America As Second Creation

Author : David E. Nye
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262640597
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book America as Second Creation written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-09-17 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the dialogue that emerged after 1776 between different visions of what it meant to use new technologies to transform the land. After 1776, the former American colonies began to reimagine themselves as a unified, self-created community. Technologies had an important role in the resulting national narratives, and a few technologies assumed particular prominence. Among these were the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam. In this book David Nye explores the stories that clustered around these technologies. In doing so, he rediscovers an American story of origins, with America conceived as a second creation built in harmony with God's first creation. While mainstream Americans constructed technological foundation stories to explain their place in the New World, however, marginalized groups told other stories of destruction and loss. Native Americans protested the loss of their forests, fishermen resisted the construction of dams, and early environmentalists feared the exhaustionof resources. A water mill could be viewed as the kernel of a new community or as a new way to exploit labor. If passengers comprehended railways as part of a larger narrative about American expansion and progress, many farmers attacked railroad land grants. To explore these contradictions, Nye devotes alternating chapters to narratives of second creation and to narratives of those who rejected it.Nye draws on popular literature, speeches, advertisements, paintings, and many other media to create a history of American foundation stories. He shows how these stories were revised periodically, as social and economic conditions changed, without ever erasing the earlier stories entirely. The image of the isolated frontier family carving a homestead out of the wilderness with an axe persists to this day, alongside later images and narratives. In the book's conclusion, Nye considers the relation between these earlier stories and such later American developments as the conservation movement, narratives of environmental recovery, and the idealization of wilderness.

Author : David E. Nye
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262640596
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book America as Second Creation written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-09-17 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the dialogue that emerged after 1776 between different visions of what it meant to use new technologies to transform the land. After 1776, the former American colonies began to reimagine themselves as a unified, self-created community. Technologies had an important role in the resulting national narratives, and a few technologies assumed particular prominence. Among these were the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam. In this book David Nye explores the stories that clustered around these technologies. In doing so, he rediscovers an American story of origins, with America conceived as a second creation built in harmony with God's first creation. While mainstream Americans constructed technological foundation stories to explain their place in the New World, however, marginalized groups told other stories of destruction and loss. Native Americans protested the loss of their forests, fishermen resisted the construction of dams, and early environmentalists feared the exhaustionof resources. A water mill could be viewed as the kernel of a new community or as a new way to exploit labor. If passengers comprehended railways as part of a larger narrative about American expansion and progress, many farmers attacked railroad land grants. To explore these contradictions, Nye devotes alternating chapters to narratives of second creation and to narratives of those who rejected it.Nye draws on popular literature, speeches, advertisements, paintings, and many other media to create a history of American foundation stories. He shows how these stories were revised periodically, as social and economic conditions changed, without ever erasing the earlier stories entirely. The image of the isolated frontier family carving a homestead out of the wilderness with an axe persists to this day, alongside later images and narratives. In the book's conclusion, Nye considers the relation between these earlier stories and such later American developments as the conservation movement, narratives of environmental recovery, and the idealization of wilderness.

Author : Jonathan Gienapp
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 067498952X
Total Pages : 402 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Second Creation written by Jonathan Gienapp and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans widely believe that the U.S. Constitution was almost wholly created when it was drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788. Jonathan Gienapp recovers the unknown story of the Constitution’s second creation in the decade after its adoption—a story with explosive implications for current debates over constitutional originalism and interpretation.

Author : Jonathan Gienapp
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674185048
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Second Creation written by Jonathan Gienapp and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans widely believe that the U.S. Constitution was almost wholly created when it was drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788. Jonathan Gienapp recovers the unknown story of the Constitution’s second creation in the decade after its adoption—a story with explosive implications for current debates over constitutional originalism and interpretation.

Author : Francis Jennings
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521664813
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Creation of America written by Francis Jennings and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-07-31 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This alternative history of the American Revolution, first published in 2000, shows the colonists as empire-building conquerors rather than democratic revolutionaries.

