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Author: Robert H. Webking Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 9780807114384 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
In recent years historians of the American Revolution have become increasingly convinced that political ideas, rather than material interests, were what ultimately led American colonists to fight for independence from Great Britain. During the years preceding the Revolution, Americans explained their resistance to British rule in principled terms. They understood liberty to be something real, valuable, and seriously threatened by British actions that were not merely impolitic but fundamentally unjust. American statesmen contended that certain basic principles had to rule governments, and they developed careful, complex arguments to persuade others, in the colonies and in Britain, that the British government was violating these principles to an extent that prudent, well-informed citizens could not allow. The American Revolution and the Politics of Liberty is a systematic account of the political thought of the leaders of the American Revolution. In his first six chapters, Robert H. Webking analyzes in turn the ideas of James Otis, Patrick Henry, John Dickinson, Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Webking examines the political contributions of each of these men and explicates the assumptions and implications of their arguments against the British. He explains their ideas about the goals of American politics, the methods that ought to be used to reach those goals, and the circumstances that would make revolution just and prudent. In the ensuing chapters Webking presents an overview of the political thought behind the American Revolution based on his analysis of these six political leaders. He addresses the average colonial American's level of political sophistication, the American conception of liberty and its importance, and the American perception of the British threat to that liberty.The thinkers that Webking studies are recognized now, as they were in their time, as the major figures in American Revolutionary thought. The principles that they discussed, refined, and implemented continue to serve as the foundation for American government. The American Revolution and the Politics of Liberty offers a complete and sophisticated understanding of the contribution these leaders made to American politics.
Author: Robert H. Webking Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 9780807114384 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
In recent years historians of the American Revolution have become increasingly convinced that political ideas, rather than material interests, were what ultimately led American colonists to fight for independence from Great Britain. During the years preceding the Revolution, Americans explained their resistance to British rule in principled terms. They understood liberty to be something real, valuable, and seriously threatened by British actions that were not merely impolitic but fundamentally unjust. American statesmen contended that certain basic principles had to rule governments, and they developed careful, complex arguments to persuade others, in the colonies and in Britain, that the British government was violating these principles to an extent that prudent, well-informed citizens could not allow. The American Revolution and the Politics of Liberty is a systematic account of the political thought of the leaders of the American Revolution. In his first six chapters, Robert H. Webking analyzes in turn the ideas of James Otis, Patrick Henry, John Dickinson, Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Webking examines the political contributions of each of these men and explicates the assumptions and implications of their arguments against the British. He explains their ideas about the goals of American politics, the methods that ought to be used to reach those goals, and the circumstances that would make revolution just and prudent. In the ensuing chapters Webking presents an overview of the political thought behind the American Revolution based on his analysis of these six political leaders. He addresses the average colonial American's level of political sophistication, the American conception of liberty and its importance, and the American perception of the British threat to that liberty.The thinkers that Webking studies are recognized now, as they were in their time, as the major figures in American Revolutionary thought. The principles that they discussed, refined, and implemented continue to serve as the foundation for American government. The American Revolution and the Politics of Liberty offers a complete and sophisticated understanding of the contribution these leaders made to American politics.
Author: Michael A. McDonnell Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 0807839043 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 565
Book Description
War often unites a society behind a common cause, but the notion of diverse populations all rallying together to fight on the same side disguises the complex social forces that come into play in the midst of perceived unity. Michael A. McDonnell uses the Revolution in Virginia to examine the political and social struggles of a revolutionary society at war with itself as much as with Great Britain. McDonnell documents the numerous contests within Virginia over mobilizing for war--struggles between ordinary Virginians and patriot leaders, between the lower and middle classes, and between blacks and whites. From these conflicts emerged a republican polity rife with racial and class tensions. Looking at the Revolution in Virginia from the bottom up, The Politics of War demonstrates how contests over waging war in turn shaped society and the emerging new political settlement. With its insights into the mobilization of popular support, the exposure of social rifts, and the inversion of power relations, McDonnell's analysis is relevant to any society at war.
