Author: A. G. Roeber Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 9780801859687 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 452
Book Description
Historians usually look for the origins of American political culture among English-speaking people and British constitutional and legal sources. Yet German immigrants to the colonies also contributed to - and developed for themselves - an American political consciousness. In Palatines, Liberty, and Property A.G. Roeber focuses on this neglected subject and explains why so many Germans, when they faced critical choices in 1776, became active supporters of the patriot cause. Employing a variety of German-language sources, Roeber explores German conceptions of personal and public property in the context of cultural and religious beliefs, village life, and family concerns. He follows all the major German migration streams, beginning with the Palatines in New York and including Germans who settled in Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. Roeber's study of German-American ideas about liberty and property provides a unique perspective within a growing historiography on the transfer of culture and beliefs from Europe and Africa to America.
Author: David Hackett Fischer Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 9780195162530 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 880
Book Description
The bestselling author of "Washington's Crossing" and "Albion's Seed" offers a strikingly original history of America's founding principles. Fischer examines liberty and freedom not as philosophical or political abstractions, but as folkways and popular beliefs deeply embedded in American culture. 400+ illustrations, 250 in full color.
Author: Timothy Sandefur Publisher: Cato Institute ISBN: 1933995327 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 170
Book Description
The right to own and use private property is among the most essential human rights and the essential basis for economic growth. That’s why America’s Founders guaranteed it in the Constitution. Yet in today’s America, government tramples on this right in countless ways. Regulations forbid people to use their property as they wish, bureaucrats extort enormous fees from developers in exchange for building permits, and police departments snatch personal belongings on the suspicion that they were involved in crimes. In the case of Kelo v. New London, the Supreme Court even declared that government may seize homes and businesses and transfer the land to private developers to build stores, restaurants, or hotels. That decision was met with a firestorm of criticism across the nation. In this, the first book on property rights to be published since the Kelo decision, Timothy Sandefur surveys the landscape of private property in America’s third century. Beginning with the role property rights play in human nature, Sandefur describes how America’s Founders wrote a Constitution that would protect this right and details the gradual erosion that began with the Progressive Era’s abandonment of the principles of individual liberty. Sandefur tells the gripping stories of people who have found their property threatened: Frank Bugryn and his Connecticut Christmas-tree farm; Susette Kelo and the little dream house she renovated; Wilhelmina Dery and the house she was born in, 80 years before bureaucrats decided to take it; Dorothy English and the land she wanted to leave to her children; and Kenneth Healing and his 17-year legal battle for permission to build a home. Thanks to the abuse of eminent domain and asset forfeiture laws, federal, state, and local governments have now come to see property rights as mere permissions, which can be revoked at any time in the name of the “greater good.” In this book, Sandefur explains what citizens can do to restore the Constitution’s protections for this “cornerstone of liberty.”
Author: Arlin C. Migliazzo Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press ISBN: 9781570036828 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 488
Book Description
A case study in the social history of frontier town building set in the swamps of South Carolina On the banks of the lower Savannah River, the military objectives of South Carolina officials, the ambitions of Swiss entrepreneur Jean Pierre Purry, and the dreams of Protestants from Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, and England converged in a planned settlement named Purrysburg. This examination of the first South Carolina township in Governor Robert Johnson's strategic plan to populate and defend the colonial backcountry offers the clearest picture to date of the settlement of the colony's Southern frontier by ethnically diverse and contractually obligated immigrants. Arlin C. Migliazzo contends that the story of Purrysburg Township, founded in 1732 and set in the forbidding environment bounded by the Savannah River and the Coosawhatchie swamps, challenges the notion that white colonists shed their ethnic distinctions to become a monolithic culture. He views Purrysburg as a laboratory in which to observe ethnic phenomena in the colonial and antebellum South. Separated by linguistic, religious, and cultural barriers, the émigrés adapted familiar social processes from their homelands to create a workable sense of community and identity. His work is one of only a handful of examples of what has been deemed the "new social history" methodology as applied to a South Carolina subject. Initially devastated by privation and a high mortality rate, Purrysburg residents also suffered the vicissitudes of an indifferent provincial elite, the encroachment of lowcountry rice planters, Prevost's invasion in 1779, and ultimate destruction of the settlement by Sherman's army. Migliazzo details the community's changing military and economic fortunes, the gradual displacement of its residents to neighboring communities, the role of African Americans in the region, the complex religious life of township settlers, and the quirky contributions of Purry's climatological speculations to the fateful siting of this first township.
