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Sealed with Blood
The first martyr to the cause of American liberty was Major General Joseph Warren, a well-known political orator, physician, and president of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts. Shot in the face at close range at Bunker Hill, Warren was at once transformed into a national hero, with his story appearing throughout the colonies in newspapers, songs, pamphlets, sermons, and even theater productions. His death, though shockingly violent, was not unlike tens of thousands of others, but his sacrifice came to mean something much more significant to the American public.Sealed with Bloodreveals how public memories and commemorations of Revolutionary War heroes, such as those for Warren, helped Americans form a common bond and create a new national identity. Drawing from extensive research on civic celebrations and commemorative literature in the half-century that followed the War for Independence, Sarah Purcell shows how people invoked memories of their participation in and sacrifices during the war when they wanted to shore up their political interests, make money, argue for racial equality, solidify their class status, or protect their personal reputations. Images were also used, especially those of martyred officers, as examples of glory and sacrifice for the sake of American political principles. By the midnineteenth century, African Americans, women, and especially poor white veterans used memories of the Revolutionary War to articulate their own, more inclusive visions of the American nation and to try to enhance their social and political status. Black slaves made explicit the connection between military service and claims to freedom from bondage. Between 1775 and 1825, the very idea of the American nation itself was also democratized, as the role of \"the people\" in keeping the sacred memory of the Revolutionary War broadened.
eBook
American political history : a very short introduction
\"American Political History : A Very Short Introduction captures the richness of American political history, focusing primarily on national politics. It explores the nature of the two-party system, key turning points in American political history, representative presidential and congressional elections, struggles to expand the electorate, and critical social protest and third-party movements\"--Provided by publisher
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Conspiracy Theory in America
Ever since the Warren Commission concluded that a lone gunman assassinated President John F. Kennedy, people who doubt that finding have been widely dismissed as conspiracy theorists, despite credible evidence that right-wing elements in the CIA, FBI, and Secret Service—and possibly even senior government officials—were also involved. Why has suspicion of criminal wrongdoing at the highest levels of government been rejected out-of-hand as paranoid thinking akin to superstition? Conspiracy Theory in America investigates how the Founders’ hard-nosed realism about the likelihood of elite political misconduct—articulated in the Declaration of Independence—has been replaced by today’s blanket condemnation of conspiracy beliefs as ludicrous by definition. Lance deHaven-Smith reveals that the term “conspiracy theory\" entered the American lexicon of political speech to deflect criticism of the Warren Commission and traces it back to a CIA propaganda campaign to discredit doubters of the commission’s report. He asks tough questions and connects the dots among five decades’ worth of suspicious events, including the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, the attempted assassinations of George Wallace and Ronald Reagan, the crimes of Watergate, the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal, the disputed presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, the major defense failure of 9/11, and the subsequent anthrax letter attacks. Sure to spark intense debate about the truthfulness and trustworthiness of our government, Conspiracy Theory in America offers a powerful reminder that a suspicious, even radically suspicious, attitude toward government is crucial to maintaining our democracy.
eBook
Recalibrating reform : the limits of political change
\"This book deals with the conservative aftermath of several eras of reform in American history by pointing to the phenomenon of \"recalibration\". It demonstrates the difficulty of achieving substantive political change in American politics; elements of the old political order always somehow find ways to survive and reassert themselves after reform has occurred\"-- Provided by publisher.
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This Violent Empire
This Violent Empiretraces the origins of American violence, racism, and paranoia to the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans' national sense of self.Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series of \"Others\" (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless) whose differences from European American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders. These \"Others,\" dangerous and polluting, had to be excluded from the European American body politic. Feared, but also desired, they refused to be marginalized, incurring increasingly enraged enactments of their political and social exclusion that shaped our long history of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Close readings of political rhetoric during the Constitutional debates reveal the genesis of this long history.
eBook
Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America
This sweeping new assessment of Civil War monuments unveiled in the United States between the 1860s and 1930s argues that they were pivotal to a national embrace of military values. Americans' wariness of standing armies limited construction of war memorials in the early republic, Thomas J. Brown explains, and continued to influence commemoration after the Civil War. As large cities and small towns across the North and South installed an astonishing range of statues, memorial halls, and other sculptural and architectural tributes to Civil War heroes, communities debated the relationship of military service to civilian life through fund-raising campaigns, artistic designs, oratory, and ceremonial practices. Brown shows that distrust of standing armies gave way to broader enthusiasm for soldiers in the Gilded Age. Some important projects challenged the trend, but many Civil War monuments proposed new norms of discipline and vigor that lifted veterans to a favored political status and modeled racial and class hierarchies. A half century of Civil War commemoration reshaped remembrance of the American Revolution and guided American responses to World War I. Brown provides the most comprehensive overview of the American war memorial as a cultural form and reframes the national debate over Civil War monuments that remain potent presences on the civic landscape.
eBook
Modern conspiracies in America : separating fact from fiction
\"America is awash with alleged conspiracies. It seems like today, no one with a cell phone escapes the vortex of skepticism, cynicism, paranoia, and fear that occupy our thoughts almost constantly. Seeking out valid answers in this cacophony can be confusing and deeply frustrating. In this book, historian Michael D. Gambone provides case studies of popular conspiracy theories in America from the past 100 years, from Protocol of the Elders of Zion to #stopthesteal. He offers an approach, based on basic logic and historical case studies, not designed to win arguments, but to help reads separate truth from the avalanche of nonsense descending on us every day. In each case, Gambone outlines the conspiracy claim, provides historical context for the conspiracy, presents evidence of the conspiracy claim and analyzes the claim, context, and evidence. Modern Conspiracies in American History will appeal to a broad audience of readers interested in American history and those seeking to become better informed consumers of news in an era when social media spreads misinformation widely and quickly\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Chicanx Utopias
Amid the rise of neoliberalism, globalization, and movements for
civil rights and global justice in the post-World War II era,
Chicanxs in film, music, television, and art weaponized culture to
combat often oppressive economic and political conditions. They
envisioned utopias that, even if never fully realized, reimagined
the world and linked seemingly disparate people and places. In the
latter half of the twentieth century, Chicanx popular culture
forged a politics of the possible and gave rise to utopian dreams
that sprang from everyday experiences.
In Chicanx Utopias , Luis Alvarez offers a broad study
of these utopian visions from the 1950s to the 2000s. Probing the
film Salt of the Earth , brown-eyed soul music, sitcoms,
poster art, and borderlands reggae music, he examines how Chicanx
pop culture, capable of both liberation and exploitation, fostered
interracial and transnational identities, engaged social movements,
and produced varied utopian visions with divergent possibilities
and limits. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Walter
Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and the Zapatista movement, this book
reveals how Chicanxs articulated pop cultural utopias to make sense
of, challenge, and improve the worlds they inhabited.
eBook