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"Political culture-United States-History-19th century"
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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
Old Tip vs. the Sly Fox
Usually remembered for its slogan \"Tippecanoe and Tyler too,\" the
election of 1840 is also the first presidential election of which
it might be truly said, \"It’s the Economy, Stupid.\" Tackling a
contest best known for log cabins, cider barrels, and catchy songs,
this timely volume reveals that the election of 1840 might be
better understood as a case study of how profoundly the economy
shapes the presidential vote. Richard J. Ellis, a veteran scholar
of presidential politics, suggests that the election pitting the
Democratic incumbent Martin Van Buren against Whig William Henry
Harrison should also be remembered as the first presidential
election in which a major political party selected-rather than
merely anointed-its nominee at a national nominating convention. In
this analysis, the convention's selection, as well as Henry Clay's
post-convention words and deeds, emerge as crucial factors in the
shaping of the nineteenth-century partisan nation. Exploring the
puzzle of why the Whig Party's political titan Henry Clay lost out
to a relative political also-ran, Ellis teases out the role the
fluctuating economy and growing anti-slavery sentiment played in
the party's fateful decision to nominate the Harrison-Tyler ticket.
His work dismantles the caricature of the 1840 campaign (a.k.a. the
\"carnival campaign\") as all froth and no substance, instead giving
due seriousness to the deeply held moral commitments, as well as
anxieties about the political system, that informed the campaign.
In Old Tip vs. the Sly Fox , the campaign of 1840 can
finally be seen clearly for what it was: a contest of two
profoundly different visions of policy and governance, including
fundamental, still-pressing questions about the place of the
presidency and Congress in the US political system.
eBook
The field of blood : violence in Congress and the road to civil war
\"Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on [a] ... range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests ... These fights didn't happen in a vacuum. Freeman's ... accounts of brawls and thrashings tell a larger story of how fisticuffs and journalism, and the powerful emotions they elicited, raised tensions between North and South and led toward war\"--Publisher marketing.
Book
New Perspectives on the Union War
New Perspectives on the Union War explores, at a wide array of points along the political spectrum, the many shapes patriotic sentiment took in the loyal states during the Civil War. The essays provide new insights into well-known figures such as Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, political philosopher Francis Lieber, African American author/entrepreneur Elizabeth Keckley, abolitionist Abby Kelly Foster, New York governor Horatio Seymour, and Attorney General Edward Bates. They also offer the perspectives of common soldiers, of the partisan press, of the clergy, and of social reformers.
eBook
The golden age of the classics in America : Greece, Rome, and the antebellum United States
In a masterful study, Carl J. Richard explores how the Greek and Roman classics became enshrined in American antebellum culture. For the first time, knowledge of the classics extended beyond aristocratic males to the middle class, women, African Americans, and frontier settlers.
The classics shaped how Americans interpreted developments around them. The example of Athens allowed politicians of the democratic age to espouse classical knowledge without seeming elitist. The Industrial Revolution produced a backlash against utilitarianism that centered on the classics. Plato and other ancients had a profound influence on the American romantics who created the first national literature, and pious Christians in an age of religious fervor managed to reconcile their faith with the literature of a pagan culture. The classics supplied both sides of the slavery debate with their chief rhetorical tools: the Aristotelian defense of slavery to Southern slaveholders and the concept of natural law to the Northern abolitionists.
The Civil War led to a radical alteration of the educational system in a way that steadily eroded the preeminence of the classics. They would never regain the profound influence they held in the antebellum era.
eBook
Civic longing : the speculative origins of U.S. citizenship
Citizenship defines the U.S. political experiment, but the modern legal category that it now names is a relatively recent invention. There was no Constitutional definition of citizenship until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, almost a century after the Declaration of Independence. Civic Longing looks at the fascinating prehistory of U.S. citizenship in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, when the cultural and juridical meaning of citizenship--as much as its scope--was still up for grabs. Carrie Hyde recovers the numerous cultural forms through which the meaning of citizenship was provisionally made and remade in the early United States. Civic Longing offers the first historically grounded account of the formative political power of the imaginative traditions that shaped early debates about citizenship. In the absence of a centralized legal definition of citizenship, Hyde shows, politicians and writers regularly turned to a number of highly speculative traditions--political philosophy, Christian theology, natural law, fiction, and didactic literature--to authorize visions of what citizenship was or ought to be. These speculative traditions sustained an idealized image of citizenship by imagining it from its outer limits, from the point of view of its \"negative civic exemplars\"--expatriates, slaves, traitors, and alienated subjects. By recovering the strange, idiosyncratic meanings of citizenship in the early United States, Hyde provides a powerful critique of originalism, and challenges anachronistic assumptions that read the definition of citizenship backward from its consolidation in the mid-nineteenth century as jus soli or birthright citizenship.-- Provided by publisher
Book
The Union War
Today, many believe the Civil War was fought over slavery. This view satisfies our contemporary sense of justice, but as Gallagher's searing revisionist history shows, it is an anachronistic judgment. Northern citizen-soldiers fought the war to preserve the Union. Emancipation was secondary to the war’s primary goal of safeguarding the republic.
eBook