Backcountry Crucibles

Author : Jean R. Soderlund
Publisher : Associated University Presse
ISBN 13 : 9780934223805
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Backcountry Crucibles written by Jean R. Soderlund and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2008 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American historians have emphasized major cities as cultural and economic centers. This volume explores the vitality of cultural, economic, and political life beyond those cities. The Lehigh Valley is a place where integral events occurred, but is also an example of regional growth outside large cities. Its unique location, close enough to New York and Philadelphia to market grain, iron, coal, and steel, yet distant enough to develop its own cultural life, offers a regional model persisting for more than two centuries heretofore unexplored in American historical scholarship. This persistence of cultural and economic patterns, including the capacity to change, makes Lehigh Valley history particularly intriguing.

Author : Turk McCleskey
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813935830
Total Pages : 463 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Road to Black Ned's Forge written by Turk McCleskey and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-06-09 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1752 an enslaved Pennsylvania ironworker named Ned purchased his freedom and moved to Virginia on the upper James River. Taking the name Edward Tarr, he became the first free black landowner west of the Blue Ridge. Tarr established a blacksmith shop on the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia to the Carolinas and helped found a Presbyterian congregation that exists to this day. Living with him was his white, Scottish wife, and in a twist that will surprise the modern reader, Tarr’s neighbors accepted his interracial marriage. It was when a second white woman joined the household that some protested. Tarr’s already dramatic story took a perilous turn when the predatory son of his last master, a Charleston merchant, abruptly entered his life in a fraudulent effort to reenslave him. His fate suddenly hinged on his neighbors, who were all that stood between Tarr and a return to the life of a slave. This remarkable true story serves as a keyhole narrative, unlocking a new, more complex understanding of race relations on the American frontier. The vividly drawn portraits of Tarr and the women with whom he lived, along with a rich set of supporting characters in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia, provide fascinating insight into the journey from slavery to freedom, as well as the challenges of establishing frontier societies. The story also sheds light on the colonial merchant class, Indian warfare in southwest Virginia, and slavery’s advent west of the Blue Ridge. Contradicting the popular view of settlers in southern Virginia as poor, violent, and transient, this book--with its pathbreaking research and gripping narrative--radically rewrites the history of the colonial backcountry, revealing it to be made up largely of close-knit, rigorously governed communities.

Author : James P. Myers
Publisher : Lehigh University Press
ISBN 13 : 0982131348
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Ordeal of Thomas Barton written by James P. Myers and published by Lehigh University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the career of Rev. Thomas Barton. Barton's ministry illuminates life on Pennsylvania's pre-Revolutionary frontier. As missionary for the church of England, Barton championed the interests of the Anglican church and the proprietary of William Penn's children in a turbulent borderland best by both threats from the French and their Native American allies and challenges to English authority from a largely Scots-Irish Presbyterian population. Ultimately, his hopes were destroyed when revolution swept him to a life of loss in New York City, where he died. This study examines the tragic life of a mid-level Anglo-Irish placeman who sought to expand his opportunities in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania.--Dust jacket.

Author : William Pencak
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1611460832
Total Pages : 383 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contested Commonwealths written by William Pencak and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-09-16 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: United States historian William Pencak presents thirteen of his essays, written beginning in 1976. Some deal with colonial and revolutionary crowds and communities in Massachusetts--the impressment riot of 1747, the popular uprisings of the 1760s and 1770s, and Shays' Rebellion. Others examine popular ideology in songs and almanacs, and the thought and behavior of George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and the loyalist Peter Oliver. Interpretive essays argue that colonial outage that their participation in the French and Indian War went unrecognized by the British led to the American Revolution; that revolutionary economic thought turned smuggling from a vice into the 'natural law' of free trade; and that focusing on the Civil War and the years 1861 to 1865, leads to a glorified conception of the national past that is better understood as shaped by "An Era of Racial Violence" that extended from 1854 to at least 1877.

