American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 PDF Download

Author: Alan Taylor
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393253872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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“Excellent . . . deserves high praise. Mr. Taylor conveys this sprawling continental history with economy, clarity, and vividness.”—Brendan Simms, Wall Street Journal The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the nation its democratic framework. Alan Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history. The American Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain’s colonies, fueled by local conditions and resistant to control. Emerging from the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, the revolution pivoted on western expansion as well as seaboard resistance to British taxes. When war erupted, Patriot crowds harassed Loyalists and nonpartisans into compliance with their cause. The war exploded in set battles like Saratoga and Yorktown and spread through continuing frontier violence. The discord smoldering within the fragile new nation called forth a movement to concentrate power through a Federal Constitution. Assuming the mantle of “We the People,” the advocates of national power ratified the new frame of government. But it was Jefferson’s expansive “empire of liberty” that carried the revolution forward, propelling white settlement and slavery west, preparing the ground for a new conflagration.

Author: Alan Taylor
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101075813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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A multicultural, multinational history of colonial America from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Internal Enemy and American Revolutions In the first volume in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America, from the native inhabitants from milennia past, through the decades of Western colonization and conquest, and across the entire continent, all the way to the Pacific coast. Transcending the usual Anglocentric version of our colonial past, he recovers the importance of Native American tribes, African slaves, and the rival empires of France, Spain, the Netherlands, and even Russia in the colonization of North America. Moving beyond the Atlantic seaboard to examine the entire continent, American Colonies reveals a pivotal period in the global interaction of peoples, cultures, plants, animals, and microbes. In a vivid narrative, Taylor draws upon cutting-edge scholarship to create a timely picture of the colonial world characterized by an interplay of freedom and slavery, opportunity and loss. "Formidable . . . provokes us to contemplate the ways in which residents of North America have dealt with diversity." -The New York Times Book Review

Author: Alan Taylor
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393652432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian comes a brilliant, absorbing study of Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to save Virginia through education. By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully written history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. It offers an incisive portrait of Thomas Jefferson set against a social fabric of planters in decline, enslaved black families torn apart by sales, and a hair-trigger code of male honor. A man of “deft evasions” who was both courtly and withdrawn, Jefferson sought control of his family and state from his lofty perch at Monticello. Never quite the egalitarian we wish him to be, he advocated emancipation but shrank from implementing it, entrusting that reform to the next generation. Devoted to the education of his granddaughters, he nevertheless accepted their subordination in a masculine culture. During the revolution, he proposed to educate all white children in Virginia, but later in life he narrowed his goal to building an elite university. In 1819 Jefferson’s intensive drive for state support of a new university succeeded. His intention was a university to educate the sons of Virginia’s wealthy planters, lawyers, and merchants, who might then democratize the state and in time rid it of slavery. But the university’s students, having absorbed the traditional vices of the Virginia gentry, preferred to practice and defend them. Opening in 1825, the university nearly collapsed as unruly students abused one another, the enslaved servants, and the faculty. Jefferson’s hopes of developing an enlightened leadership for the state were disappointed, and Virginia hardened its commitment to slavery in the coming years. The university was born with the flaws of a slave society. Instead, it was Jefferson’s beloved granddaughters who carried forward his faith in education by becoming dedicated teachers of a new generation of women.

Author: Grace Lee Boggs
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520272595
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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"Reading Grace Lee Boggs helps you glimpse a United States that is better and more beautiful than you thought it was. As she analyzes some of the inspiring theories and practices that have emerged from the struggles for equality and freedom in Detroit and beyond, she also shows us that in this country, a future revolution is not only necessary but possible." —Michael Hardt, co-author of Commonwealth "This groundbreaking book not only represents the best of Grace Lee Boggs, but the best of any radical, visionary thinking in the United States. She reminds us why revolution is not only possible and necessary, but in some places already in the making. The conditions we face under neoliberalism and war do, indeed, mark the end of an era in which the old ideological positions of protest are not really relevant or effective—and this book offers a new way forward."—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination “Grace Boggs has long been a major voice of hope and action for transformation of the United States and the world. Here is her testimony of hope and program for action. It must be taken seriously.” —Immanuel Wallerstein, author of Utopistics: or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century "One of the most accomplished radicals of our time, the Detroit-based visionary Grace Lee Boggs has become one of our most influential and inspiring public intellectuals. The Next American Revolution is her powerful reflection on a lifetime of urban revolutionary work, an ode to the courage and brilliance of her late partner James Boggs, and a plain-spoken call for us to address the troubled times we face with a sense of history, a strong set of values, and an unwavering faith in our own creative, restorative powers." —Jeff Chang, author of Can't Stop Won't Stop

Author: Alan Taylor
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324005807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Winner of the 2022 New-York Historical Society Book Prize in American History A Washington Post and BookPage Best Nonfiction Book of the Year From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent. In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The system of American slavery grew increasingly powerful and expansive, its vigorous internal trade in Black Americans separating parents and children, husbands and wives. Bitter party divisions pitted elites favoring strong government against those, like Andrew Jackson, espousing a democratic populism for white men. Violence was both routine and organized: the United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi. At the end of the period the United States, its conquered territory reaching the Pacific, remained internally divided, with sectional animosities over slavery growing more intense. Taylor’s elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota. Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period.

