Author: Frances Manwaring CaulkinsPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : New London (Conn.)
Languages : en
Pages : 686
Book Description
History of New London, Connecticut
Author: Frances Manwaring CaulkinsPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : New London (Conn.)
Languages : en
Pages : 686
Book Description
The Papers of Robert Treat Paine
Author: Robert Treat PainePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 428
Book Description
The Papers of Robert Treat Paine is a selected edition of documents primarily from the Robert Treat Paine collection at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Covering his public and private lives, the published Papers draws together correspondence to and from Paine beginning with his days at Harvard. The five-volume edition includes all of his correspondence with family, friends, clients, and fellow lawyers. Selected pieces also provide examples of his allegorical writings, his sermons, and his Harvard undergraduate club writings.
Life and Correspondence of H. Knox
Author: Francis Samuel DRAKEPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 176
Book Description
Liberty Men and Great Proprietors
Author: Alan TaylorPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807839973
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398
Book Description
This detailed exploration of the settlement of Maine beginning in the late eighteenth century illuminates the violent, widespread contests along the American frontier that served to define and complete the American Revolution. Taylor shows how Maine's militant settlers organized secret companies to defend their populist understanding of the Revolution.
Travels in New-England and New-York
Author: Timothy DwightA History of the American People
Author: Paul JohnsonPublisher: Harper
ISBN: 9780060168360
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1104
Book Description
"The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures," begins Paul Johnson's remarkable new American history. "No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind." Johnson's history is a reinterpretation of American history from the first settlements to the Clinton administration. It covers every aspect of U.S. history--politics; business and economics; art, literature and science; society and customs; complex traditions and religious beliefs. The story is told in terms of the men and women who shaped and led the nation and the ordinary people who collectively created its unique character. Wherever possible, letters, diaries, and recorded conversations are used to ensure a sense of actuality. "The book has new and often trenchant things to say about every aspect and period of America's past," says Johnson, "and I do not seek, as some historians do, to conceal my opinions." Johnson's history presents John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Cotton Mather, Franklin, Tom Paine, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison from a fresh perspective. It emphasizes the role of religion in American history and how early America was linked to England's history and culture and includes incisive portraits of Andrew Jackson, Chief Justice Marshall, Clay, Lincoln, and Jefferson Davis. Johnson shows how Grover Cleveland and Teddy Roosevelt ushered in the age of big business and industry and how Woodrow Wilson revolutionized the government's role. He offers new views of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover and of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and his role as commander in chief during World War II. An examination of the unforeseen greatness of Harry Truman and reassessments of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush follow. "Compulsively readable," said Foreign Affairs of Johnson's unique narrative skills and sharp profiles of people. This is an in-depth portrait of a great people, from their fragile origins through their struggles for independence and nationhood, their heroic efforts and sacrifices to deal with the `organic sin' of slavery and the preservation of the Union to its explosive economic growth and emergence as a world power and its sole superpower. Johnson discusses such contemporary topics as the politics of racism, education, Vietnam, the power of the press, political correctness, the growth of litigation, and the rising influence of women. He sees Americans as a problem-solving people and the story of America as "essentially one of difficulties being overcome by intelligence and skill, by faith and strength of purpose, by courage and persistence...Looking back on its past, and forward to its future, the auguries are that it will not disappoint humanity." This challenging narrative and interpretation of American history by the author of many distinguished historical works is sometimes controversial and always provocative. Johnson's views of individuals, events, themes, and issues are original, critical, and admiring, for he is, above all, a strong believer in the history and the destiny of the American people.
John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire
Author: William Earl WeeksPublisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813184096
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361
Book Description
This is the story of a man, a treaty, and a nation. The man was John Quincy Adams, regarded by most historians as America's greatest secretary of state. The treaty was the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, of which Adams was the architect. It acquired Florida for the young United States, secured a western boundary extending to the Pacific, and bolstered the nation's position internationally. As William Weeks persuasively argues, the document also represented the first determined step in the creation of an American global empire. Weeks follows the course of the often labyrinthine negotiations by which Adams wrested the treaty from a recalcitrant Spain. The task required all of Adams's skill in diplomacy, for he faced a tangled skein of domestic and international controversies when he became secretary of state in 1817. The final document provided the United States commercial access to the Orient—a major objective of the Monroe administration that paved the way for the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Adams, the son of a president and later himself president, saw himself as destined to play a crucial role in the growth and development of the United States. In this he succeeded. Yet his legendary statecraft proved bittersweet. Adams came to repudiate the slave society whose interests he had served by acquiring Florida, he was disgusted by the rapacity of the Jacksonians, and he experienced profound guilt over his own moral transgressions while secretary of state. In the end, Adams understood that great virtue cannot coexist with great power. Weeks's book, drawn in part from articles that won the Stuart Bernath Prize, makes a lasting contribution to our understanding of American foreign policy and adds significantly to our picture of one of the nation's most important statesmen.