Author: Rosemarie Zagarri Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812205553 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise. According to Rosemarie Zagarri, the debate over women's rights began not in the decades prior to 1848 but during the American Revolution itself. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, this book explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution until the election of Andrew Jackson. Although the period after the Revolution produced no collective movement for women's rights, women built on precedents established during the Revolution and gained an informal foothold in party politics and male electoral activities. Federalists and Jeffersonians vied for women's allegiance and sought their support in times of national crisis. Women, in turn, attended rallies, organized political activities, and voiced their opinions on the issues of the day. After the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a widespread debate about the nature of women's rights ensued. The state of New Jersey attempted a bold experiment: for a brief time, women there voted on the same terms as men. Yet as Rosemarie Zagarri argues in Revolutionary Backlash, this opening for women soon closed. By 1828, women's politicization was seen more as a liability than as a strength, contributing to a divisive political climate that repeatedly brought the country to the brink of civil war. The increasing sophistication of party organizations and triumph of universal suffrage for white males marginalized those who could not vote, especially women. Yet all was not lost. Women had already begun to participate in charitable movements, benevolent societies, and social reform organizations. Through these organizations, women found another way to practice politics.
Author: H. W. Brands Publisher: Anchor ISBN: 0593082567 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 513
Book Description
"A fast-paced, often riveting account of the military and political events leading up to the Declaration of Independence and those that followed during the war ... Brands does his readers a service by reminding them that division, as much as unity, is central to the founding of our nation."—The Washington Post From best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands comes a gripping, page-turning narrative of the American Revolution that shows it to be more than a fight against the British: it was also a violent battle among neighbors forced to choose sides, Loyalist or Patriot. What causes people to forsake their country and take arms against it? What prompts their neighbors, hardly distinguishable in station or success, to defend that country against the rebels? That is the question H. W. Brands answers in his powerful new history of the American Revolution. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were the unlikeliest of rebels. Washington in the 1770s stood at the apex of Virginia society. Franklin was more successful still, having risen from humble origins to world fame. John Adams might have seemed a more obvious candidate for rebellion, being of cantankerous temperament. Even so, he revered the law. Yet all three men became rebels against the British Empire that fostered their success. Others in the same circle of family and friends chose differently. William Franklin might have been expected to join his father, Benjamin, in rebellion but remained loyal to the British. So did Thomas Hutchinson, a royal governor and friend of the Franklins, and Joseph Galloway, an early challenger to the Crown. They soon heard themselves denounced as traitors--for not having betrayed the country where they grew up. Native Americans and the enslaved were also forced to choose sides as civil war broke out around them. After the Revolution, the Patriots were cast as heroes and founding fathers while the Loyalists were relegated to bit parts best forgotten. Our First Civil War reminds us that before America could win its revolution against Britain, the Patriots had to win a bitter civil war against family, neighbors, and friends.
Author: John Phillips Resch Publisher: ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
The War for Independence touched virtually every American. It promised liberty, the opportunity for a better life, and the excitement of the battlefield. It also brought disappointment, misery, and mourning. In this collection of original essays that highlight the variety and richness of recent research, eleven leading historians investigate the diverse experiences of Americans from North to South, from coast to backcountry, from white townsfolk to African American slaves. Revolutionary ideology may have inspired some soldiers in the Continental Army, but as the case studies in this volume document, the men of New England also weighed family commitments, economic concerns, and local politics when deciding whether or not to enlist in the militia. Slaves joined the army believing the war would bring them personal freedom while women served as auxiliaries or as camp followers. Those left behind defended the homefront--unless the war took their homes and made them refugees. On the frontier, politically astute Native Americans weighed the relative advantages to themselves before deciding to support the patriots or the Crown. By bringing together the perspectives of soldiers, women, African Americans, and American Indians, War and Society in the American Revolution gives readers a fuller sense of the meaning of this historical moment. At the same time, these essays show that instead of unifying Americans, the war actually exacerbated social divisions, leaving unresolved the inequalities and tensions that would continue to trouble the new nation.