Author: Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300195249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 876

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Questioning popular belief, a historian and re-examines what exactly led to the British Empire’s loss of the American Revolution. The loss of America was an unexpected defeat for the powerful British Empire. Common wisdom has held that incompetent military commanders and political leaders in Britain must have been to blame, but were they? This intriguing book makes a different argument. Weaving together the personal stories of ten prominent men who directed the British dimension of the war, historian Andrew O’Shaughnessy dispels the incompetence myth and uncovers the real reasons that rebellious colonials were able to achieve their surprising victory. In interlinked biographical chapters, the author follows the course of the war from the perspectives of King George III, Prime Minister Lord North, military leaders including General Burgoyne, the Earl of Sandwich, and others who, for the most part, led ably and even brilliantly. Victories were frequent, and in fact the British conquered every American city at some stage of the Revolutionary War. Yet roiling political complexities at home, combined with the fervency of the fighting Americans, proved fatal to the British war effort. The book concludes with a penetrating assessment of the years after Yorktown, when the British achieved victories against the French and Spanish, thereby keeping intact what remained of the British Empire. “A remarkable book about an important but curiously underappreciated subject: the British side of the American Revolution. With meticulous scholarship and an eloquent writing style, O'Shaughnessy gives us a fresh and compelling view of a critical aspect of the struggle that changed the world.”—Jon Meacham, author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

Author: Timothy Mason Roberts
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813928184
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism is a study of American politics, culture, and foreign relations in the mid-nineteenth century, illuminated through the reactions of Americans to the European revolutions of 1848. Flush from the recent American military victory over Mexico, many Americans celebrated news of democratic revolutions breaking out across Europe as a further sign of divine providence. Others thought that the 1848 revolutions served only to highlight how America’s own revolution had not done enough in the way of reform. Still other Americans renounced the 1848 revolutions and the thought of trans-atlantic unity because they interpreted European revolutionary radicalism and its portents of violence, socialism, and atheism as dangerous to the unique virtues of the United States. When the 1848 revolutions failed to create stable democratic governments in Europe, many Americans declared that their own revolutionary tradition was superior; American reform would be gradual and peaceful. Thus, when violence erupted over the question of territorial slavery in the 1850s, the effect was magnified among antislavery Americans, who reinterpreted the menace of slavery in light of the revolutions and counter-revolutions of Europe. For them a new revolution in America could indeed be necessary, to stop the onset of authoritarian conditions and to cure American exemplarism. The Civil War, then, when it came, was America’s answer to the 1848 revolutions, a testimony to America’s democratic shortcomings, and an American version of a violent, nation-building revolution.

Author: Maya Jasanoff
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1400075475
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER This groundbreaking book offers the first global history of the loyalist exodus to Canada, the Caribbean, Sierra Leone, India, and beyond. At the end of the American Revolution, sixty thousand Americans loyal to the British cause fled the United States and became refugees throughout the British Empire. Liberty’s Exiles tells their story. This surprising new account of the founding of the United States and the shaping of the post-revolutionary world traces extraordinary journeys like the one of Elizabeth Johnston, a young mother from Georgia, who led her growing family to Britain, Jamaica, and Canada, questing for a home; black loyalists such as David George, who escaped from slavery in Virginia and went on to found Baptist congregations in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone; and Mohawk Indian leader Joseph Brant, who tried to find autonomy for his people in Ontario. Ambitious, original, and personality-filled, this book is at once an intimate narrative history and a provocative analysis that changes how we see the revolution’s “losers” and their legacies.

Author: Friedrich von Gentz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 78

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Author: Michael Zezima
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
ISBN: 1609259076
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Since when was it unpatriotic to dissent? Why is it “un-American” to question our government’s policies? And how did the Far Right manage to claim the flag exclusively for itself? A book that the country desperately needs, 50 American Revolutions is a concise, quick guide to the people and events in our country’s history that progressives and anyone not impressed by the radical Right’s warped version of patriotism can be proud of. Author Mickey Z begins with Thomas Paine’s revolutionary manifesto Common Sense, written anonymously as a pamphlet in January 1776 and read by every member of Congress, and goes on to highlight the most notable people and events in the history of the United States, right through to the families of 9/11 victims in the group Peaceful Tomorrows questioning the connection between the events of that day and the United States’ subsequent acts of aggression in Iraq. In addition to concise essays on everything and everyone from the Bill of Rights to disability rights, Coxey’s Army to Public Enemy, Mickey also highlights important milestones along the timeline of the book, making for a complete picture of US history, good with bad. As with Russ Kick’s ultra-popular 50 Things You’re Not Supposed To Know, 50 American Revolutions is perfectly sized for handbags and coat pockets (it’s the same size as a CD), it’s a tremendous gift for anyone whose idea of patriotism needs some revision.