The World Republic of Letters
Author: Pascale CasanovaPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674013452
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 446
Book Description
The "world of letters" has always seemed a matter more of metaphor than of global reality. In this book, Pascale Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements--a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of globalization, with its suggestion of a happy literary "melting pot," Casanova exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence of their dominant counterparts. Inspired by the writings of Fernand Braudel and Pierre Bourdieu, this ambitious book develops the first systematic model for understanding the production, circulation, and valuing of literature worldwide. Casanova proposes a baseline from which we might measure the newness and modernity of the world of letters--the literary equivalent of the meridian at Greenwich. She argues for the importance of literary capital and its role in giving value and legitimacy to nations in their incessant struggle for international power. Within her overarching theory, Casanova locates three main periods in the genesis of world literature--Latin, French, and German--and closely examines three towering figures in the world republic of letters--Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner. Her work provides a rich and surprising view of the political struggles of our modern world--one framed by sites of publication, circulation, translation, and efforts at literary annexation.
The Education of Henry Adams
Author: Henry AdamsPublisher: Standard Ebooks
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 562
Book Description
One of the most well-known and influential autobiographies ever written, The Education of Henry Adams is told in the third person, as if its author were watching his own life unwind. It begins with his early life in Quincy, the family seat outside of Boston, and soon moves on to primary school, Harvard College, and beyond. He learns about the unpredictability of politics from statesmen and diplomats, and the newest discoveries in technology, science, history, and art from some of the most important thinkers and creators of the day. In essentially every case, Adams claims, his education and upbringing let him down, leaving him in the dark. But as the historian David S. Brown puts it, this is a “charade”: The Education’s “greatest irony is its claim to telling the story of its author’s ignorance, confusion, and misdirection.” Instead, Adams uses its “vigorous prose and confident assertions” to attack “the West after 1400.” For instance, industrialization and technology make Adams wonder “whether the American people knew where they were driving.” And in one famous chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he contrasts the rise of electricity and the power it brings with the strength and resilience of religious belief in the Middle Ages. The grandson and great-grandson of two presidents and the son of a politician and diplomat who served under Lincoln as minister to Great Britain, Adams was born into immense privilege, as he knew well: “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he.” After growing up a Boston Brahmin, he worked as a journalist, historian, and professor, moving in early middle age to Washington. Although Adams distributed a privately printed edition of a hundred copies of The Education for friends and family in 1907, it wasn’t published more widely until 1918, the year he died. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1919, and in 1999 a Modern Library panel placed it first on its list of the best nonfiction books published in the twentieth century. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
Science, Technology, and Warfare
Author: Monte D. WrightPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military art and science
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
The nature of warfare has always been largely determined by contemporary technology. Instances of technological change undertaken for the sake of military advantage have also been relatively common in history. The relationships between science and warfare, however, have been much more variable and ambiguous. The papers and discussions of the Symposium investigate selected aspects of the complex relationships between science and technology on the one hand, and warfare on the other, from the Renaissance to the 1960s. In the first session, Professor Hall takes up in turn the possible areas of interaction between science (exterior ballistics, engineering, explosives, mechanics, and metallurgy) and military technology (edge weapons, cannons and mortars, fortification and siege warfare, and small arms) in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. The notion that science is pursued for utilitarian ends, Hall finds, is an unhistorical projection backward from our own age." He excludes navigation and medicine from consideration, because they were civil as well as military concerns. In spite of the pleading of certain early propagandists of the Empire of Man over Nature," and in spite of the elaborate sketches of military engines in Leonardo's notebooks, military technology was largely innocent of scientific method. The developments in fortification required mathematical skills, but nothing more than elementary geometry and arithmetic. Mathematicians studied the ancient problem of the trajectory of projectiles, but their efforts affected neither the design nor the use of guns. The range tables they provided were not even usable with the guns of the time. The solution of the trajectory problem would await Benjamin Robins and the 18th century. Professor Hale supports Hall's conclusion with three arguments. In the 16th and 17th centuries, armies were so organized as to preclude any productive contact with the worlds of science and technology.