slogans. Although this struggle often unfolded in the corridors of power, Egerton pays special attention to what black Americans did for themselves in these decades, and his narrative brims with compelling portraits of forgotten African American activists and rebels, who battled huge odds and succeeded in finding liberty--if never equality--only in northern states. Egerton concludes that despite the real possibility of peaceful, if gradual, emancipation, the Founders ultimately lacked the courage to end slavery.

Download or read book Calendar of Papers in Washington Archives Relating to the Territories of the United States to 1873 written by David W. Parker and published by Washington, D.C : Carnegie institution of Washington. This book was released on 1911 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Benjamin Lincoln and the American Revolution written by David B. Mattern and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first modern biography of an American Revolutionary War hero In this definitive biography of one of America's most important but least known Revolutionary War generals, David B. Mattern tells the life story of Benjamin Lincoln, a prosperous farmer who left the comfort of his Massachusetts home to become a national hero in America's struggle for independence. Mattern's account of the citizen-soldier who served as George Washington's second-in-command at Yorktown and as secretary at war from 1781 to 1783 revisits the challenges, sacrifices, triumphs, and defeats that shaped Lincoln's evolution from affluent middle-aged family man to pillar of a dynamic republic. In addition to offering new insights into leadership during the Revolutionary period, Lincoln's life so mirrored his times that it provides an opportunity to tell the tale of the American Revolution in a fresh, compelling way.

Download or read book Speculation Nation written by Michael A. Blaakman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first quarter-century after its founding, the United States was swept by a wave of land speculation so unprecedented in intensity and scale that contemporaries and historians alike have dubbed it a "mania." In Speculation Nation, Michael A. Blaakman uncovers the revolutionary origins of this real-estate bonanza--a story of ambition, corruption, capitalism, and statecraft that stretched across millions of acres from Maine to the Mississippi and Georgia to the Great Lakes. Patriot leaders staked the success of their revolution on the seizure and public sale of Native American territory. Initially, they hoped that fledgling state and national governments could pay the hefty costs of the War for Independence and extend a republican society of propertied citizens by selling expropriated land directly to white farmers. But those democratic plans quickly ran aground of a series of obstacles, including an economic depression and the ability of many Native nations to repel U.S. invasion. Wily merchants, lawyers, planters, and financiers rushed into the breach. Scrambling to profit off future expansion, they lobbied governments to convey massive tracts for pennies an acre, hounded revolutionary veterans to sell their land bounties for a pittance, and marketed the rustic ideal of a yeoman's republic--the early American dream--while waiting for land values to rise. When the land business crashed in the late 1790s, scores of "land mad" speculators found themselves imprisoned for debt or declaring bankruptcy. But through their visionary schemes and corrupt machinations, U.S. speculators and statesmen had spawned a distinctive and enduring form of settler colonialism: a financialized frontier, which transformed vast swaths of contested land into abstract commodities. Speculation Nation reveals how the era of land mania made Native dispossession a founding premise of the American republic and ultimately rooted the United States' "empire of liberty" in speculative capitalism.

Download or read book Chained to History written by Steven J. Brady and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Chained to History, Steven J. Brady places slavery at the center of the story of America's place in the world in the years prior to the calamitous Civil War. Beginning with the immediate aftermath of the War of the American Revolution, Brady follows the military, economic, and moral lines of the diplomatic challenges of attempting to manage, on the global stage, the actuality of human servitude in a country dedicated to human freedom. Chained to History shows how slavery was interwoven with America's foreign relations and affected policy controversies ranging from trade to extradition treaties to military alliances. Brady highlights the limitations placed on American policymakers who, working in an international context increasingly supportive of abolition, were severely constrained regarding the formulation and execution of preferred policy. Policymakers were bound to the slave interest based in the Democratic Party and the tortured state of domestic politics bore heavily on the conduct of foreign affairs. As international powers not only abolished the slave trade but banned human servitude as such, the American position became untenable. From the Age of Revolutions through the American Civil War, slavery was a constant factor in shaping US relations with the Atlantic World and beyond. Chained to History addresses this critical topic in its complete scope and shows the immoral practice of human bondage to have informed how the United States re-entered the community of nations after 1865.

Download or read book America on the Brink written by Richard Buel and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating story of how New England Federalists threatened to dissolve the Union by making a separate peace with England during the War of 1812. Many people would be surprised to learn that the struggle between Thomas Jefferson's Republican Party and Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Party defined--and jeopardized--the political life of the early American republic. Richard Buel Jr.'s America on the Brink looks at why the Federalists, who worked so hard to consolidate the federal government before 1800, went to great lengths to subvert it after Jefferson's election. In addition to taking the side of the British in the diplomatic dance before the war, the Federalists did everything they could to impede the prosecution of the war, even threatening the Madison Administration with a separate peace for New England in 1814. Readers fascinated by the world of the Founding Fathers will come away from this riveting account with a new appreciation for how close the new nation came to falling apart almost fifty years before the Civil War.