Author : H. L. Dufour Woolfley
Publisher : Lehigh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1611461367
Total Pages : 215 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Quaker Goes to Spain written by H. L. Dufour Woolfley and published by Lehigh University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1813, as war with Britain intensified, President James Madison secretly dispatched an envoy to the Regency government of Spain with the urgent goal of thwarting a feared British bid to use Spanish Florida as a base from which to attack the United States, and with the further hope of acquiring that territory for America. The man Madison sent to pursue those challenging tasks was Anthony Morris, a friend of Dolley’s from their youth in Philadelphia and a devout Quaker lawyer who had never before journeyed abroad. Morris, a widower, had willingly accepted the president’s call, despite the separation it would impose from his four teenage children. The Morris mission did not proceed as intended, as developments in Spain conspired to alter its scope and prolong its duration. Long after the war had ended, Morris was compelled to persevere at his post as the only American link to an unfriendly Spanish monarchy. As he dutifully carried on, ill-founded accusations by two other frustrated American diplomats slurred his reputation. Meanwhile, he thirsted to rejoin his maturing children, whose lives were taking paths that would have been unlikely had he never left them. Throughout this ordeal, a steadfastly philosophical Anthony Morris strove to counter his distress by thoughtful exploration of a national culture and a religious faith so very different from his own. The full story of this distinctive but little-remembered diplomatic endeavor has not previously been recounted. The telling of it here reveals much about the vexation and confusion endemic to American diplomacy in the age of sail, when events often moved faster than the mails. Interwoven with that historical account is the poignant revelation of the spiritual and cultural growth that Anthony Morris reaped from his odyssey, as displayed in a stream of intimate, charming letters to the daughters he had left at home. Published in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series

Author : Kevin J. Dellape
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1611461448
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book America's First Chaplain written by Kevin J. Dellape and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-10-25 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America’s First Chaplain is a biography of the life of Philadelphia’s Jacob Duché, the Anglican minister who offered the most famous prayer and wrote one of the most infamous letters of the American Revolution. For the prayer to open the First Continental Congress, Duché was declared a national hero and named the first chaplain to the newly independent American Congress. For the letter written to George Washington imploring the general to encourage Congress to rescind independence, he was accused of high treason and sent into exile. As a result of this apparently irreconcilable contradiction in the minister’s behavior, many of his contemporaries and most historians have assumed he was weak, that in the moment of crisis – his imprisonment by British authorities during their occupation of Philadelphia - he cut a deal with the British for his own safety. The evidence gathered from the life of Jacob Duché, however, points to a very different conclusion, one that reveals the immense complexity of the American Revolution and the havoc it wreaked on the lives of the people who experienced it. The story of this deeply religious rector of Christ Church and St. Peter’s reveals the human side of the Revolution, a story that includes great accomplishment and great tragedy. It also provides insight into the complicated nature of Pennsylvania’s “democratic” revolution, the unique difficulties faced by Anglican leaders during the revolution, and the weakness of simplistic categorizations such as patriot or loyalist. For more than two centuries two events – a prayer and a letter - have obscured our view of the extraordinary life lying in the background. This biography attempts to reinterpret the prayer and the letter in light of the man behind them and in the process to uncover the real significance of both as well as to gain a glimpse into the complexity and contradictions of the American Revolution.

Author : Linda S. Myrsiades
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 1611461022
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Law and Medicine in Revolutionary America written by Linda S. Myrsiades and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law and Medicine in Revolutionary America: Dissecting the Rush v. Cobbett Trial, 1799 offers the first deep analysis of the most important libel trial in post-revolutionary America and an approach to understanding a much-studied revolutionary figure, Benjamin Rush, in a new light as a legal subject. This libel trial faced off the new nation's most prestigious physician-patriot, Benjamin Rush, against its most popular journalist, William Cobbett, the editor of Porcupine's Gazette. Studied by means of a rare and substantial surviving transcript, the trial features six litigating counsel whose narrative of events and roles provides a unique view of how the revolutionary generation saw itself and the legacy it wished to leave to its progeny. The trial is structured by assaults against medical bleeding and its premier practitioner in yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s in Philadelphia, on the one hand, and castigates the licentiousness of the press in the nation's then-capital city, on the other. As it does so, it exemplifies the much-derided litigiousness of the new nation and the threat of sedition that characterized the development of political parties and the partisan press in late eighteenth-century America.