Author: Mark A. Noll Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198034415 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 637
Book Description
Religious life in early America is often equated with the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism best embodied by the theology of Cotton Mather. Yet, by the nineteenth century, American theology had shifted dramatically away from the severe European traditions directly descended from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was in the United States the most influential. In its place arose a singularly American set of beliefs. In America's God, Mark Noll has written a biography of this new American ethos. In the 125 years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, theology played an extraordinarily important role in American public and private life. Its evolution had a profound impact on America's self-definition. The changes taking place in American theology during this period were marked by heightened spiritual inwardness, a new confidence in individual reason, and an attentiveness to the economic and market realities of Western life. Vividly set in the social and political events of the age, America's God is replete with the figures who made up the early American intellectual landscape, from theologians such as Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel W. Taylor, William Ellery Channing, and Charles Hodge and religiously inspired writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Stowe to dominant political leaders of the day like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The contributions of these thinkers combined with the religious revival of the 1740s, colonial warfare with France, the consuming struggle for independence, and the rise of evangelical Protestantism to form a common intellectual coinage based on a rising republicanism and commonsense principles. As this Christian republicanism affirmed itself, it imbued in dedicated Christians a conviction that the Bible supported their beliefs over those of all others. Tragically, this sense of religious purpose set the stage for the Civil War, as the conviction of Christians both North and South that God was on their side served to deepen a schism that would soon rend the young nation asunder. Mark Noll has given us the definitive history of Christian theology in America from the time of Jonathan Edwards to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. It is a story of a flexible and creative theological energy that over time forged a guiding national ideology the legacies of which remain with us to this day.
Author: Jonathan M. Wilson Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1532663188 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
Do people who follow the same religion the same way also make the same political choices? Even if that might not be always true, is it true enough that it should be treated as an axiom in America’s popular culture? God on Three Sides explores two communities where ethnic Germans in early America followed the same religion in the same way but, within each community, held very different views regarding the political issues of the eighteenth century. The political issues in focus are what surfaced in the crises of the wars against the French, the engagement with indigenous peoples, and the American Revolution.
Author: Hartmut Lehmann Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 9780271043104 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 348
Book Description
This volume brings together essays by leading German and American historians on the subject of German emigration in the eighteenth century when Germans were moving to a variety of destinations: Russia, Prussian Lithuania, and various other German territories as well as North America.What drove men and women from different regional and social backgrounds to leave their homes during this time? Some migrations were forced, as for the Mennonites, the Salzburger emigrants, and the French Huguenots; some were voluntary and determined by the wish for one's own land and greater social and economic opportunity. In all groups, religion was a prominent motivator and primary element of social identification and cohesion. Inevitably, migrants carried with them traditional skills and other indispensable cultural "baggage." A key strength of this book is that contributors emphasize the mutual exchanges that occurred among cultures.
Author: Ned C. Landsman Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 0801899702 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
This work examines colonial New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania as central to both warfare and the emerging British-Atlantic world of culture and trade. In this probing history, Ned C. Landsman demonstrates how the Middle Colonies came to function as a distinct region. He argues that while each territory possessed varying social, religious, and political cultures, the collective lands of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were unified in their particular history and place in the imperial and Atlantic worlds. Landsman shows that the societal cohesiveness of the three colonies originated in the commercial and military rivalries among Native nations and developed further with the competing involvement of the European powers. They eventually emerged as the focal point in the contest for dominion over North America. In relating this progression, Landsman discusses various factors in the region’s development, including the Enlightenment, evangelical religion, factional politics, religious and ethnic diversity, and distinct systems of Protestant pluralism. Ultimately, he argues, it was within the Middle Colonies that the question was first posed, What is the American?
Author: Ken Miller Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801454948 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 261
Book Description
In Dangerous Guests, Ken Miller reveals how wartime pressures nurtured a budding patriotism in the ethnically diverse revolutionary community of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. During the War for Independence, American revolutionaries held more than thirteen thousand prisoners—both British regulars and their so-called Hessian auxiliaries—in makeshift detention camps far from the fighting. As the Americans’ principal site for incarcerating enemy prisoners of war, Lancaster stood at the nexus of two vastly different revolutionary worlds: one national, the other intensely local. Captives came under the control of local officials loosely supervised by state and national authorities. Concentrating the prisoners in the heart of their communities brought the revolutionaries’ enemies to their doorstep, with residents now facing a daily war at home. Many prisoners openly defied their hosts, fleeing, plotting, and rebelling, often with the clandestine support of local loyalists. By early 1779, General George Washington, furious over the captives’ ongoing attempts to subvert the American war effort, branded them "dangerous guests in the bowels of our Country." The challenge of creating an autonomous national identity in the newly emerging United States was nowhere more evident than in Lancaster, where the establishment of a detention camp served as a flashpoint for new conflict in a community already unsettled by stark ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences. Many Lancaster residents soon sympathized with the Hessians detained in their town while the loyalist population considered the British detainees to be the true patriots of the war. Miller demonstrates that in Lancaster, the notably local character of the war reinforced not only preoccupations with internal security but also novel commitments to cause and country.
Author: A. G. Roeber
Author: David Hackett Fischer
Author: Timothy Sandefur
Author: Timothy Sandefur
Author: Arlin C. Migliazzo
Author: Mark A. Noll
Author: Jonathan M. Wilson
Author: Hartmut Lehmann
Author: Ned C. Landsman
Author: Ken Miller