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Drawing on a gold mine of primary documents--including letters, diary entries, personal narratives, political speeches, broadsides, trial transcripts, and newspaper articles--The Boisterous Sea of Liberty is a panoramic look at our early history as captured in the words of Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, Douglass, Stowe, and many other historical figures both famous and obscure. In these widely varied pieces, almost all of which were culled from the vast and prestigious Gilder Lehrman Collection at New York's Pierpont Morgan Library, the living voices of the past speak to us from telling and often opposing perspectives--from the vantage points of loyalists and patriots, of slaves and masters, of Union and Confederate soldiers. These documents will provide a clearer understanding of such historical cornerstones as Columbus's dealings with Native Americans, the Stamp Act Crisis, the Declaration of Independence, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Missouri Crisis, the Mexican War, and the Harpers Ferry incident, to name but a few.Compiled by renowned historians David Brion Davis and Steven Mintz, and accompanied by several fine illustrations of the original documents, this book will engagingly introduce all students of American history to the men and women who lived through--and determined--the very events that shaped our nation.

In this volume, Kevin J. Hayes collects thirty accounts of Thomas Jefferson written by his granddaughters, visiting dignitaries, fellow politicians, and others who knew him as a family man, public servant, intellectual, and institution builder. The letters and reminiscences of those who knew Jefferson personally reveal him to be a warm, funny man, quite unlike the solemn statesman so often limned in biographies. To friends and enemies alike he was the model of a republican gentleman, profoundly knowledgeable in philosophy and natural history, able to converse in several languages, and capable of great wit but contemptuous of ceremony and fancy dress. Through these excerpts, we can see the nation's third president as his family knew him-a loving husband, father, and grandfather-and as his peers did, as a tireless public servant with a fondness for tall tales.

In the decades of the early republic, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. As Elizabeth Varon shows, \"disunion\" connoted the dissolution of the republic--the failure of the founders' effort to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a cataclysm that would plunge the nation into the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world. For many others, however, disunion was seen as the main instrument by which they could achieve their partisan and sectional goals. Varon blends political history with intellectual, cultural, and gender history to examine the ongoing debates over disunion that long preceded the secession crisis of 1860-61.

In American political fantasy, the Founding Fathers loom large, at once historical and mythical figures. InThe Traumatic Colonel, Michael J. Drexler and Ed White examine the Founders as imaginative fictions, characters in the specifically literary sense, whose significance emerged from narrative elements clustered around them. From the revolutionary era through the 1790s, the Founders took shape as a significant cultural system for thinking about politics, race, and sexuality. Yet after 1800, amid the pressures of the Louisiana Purchase and the Haitian Revolution, this system could no longer accommodate the deep anxieties about the United States as a slave nation.Drexler and White assert that the most emblematic of the political tensions of the time is the figure of Aaron Burr, whose rise and fall were detailed in the literature of his time: his electoral tie with Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the accusations of seduction, the notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton, his machinations as the schemer of a breakaway empire, and his spectacular treason trial. The authors venture a psychoanalytically-informed exploration of post-revolutionary America to suggest that the figure of Burr was fundamentally a displaced fantasy for addressing the Haitian Revolution. Drexler and White expose how the historical and literary fictions of the nation's founding served to repress the larger issue of the slave system and uncover the Burr myth as the crux of that repression. Exploring early American novels, such as the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Tabitha Gilman Tenney, as well as the pamphlets, polemics, tracts, and biographies of the early republican period, the authors speculate that this flourishing of political writing illuminates the notorious gap in U.S. literary history between 1800 and 1820.

In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, after decades of intense upheaval and debate, the role of the citizen was seen as largely political. But as Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan reveals, some Americans saw a need for a realm of public men outside politics. They believed that neither the nation nor they themselves could achieve virtue and happiness through politics alone. Imagining a different kind of citizenship, they founded periodicals, circulated manuscripts, and conversed about poetry, art, and the nature of man. They pondered William Godwin and Edmund Burke more carefully than they did candidates for local elections and insisted other Americans should do so as well.Kaplan looks at three groups in particular: the Friendly Club in New York City, which revolved around Elihu Hubbard Smith, with collaborators such as William Dunlap and Charles Brockden Brown; the circle around Joseph Dennie, editor of two highly successful periodicals; and the Anthologists of the Boston Athenaeum. Through these groups, Kaplan demonstrates, an enduring and influential model of the man of letters emerged in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

Traveling South is the first major study of how narratives of travel through the antebellum South helped construct an American national identity during the years between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. John Cox makes his case on the basis of a broad range of texts that includes slave narratives, domestic literature, and soldiers' diaries, as well as more traditional forms of travel writing. In the process he extends the boundaries of travel literature both as a genre and as a subject of academic study. The writers of these intranational accounts struggled with the significance of travel through a region that was both America and \"other.\" In writings by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and William Bartram, for example, the narrators create personal identities and express their Americanness through travel that, Cox argues, becomes a defining aspect of the young nation. In the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup, the complex relationship between travel and slavery highlights contemporary debates over the meaning of space and movement. Both Fanny Kemble and Harriet Jacobs explore the intimate linkings of women's travel and the construction of an ideal domestic space, whereas Frederick Law Olmsted seeks, through his travel writing, to reform the southern economy and expand a New England yeoman ideology throughout the nation. The Civil War diaries of Union soldiers, written during the years that witnessed the largest movement of travelers through the South, echo earlier themes while concluding that the South should not be transformed in order to become sufficiently \"American\"; rather, it was and should remain a part of the American nation, regardless of perceived differences.

This book explores the history of a Native American family using a rich collection of sources, including G. W. Grayson's never-before studied forty-four volume diary. At the heart of the narrative is a fact suppressed to this day by some Graysons: one branch of the family is of African descent. Focusing on five generations from 1780 to 1920, this book reveals the terrible compromises that Indians had to make to survive in the shadow of the expanding American republic. Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy of the United States, American Indians disowned their kin, enslaved their relatives, and fought each other on the battlefield. In the 18th-century native South, when the Graysons first welcomed Africans into their family, black-Indian relationships were common and bore little social stigma. But as American slave plantations began to spread across Indian lands, race took on ever greater significance. Native American families found that their survival depended on distancing themselves from their black relatives. The black and Indian Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by US troops in 1813 and again in 1836, endured Indian removal and the Trail of Tears, battled each other in the Civil War, and weathered the destruction of the Creek Nation in the 1890s. When they finally became American citizens in 1907, Oklahoma law defined some Graysons as white, some as black. By this time, the two sides of the family, divided by race, barely acknowledged each other.