Download or read book The War of 1812 written by Donald R Hickey and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface to the First Edition -- Preface to the Bicentennial Edition -- Introduction -- 1. The Road to War, 1801-1812 -- 2. The Declaration of War -- 3. The Baltimore Riots -- 4. The Campaign of 1812 -- 5. Raising Men and Money -- 6. The Campaign of 1813 -- 7. The Last Embargo -- 8. The British Counteroffensive -- 9. The Crisis of 1814 -- 10. The Hartford Convention -- 11. The Treaty of Ghent -- Conclusion -- A Note on Sources -- Notes -- Index -- back cover.

Download or read book The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States 1789 1800 pt 1 Appointments and proceedings written by Maeva Marcus and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume one presents documents that establish the structure of the Supreme Court and recount the official record of the Court's activity during its first decade. It serves as an introduction and reference tool for the subsequent volumes in the series.

Download or read book Pricing the Land written by Scott W. Anderson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pricing the Land reconstructs the complicated history of buying and selling land along the New York frontier after the American Revolution. Scott W. Anderson focuses on the prices bid for lots in central New York that had been set aside for veterans of the war (the New Military Tract) and within the Cayuga Reservation created by treaty in 1789, comprising a hundred square miles of land on both shores of the northern end of Cayuga Lake. He considers several factors that affected the value of this land: the scarcity of money in early America; the role that Alexander Hamilton's assumption policy played in encouraging debt speculation; the sale of huge tracts by New York and Massachusetts to investment syndicates; and the struggles of settlers across the New York frontier to escape debt, bondage, and poverty. Anderson, who served as an expert witness in the Cayuga Land Claim trials of 1999 to 2001 that awarded the Cayuga Nation $247.9 million in compensation and damages (a judgment overturned in 2005), developed new methodological tools for determining a better estimate of the value of this land. In Pricing the Land, he concludes that the only accurate measure of worth lay in the settlers' ability to pay their rents or debts, which was only possible once the Market Revolution reached central New York. As a result of his historical recovery, Anderson finds that the Cayuga Nation might have been entitled to twice the amount they were awarded in their lawsuit.

Download or read book John Adams Slavery and Race written by Arthur Scherr and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-01-04 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing the first full investigation of second U.S. president John Adams' attitudes toward slavery, blacks, and the Haitian Revolution, this iconoclastic study illuminates the inner and outer worlds of Adams for scholars and general readers. John Adams was a Founding Father of the United States who not only played a key role in laying the foundation of the nation but is also highly regarded as a great speaker, thinker, lawyer, revolutionary, diplomat, vice president, and president. But was Adams an opponent of slavery and a believer in racial equality? The historical evidence points to the contrary. This book is the first to discuss at any length John Adams's views on race, slavery, and slavery extension by examining his writings, politics, and diplomacy. Historian Arthur Scherr, an expert who is uniquely knowledgeable about Adams's views on slavery, race, and the Haitian Revolution, reveals Adams's attitudes toward slavery and race in and out of office, spotlighting his views on slavery during the American Revolution, his perspective regarding race as vice president and president of the United States, and his opinions in retirement. Readers will be able to form their opinions based on factual documentation of Adams's statements and actions regarding the key events involving slavery and race during this period: the gradual emancipation of slaves; U.S. aid to Haiti, the only black-governed nation in the world, and to its Governor-General Toussaint Louverture in gaining its independence; and the U.S. government's decision to permit slavery in new states and territories formed from public lands such as the Old Northwest and the Louisiana Purchase.

Download or read book Enduring Controversies in Presidential Nominating Politics written by Emmett H. Buell Jr. and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2004-08-29 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The process of nominating and electing a president is a spectacle that never fails to engage and excite millions of Americans—and rarely fails to enrage us, as well.Enduring Controversies in Presidential Nominating Politics retraces the more than two hundred-year history of presidential elections in the United States to provide a primer on how the process has evolved from the days of the founders, through the heyday of nominating conventions, to today's overwhelming interest in early primaries.Original essays by the editors introduce, critique, and occasionally even refute a wide variety of historical readings including Alexander Hamilton's defense of election procedures, excerpts of individual states' nominations of candidates in 1824, an overview of the impact television has had on nominating conventions, and calls for a national rotating primary scheme in 2004. As a whole, the collection reveals the common threads that run through the history of the nominating process, and points out that today's litany of complaints is not at all new.