Author : Dorothy T. Potter
Publisher : Lehigh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1611460034
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book 'Food for Apollo' written by Dorothy T. Potter and published by Lehigh University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-12 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Food for Apollo:' Cultivated Music in Antebellum Philadelphia by Dorothy Potter, describes and evaluates the growth and scope of cultivated music in that city, from the early eighteenth-century to the advent of the Civil War. In many works dealing with American culture, discussion of music's influence is limited to a few significant performances or persons, or ignored altogether. The study of music's role in cultural history is fairly recent, compared to literature, art, and architecture. Whether vernacular or based on European models, a more thorough understanding of music should include attention to related subjects. This book examines concert and theatre performances, music publishing, pre-1861 manufacture of pianos, and British and American literature which promoted music, informing readers about individuals such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose works and fame generated interest on both sides of the Atlantic. Though initially hindered by the Society of Friends' opposition to entertainments of all sorts, numbers of non-Quakers supported dancing, concerts, and drama by the 1740s; this interest accelerated after the Revolution, with the building of some of America's earliest theatres, and over time, Musical Fund Hall, the Academy of Music, and other venues. Emigrant musicians, notably Alexander Reinagle, introduced new works by contemporary Europeans such as Franz Joseph Haydn, Mozart, C.P. E. Bach, and many others, in concerts blended with favorite tunes, like the 'President's March.'. Later in the nineteenth century, Philadelphia's noted African-American composer and band leader Francis Johnson, continued the tradition of mixing classical and vernacular works in his popular promenade concerts. As they advertised and shipped their music to an ever-growing market, post-Revolutionary emigrant music publishers, including Benjamin Carr and his family, George Willig, and George Blake, created successful businesses that influenced American taste far beyond Philadelphia. While many of their imprints were vernacular pieces of all sorts, pirated European music adapted for amateur pianists, many of whom were women, formed a substantial part of their stock. Mozart's music was frequently republished or adapted for domestic entertainments, particularly as waltzes and songs from his operas.

Author : Fred Anderson
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307425398
Total Pages : 902 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Crucible of War written by Fred Anderson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 902 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this engrossing narrative of the great military conflagration of the mid-eighteenth century, Fred Anderson transports us into the maelstrom of international rivalries. With the Seven Years' War, Great Britain decisively eliminated French power north of the Caribbean — and in the process destroyed an American diplomatic system in which Native Americans had long played a central, balancing role — permanently changing the political and cultural landscape of North America. Anderson skillfully reveals the clash of inherited perceptions the war created when it gave thousands of American colonists their first experience of real Englishmen and introduced them to the British cultural and class system. We see colonists who assumed that they were partners in the empire encountering British officers who regarded them as subordinates and who treated them accordingly. This laid the groundwork in shared experience for a common view of the world, of the empire, and of the men who had once been their masters. Thus, Anderson shows, the war taught George Washington and other provincials profound emotional lessons, as well as giving them practical instruction in how to be soldiers. Depicting the subsequent British efforts to reform the empire and American resistance — the riots of the Stamp Act crisis and the nearly simultaneous pan-Indian insurrection called Pontiac's Rebellion — as postwar developments rather than as an anticipation of the national independence that no one knew lay ahead (or even desired), Anderson re-creates the perspectives through which contemporaries saw events unfold while they tried to preserve imperial relationships. Interweaving stories of kings and imperial officers with those of Indians, traders, and the diverse colonial peoples, Anderson brings alive a chapter of our history that was shaped as much by individual choices and actions as by social, economic, and political forces.

Author : Thomas Keil
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1611461766
Total Pages : 173 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Anthracite's Demise and the Post-Coal Economy of Northeastern Pennsylvania written by Thomas Keil and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-12-11 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the anthracite coal trade's emergence and legacy in the five counties that constituted the core of the industry, the authors explain the split in the modes of production between entrepreneurial production and corporate production and the consequences of each for the two major anthracite regions. This book argues that the initial conditions in which the anthracite industry developed led to differences in the way workers organized and protested working conditions and the way in which the two regions were affected by the decline of the industry and two subsequent waves of deindustrialization. The authors examine the bourgeois class formation in the coal regions and its consequences for differential regional growth and urbanization. This is given context through their investigation of class conflict in the region and the struggle of workers to build a stable union that would represent their interests, as well as the struggles within the union that finally emerged as the dominant force (the United Mine Workers of American) between conservative business unionists and progressive forces. Lastly, the authors explore the demise of anthracite as the dominant industry, the attempt to attract replacement industries, the subsequent two waves of deindustrialization in the region, and the current economic conditions that prevail in the former coal counties and the cities in them. This book includes a discussion of local politics and the emergence of a strong labor-Democratic tie in the northern anthracite region and a weaker tie between labor and the Democratic party in the central and southern fields.