Author: Dolley Madison
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Washington (D.C.)
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description

Author: Catherine Allgor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429980558
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
First Lady of the United States and America's "Queen of Hearts," Dolley Madison fashioned an unofficial role for herself in the new administration of the United States, helping to answer the nation's need for ceremony and leaving footprints for centuries of presidential wives to follow. Assisting her husband, James Madison, she helped to promote national unity, modeling a political behavior that stressed civility and empathy. Together, their approach fueled bipartisanship in a country still assembling a political identity. About the Lives of American Women series: selected and edited by renowned women's historian Carol Berkin, these brief biographies are designed for use in undergraduate courses. Rather than a comprehensive approach, each biography focuses instead on a particular aspect of a women's life that is emblematic of her time, or which made her a pivotal figure in the era. The emphasis is on a 'good read', featuring accessible writing and compelling narratives, without sacrificing sound scholarship and academic integrity. Primary sources at the end of each biography reveal the subject's perspective in her own words. Study questions and an annotated bibliography support the student reader.

Author: Catherine Allgor
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429900008
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
An extraordinary American comes to life in this vivid, groundbreaking portrait of the early days of the republic—and the birth of modern politics When the roar of the Revolution had finally died down, a new generation of American politicians was summoned to the Potomac to assemble the nation's newly minted capital. Into that unsteady atmosphere, which would soon enough erupt into another conflict with Britain in 1812, Dolley Madison arrived, alongside her husband, James. Within a few years, she had mastered both the social and political intricacies of the city, and by her death in 1849 was the most celebrated person in Washington. And yet, to most Americans, she's best known for saving a portrait from the burning White House, or as the namesake for a line of ice cream. Why did her contemporaries give so much adulation to a lady so little known today? In A Perfect Union, Catherine Allgor reveals that while Dolley's gender prevented her from openly playing politics, those very constraints of womanhood allowed her to construct an American democratic ruling style, and to achieve her husband's political goals. And the way that she did so—by emphasizing cooperation over coercion, building bridges instead of bunkers—has left us with not only an important story about our past but a model for a modern form of politics. Introducing a major new American historian, A Perfect Union is both an illuminating portrait of an unsung founder of our democracy, and a vivid account of a little-explored time in our history.

Author: Allen Culling Clark
Publisher: Washington : Press of W. F. Roberts Company
ISBN:
Category : Presidents' spouses
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
Dolley Madison has been known under different names: Dolly, Dolley, Dorothy and Dorothea. Some of her biographers insisted that her given name was Dorothea, others wrote that it was really Dorothy - although generally in their book titles they bowed to the convention of Dolly. Source: http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/madison/overview/name.html.

Author: Don Brown
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547349041
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 37

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Book Description
Dolley was a farm girl who became a fine first lady when she married James Madison. She wore beautiful dresses, decorated her home, and threw lavish parties. Everyone talked about Dolley, and everyone loved her, too. Then war arrived at her doorstep, and Dolley had to meet challenges greater than she’d ever known. So Dolley did one thing she thought might make a difference: she saved George Washington. Not the man himself, but a portrait of him, which would surely have been destroyed by English soldiers. Don Brown once again deftly tells a little known story about a woman who made a significant contribution to American history.

Author: Bruce Chadwick
Publisher:
ISBN: 1616148357
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
In this comprehensive biography of James and Dolley Madison, historian Bruce Chadwick introduces the reader to America's first power couple. Using newly uncovered troves of letters at the University of Virginia, Chadwick has been able to reconstruct the details of the Madisons' personal and political lives. Based on this archive, the author argues that our fourth president--the architect of the Constitution--owed much of his success to the political savvy of his wife. And Dolley, through her many social skills, created the dynamic role of First Lady that we know today. Within the new historical papers are remarkable stories of Dolley's parties and her backdoor politicking. Their letters show Madison not as a boring, average president--as some historians have maintained--but as a vibrant, tough leader, a very successful commander in chief who changed America. These documents also help to paint a searing portrait of the Madisons' struggles with their irresponsible son and outline how their lifelong funding of his whims brought about their own demise. Blending the personal and the political, this is a fascinating portrait of a couple whose life together contributed so much to the future course of our nation.

Author: Elizabeth Dowling Taylor
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0230108938
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Chronicles the life of a former slave to James and Dolley Madison, tracing his early years on their plantation, his service in the White House household staff and post-emancipation achievements as a memoirist.

Author: Mary Estelle Elizabeth Cutts
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Dolley Madison left behind no written account of her life, so her niece Mary Cutts' memoir is the closest we have to Madison's autobiographical voice. With this annotated transcription of both drafts of the memoir, this book offers a contextualized version of this crucial piece of Founding-era biography. An opening essay presents the memoir not only as a source for information on Madison herself, but also as a prime example of a nineteenth-century woman, Mary Cutts, making a bid for historical significance. Other essays evaluate the historical uses and misuses of the document for understanding Dolley's life and supply background information on Mary. The questions raised by Cutts's memoir are intriguing: Given that most of the story takes place before Cutts's birth, whose voice are we hearing? What are we to make of the lies and omissions along the way? What family secrets is Cutts hiding, and whose are they?

Author: Paul Jennings
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Enslaved persons' writings, American
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description

Author: Noah Feldman
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679643842
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 825

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Book Description
A sweeping reexamination of the Founding Father who transformed the United States in each of his political “lives”—as a revolutionary thinker, partisan political strategist, and president “In order to understand America and its Constitution, it is necessary to understand James Madison.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci Over the course of his life, James Madison changed the United States three times: First, he designed the Constitution, led the struggle for its adoption and ratification, then drafted the Bill of Rights. As an older, cannier politician he co-founded the original Republican party, setting the course of American political partisanship. Finally, having pioneered a foreign policy based on economic sanctions, he took the United States into a high-risk conflict, becoming the first wartime president and, despite the odds, winning. Now Noah Feldman offers an intriguing portrait of this elusive genius and the constitutional republic he created—and how both evolved to meet unforeseen challenges. Madison hoped to eradicate partisanship yet found himself giving voice to, and institutionalizing, the political divide. Madison’s lifelong loyalty to Thomas Jefferson led to an irrevocable break with George Washington, hero of the American Revolution. Madison closely collaborated with Alexander Hamilton on the Federalist papers—yet their different visions for the United States left them enemies. Alliances defined Madison, too. The vivacious Dolley Madison used her social and political talents to win her husband new supporters in Washington—and define the diplomatic customs of the capital’s society. Madison’s relationship with James Monroe, a mixture of friendship and rivalry, shaped his presidency and the outcome of the War of 1812. We may be more familiar with other Founding Fathers, but the United States today is in many ways Madisonian in nature. Madison predicted that foreign threats would justify the curtailment of civil liberties. He feared economic inequality and the power of financial markets over politics, believing that government by the people demanded resistance to wealth. Madison was the first Founding Father to recognize the importance of public opinion, and the first to understand that the media could function as a safeguard to liberty. The Three Lives of James Madison is an illuminating biography of the man whose creativity and tenacity gave us America’s distinctive form of government. His collaborations, struggles, and contradictions define the United States to this day.