Author: Linda K. Kerber Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 0807899844 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 319
Book Description
Women of the Republic views the American Revolution through women's eyes. Previous histories have rarely recognized that the battle for independence was also a woman's war. The "women of the army" toiled in army hospitals, kitchens, and laundries. Civilian women were spies, fund raisers, innkeepers, suppliers of food and clothing. Recruiters, whether patriot or tory, found men more willing to join the army when their wives and daughters could be counted on to keep the farms in operation and to resist enchroachment from squatters. "I have Don as much to Carrey on the warr as maney that Sett Now at the healm of government," wrote one impoverished woman, and she was right. Women of the Republic is the result of a seven-year search for women's diaries, letters, and legal records. Achieving a remarkable comprehensiveness, it describes women's participation in the war, evaluates changes in their education in the late eighteenth century, describes the novels and histories women read and wrote, and analyzes their status in law and society. The rhetoric of the Revolution, full of insistence on rights and freedom in opposition to dictatorial masters, posed questions about the position of women in marriage as well as in the polity, but few of the implications of this rhetoric were recognized. How much liberty and equality for women? How much pursuit of happiness? How much justice? When American political theory failed to define a program for the participation of women in the public arena, women themselves had to develop an ideology of female patriotism. They promoted the notion that women could guarantee the continuing health of the republic by nurturing public-spirited sons and husbands. This limited ideology of "Republican Motherhood" is a measure of the political and social conservatism of the Revolution. The subsequent history of women in America is the story of women's efforts to accomplish for themselves what the Revolution did not.
Author: Barbara B. Oberg Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 0813942608 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 430
Book Description
Building on a quarter century of scholarship following the publication of the groundbreaking Women in the Age of the American Revolution, the engagingly written essays in this volume offer an updated answer to the question, What was life like for women in the era of the American Revolution? The contributors examine how women dealt with years of armed conflict and carried on their daily lives, exploring factors such as age, race, educational background, marital status, social class, and region. For patriot women the Revolution created opportunities—to market goods, find a new social status within the community, or gain power in the family. Those who remained loyal to the Crown, however, often saw their lives diminished—their property confiscated, their businesses failed, or their sense of security shattered. Some essays focus on individuals (Sarah Bache, Phillis Wheatley), while others address the impact of war on social or commercial interactions between men and women. Patriot women in occupied Boston fell in love with and married British soldiers; in Philadelphia women mobilized support for nonimportation; and in several major colonial cities wives took over the family business while their husbands fought. Together, these essays recover what the Revolution meant to and for women.
Author: Francis D. Cogliano Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 113467869X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
The American Revolution describes and explains the crucial events in the history of the United States between 1763 and 1815, when settlers in North America rebelled against British authority, won their independence in a long and bloddy stuggle and created an enduring republic. Placing the political revolution at the core of the story, this book considers: * the deterioration of the relationship between Britain and the American colonists * the Wars of Independence * the creation of the republican government and the ratification of the United States Constitution * the trials and tribulations of the first years of the new republic. The American Revolution also examines those who paradoxically were excluded from the political life of the new republic and the American claim to uphold the principle that all men are created equal. In particular this book describes the experiences of women who were often denied the rights of citizens, Native Americans and African Americans. The American Revolution is an important book for all students of the American past.
Author: Robert H. Webking
Author: Robert H. Webking
Author: Michael A. McDonnell
Author: Rosemarie Zagarri
Author: H. W. Brands
Author: John Phillips Resch
Author: Norman Gordon Levin
Author: Linda K. Kerber
Author: Barbara B. Oberg
Author: Bernard Bailyn
Author: Francis D. Cogliano