Author: William TindallPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 18
Book Description
A Sketch of Alexander Robey Shepherd
Author: William TindallAlexander Robey Shepherd
Author: John P. RichardsonPublisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821445898
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
With Alexander Robey Shepherd, John P. Richardson gives us the first full-length biography of his subject, who as Washington, D.C.’s, public works czar (1871–74) built the infrastructure of the nation’s capital in a few frenetic years after the Civil War. The story of Shepherd is also the story of his hometown after that cataclysm, which left the city with churned-up streets, stripped of its trees, and exhausted. An intrepid businessman, Shepherd became president of Washington’s lower house of delegates at twenty-seven. Garrulous and politically astute, he used every lever to persuade Congress to realize Peter L’Enfant’s vision for the capital. His tenure produced paved and graded streets, sewer systems, trees, and gaslights, and transformed the fetid Washington Canal into one of the city’s most stately avenues. After bankrupting the city, a chastened Shepherd left in 1880 to develop silver mines in western Mexico, where he lived out his remaining twenty-two years. In Washington, Shepherd worked at the confluence of race, party, region, and urban development, in a microcosm of the United States. Determined to succeed at all costs, he helped force Congress to accept its responsibility for maintenance of its stepchild, the nation’s capital city.
Writings on American History
Author: Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C.
Author: Columbia Historical Society (Washington, D.C.)Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Washington (D.C.)
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
An Example for All the Land
Author: Kate MasurPublisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807834149
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378
Book Description
"An Example for all the Land, clearly argued and deeply researched, represents a significant breakthrough in the crowded field of Reconstruction scholarship. Showing how Washington, D.C. became a laboratory for political experimentation, Masur reveals imp
Washington Architecture, 1791-1861
Author: Daniel Drake ReiffPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Book Description
The Making of Urban America
Author: John William RepsPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691238243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 590
Book Description
This comprehensive survey of urban growth in America has become a standard work in the field. From the early colonial period to the First World War, John Reps explores to what extent city planning has been rooted in the nation's tradition, showing the extent of European influence on early communities. Illustrated by over three hundred reproductions of maps, plans, and panoramic views, this book presents hundreds of American cities and the unique factors affecting their development.
The Silver of the Sierra Madre
Author: John Mason HartPublisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816550050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Book Description
In the great barranca known today as Copper Canyon, the small mining town of Batopilas once experienced a silver bonanza among the largest ever known. American investors, believing that Mexico offered an unexploited cornucopia, began purchasing mines in the Sierra Madre, seeking to expand their hold on natural resources outside U.S. borders. From 1861 until the Revolution of 1910, the men of the Batopilas Mining Company ruled the region using their wealth, armed might, and extensive connections. The technology, industrialism, and politics their interests brought to this remote community tied the Tarahumara, Yaqui, Mayo, and other peoples of the barrancas directly to the economies of the United States and China. Local society was revolutionized, and a dramatic tapestry of human interactions was created. Based on many volumes of mining company records, The Silver of the Sierra Madre exposes the mentality and methods of mine owners John Robinson and Alexander “Boss” Shepherd, vividly detailing their exploitation of the people and the natural resources of Chihuahua. Hart aptly demonstrates the human and financial losses resulting from President Porfirio Díaz’s development programs, which relied on foreign investors, foreign managers, and foreign technology. This unprecedented work also provides a highly interesting ethnographic and social description of one of the least-known areas of Mexico. It is a tale of power and desperation, respect and arrogance, adventure and tragedy, and, ultimately, triumph and survival.
Samuel Shellabarger's Civil War, 1817-1896
Author: William A. KinnisonPublisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1669806219
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 467
Book Description
On Mud Run, near the recently abandoned Shawnee Indian village of Pickewe, Samuel Shellabarger was born in a log cabin on December 10, 1817. It was in the middle of an endless Ohio forest, a world away from civilization. Indians said a bird could fly from the Ohio River to Lake Erie never having to land on the ground. Mud Run was so deep into the forest that it seemed unlikely that anyone lost there could in a single lifetime win national fame and fortune. There were clues in Samuel Shellabargers early years that suggest he might surely rise above this wilderness. Shellabargers inspiration for a new America was a religious belief that "God had created of one blood all the peoples of the earth" and all were equal in God's sight, whether he or his father wanted it to be so or not. The nation, he believed, for its own sake, should embrace equality before the law or dire consequences would result. The nation's founders had declared that all men were equal but failed to achieve equality in practice. His generation was called upon to correct the mistake. But they let the opportunity slip from their grasp and created instead a new America he described as, "not fit to be." Samuel Shellabarger did not become famous, though he almost did. He became instead a footnote in a forgotten story that the nation should have remembered. And America, he believed, missed the only chance it might ever have to preserve democracy in the nation.
On the Fringes of Power
Author: Mari GranaPublisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442247363
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 145
Book Description
Touted in his time as one of the “great men of the West,” Stephen Wallace Dorsey was a Reconstruction carpetbagger who went to Arkansas and finagled and bribed his way into getting elected to the US Senate after living only two years in the state before heading West to seek his fortune. From a fraudulent New Mexico land claim to taking up mining claims and real estate in Southern California, he used sheer cunning and guile to manipulate the system of the Gilded Age to his own ends. Dorsey was a major presence in early New Mexico—which was no-holds-barred frontier corruption—with his flair for excess. Excess is in everything he did, his manipulative 600,000-acre-land-grab, his political shenanigans, his excessive drinking, his extravagant lifestyle always on display. In his fraudulent dealings he was caught out—not by the law, but those more conniving than he was. His fantastic mansion in the middle of a still-today empty prairie in northeastern New Mexico was of state-wide historical importance before the state could no longer afford to keep it.