Author : Stephen C. Schlesinger
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0786729708
Total Pages : 144 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Act of Creation written by Stephen C. Schlesinger and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-24 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Act of Creation, Stephen C. Schlesinger tells a pivotal and little-known story of how Secretary of State Edward Stettinius and the new American President, Harry Truman, picked up the pieces of the faltering campaign initiated by Franklin Roosevelt to create a "United Nations." Using secret agents, financial resources, and their unrivaled position of power, they overcame the intrigues of Stalin, the reservations of wartime allies like Winston Churchill, the discontent of smaller states, and a skeptical press corps to found the United Nations. The author reveals how the UN nearly collapsed several times during the conference over questions of which states should have power, who should be admitted, and how authority should be divided among its branches. By shedding new light on leading participants like John Foster Dulles, John F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, Nelson Rockefeller, and E. B White, Act of Creation provides a fascinating tale of twentieth-century history not to be missed.

Author : Ronald Takaki
Publisher : eBookIt.com
ISBN 13 : 1456611062
Total Pages : 787 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Different Mirror written by Ronald Takaki and published by eBookIt.com. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 787 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Takaki traces the economic and political history of Indians, African Americans, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, Irish, and Jewish people in America, with considerable attention given to instances and consequences of racism. The narrative is laced with short quotations, cameos of personal experiences, and excerpts from folk music and literature. Well-known occurrences, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Trail of Tears, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Japanese internment are included. Students may be surprised by some of the revelations, but will recognize a constant thread of rampant racism. The author concludes with a summary of today's changing economic climate and offers Rodney King's challenge to all of us to try to get along. Readers will find this overview to be an accessible, cogent jumping-off place for American history and political science plus a guide to the myriad other sources identified in the notes.

Author : Joseph J. Ellis
Publisher : Random House Large Print Publishing
ISBN 13 : 073932618X
Total Pages : 514 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Creation written by Joseph J. Ellis and published by Random House Large Print Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterful examination of the early years of the American Republic analyzes the eventful last quarter of the eighteenth century, the accomplishments of the American founders, and the triumphs and failures that shaped the early nation and the American character. (History -- United States)

Author : Craig Bruce Smith
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469638843
Total Pages : 381 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Honor written by Craig Bruce Smith and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Revolution was not only a revolution for liberty and freedom, it was also a revolution of ethics, reshaping what colonial Americans understood as "honor" and "virtue." As Craig Bruce Smith demonstrates, these concepts were crucial aspects of Revolutionary Americans' ideological break from Europe and shared by all ranks of society. Focusing his study primarily on prominent Americans who came of age before and during the Revolution—notably John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington—Smith shows how a colonial ethical transformation caused and became inseparable from the American Revolution, creating an ethical ideology that still remains. By also interweaving individuals and groups that have historically been excluded from the discussion of honor—such as female thinkers, women patriots, slaves, and free African Americans—Smith makes a broad and significant argument about how the Revolutionary era witnessed a fundamental shift in ethical ideas. This thoughtful work sheds new light on a forgotten cause of the Revolution and on the ideological foundation of the United States.

Author : Mike Gonzalez
Publisher : Encounter Books
ISBN 13 : 1641772522
Total Pages : 166 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Plot to Change America written by Mike Gonzalez and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Plot to Change America exposes the myths that help identity politics perpetuate itself. This book reveals what has really happened, explains why it is urgent to change course, and offers a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the enticements, we can get rid of identity politics. The first myth that this book exposes is that identity politics is a grassroots movement, when from the beginning it has been, and continues to be, an elite project. For too long, we have lived with the fairy tale that America has organically grown into a nation gripped by victimhood and identitarian division; that it is all the result of legitimate demands by minorities for recognition or restitutions for past wrongs. The second myth is that identity politics is a response to the demographic change this country has undergone since immigration laws were radically changed in 1965. Another myth we are told is that to fight these changes is as depraved as it is futile, since by 2040, America will be a minority-majority country, anyway. This book helps to explain that none of these things are necessarily true.