The Smithsons and Relatives PDF Download

Author: Jesse Hezekiah Smithson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Jesse Smithson sketches his own life along with his ancestors, descendants, and related lines. Genealogical information is included.

Author: Marion J. Kaminkow
Publisher: Genealogical Publishing Com
ISBN: 9780806316673
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 882

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Book Description
This ten-year supplement lists 10,000 titles acquired by the Library of Congress since 1976--this extraordinary number reflecting the phenomenal growth of interest in genealogy since the publication of Roots. An index of secondary names contains about 8,500 entries, and a geographical index lists family locations when mentioned.

Author: Nina Burleigh
Publisher: New Word City
ISBN: 161230849X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
In her illuminating and dramatic biography The Stranger and the Statesman, New York Times bestselling author Nina Burleigh reveals a little-known slice of history in the life and times of the man responsible for the creation of the United States' principal cultural institution, the Smithsonian. It was one of the nineteenth century's greatest philanthropic gifts - and one of its most puzzling mysteries. In 1829, a wealthy English naturalist named James Smithson left his library, mineral collection, and entire fortune to the "United States of America, to found... an establishment for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men" - even though he had never visited the United States or known any Americans. In this fascinating book, Burleigh pieces together the reclusive benefactor's life, beginning with his origins as the Paris-born illegitimate son of the first Duke of Northumberland and a wild adventuress who preserved for her son a fortune through gall and determination. The book follows Smithson through his university years and his passionate study of minerals across Europe during the chaos of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Detailed are his imprisonment - simply for being an Englishman in the wrong place - his experiences in the gambling dens of France, and his lonely and painstaking scientific pursuits. After Smithson's death, nineteenth-century American politicians were given the task of securing his half-million dollars - the equivalent today of $50 million - and then trying to determine how to increase and diffuse knowledge from the muddy, brawling new city of Washington. Burleigh discloses how Smithson's bequest was nearly lost due to fierce battles among many clashing Americans - Southern slavers, states' rights advocates, nation-builders, corrupt frontiersmen, and Anglophobes who argued over whether a gift from an Englishman should even be accepted. She also reveals the efforts of the unsung heroes, mainly former president John Quincy Adams, whose tireless efforts finally saw Smithson's curious notion realized in 1846, with a castle housing the United States' first and greatest cultural and scientific establishment.

Author: Heather Ewing
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408820757
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
In 1836 the United States government received a strange and unprecedented gift - a bequest of 104,960 gold sovereigns (then worth half a million dollars) to establish a foundation in Washington 'for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men'. The Smithsonian Institution, as it would eventually be called, grew into the largest museum and research complex in the world. Yet it owes its existence to an Englishman who never set foot in the United States, and who has remained a shadowy figure for more than a hundred and fifty years. Smithson lived a restless life in the capitals of Europe during the turbulent years of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars; at one time he was trailed by the French secret police, and later languished as a prisoner of war in Denmark for four long years. Yet despite a certain a penchant for gambling and fine living, he had, by the time of his death in Paris in 1829, amassed a financial fortune and a wealth of scientific papers that he left to the new democracy America. Spurned by his natural father and his country, he would be acknowledged for his own achievements in the New World. Drawing on unpublished diaries and letters from archives all over Europe and the United States, Heather Ewing tells the full and compelling story for the first time, revealing a life lived at the heart of the English Enlightenment and illuminating the mind that sparked the creation of America's greatest museum.

Author: David Kynaston
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802719643
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 717

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Book Description
As in his highly acclaimed Austerity Britain, David Kynaston invokes an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voices to drive his narrative of 1950s Britain. The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling. These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s. Well-known figures are encountered on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosexuals) and Tiger's Roy of the Rovers (making his goal-scoring debut for Melchester). All this is part of a colourful, unfolding tapestry, in which the great national events - the Tories returning to power, the death of George VI, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Suez Crisis - jostle alongside everything that gave Britain in the 1950s its distinctive flavour: Butlin's holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, Hancock's Half-Hour, Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skiffle and teddy boys. Deeply researched, David Kynaston's Family Britain offers an unrivalled take on a largely cohesive, ordered, still very hierarchical society gratefully starting to move away from the painful hardships of the 1940s towards domestic ease and affluence.

Author: William Peace
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
ISBN: 1398438774
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Sarah, a free-spirited artist in her late twenties, accepts an assignment from her granduncle, Albert Smithson, to write his memoir. ‘Bertie’ has a crippling terror of death brought about by the agonising death of his father, who was an atheist. He learns that there are three conditions one must attain to die in a peaceful state. At age fifty-four, he has none of them and is determined to achieve them all.

Author: Smithsonian Institution
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Smithsonian Institution
Languages : en
Pages : 972

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Author: Frank Leslie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Author: Kimberly Harrison
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807131431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
"They say I'm a Yankee -- but if wanting peace is Yankee -- then I am one. I am tired of Disunion of husband & wife." In 1858, nineteen-year-old Priscilla "Mittie" Munnikhuysen began a new diary that saw her marry, leave her family in the genteel Protestant seaboard culture of Chesapeake Bay, and take up residence with her wealthy husband, Howard Bond, in the frontier plantation society of Catholicsouth Louisiana. By 1865, Priscilla Bond had witnessed trials and disillusionments enough to fill a two-volume journal: her father-in-law's brutality toward his slaves; her husband's alleged ambush of Union soldiers and subsequent flight from home; the retaliatory burning of the family's sugar plantation in Houma; and the losses, horrors, and daily depredations of war.Published here for the first time, with extensive notes and a critical introduction by Kimberly Harrison, Bond's intimate writings illuminate the Civil War's impact on women, families, and individual identities. Occasionally Bond records her experiences for the benefit of later readers, but more often she uses her diary to carve a space and time for self-reflection, self-instruction, and self-persuasion. Nineteenth-century women's lives were defined by their relation to others -- as wife, mother, daughter, and sister -- and keeping a diary allowed Bond to claim time for herself. It served as a rhetorical tool that helped motivate her to conform to contemporary standards of "true womanhood," adapt to a harsh new environment, and survive the collapse of a civilization. Harrison's interpretive commentary enables readers to appreciate the context within which Bond writes even as entries about everything from marital anguish to in-law difficulties to religious struggles to failing health bring Priscilla Bond uniquely and movingly to life. Her diary, deftly cross-referenced with numerous letters, adds a valuable and enriching layer of complexity to the larger story of the Civil War home front.

Author: Jur'e Fiorillo
Publisher: Fair Winds Press
ISBN: 1616734582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
For much of history and across most of the world, being born out of wedlock—a love child, a bastard—was a serious impediment to success. Illegitimate offspring were subject to neglect, abandonment, disinheritance, and social exclusion, and often found the usual routes to education, wealth, and status blocked. Surmounting these obstacles required tremendous fortitude and persistence. Great Bastards of History brings together the captivating and stirring stories of fifteen remarkable and influential people who overcame the disadvantages of illegitimate birth to rise to positions of power. As well as providing insights into the personalities of many world-changing figures, it highlights the extraordinary courage, drive, and resolve that ordinary individuals can summon when faced with extreme adversity. Among its subjects are powerful political players including Alexander Hamilton, the abandoned son who became a founding father of the United States, and cultural figureheads such as Leonardo da Vinci, who, despite being denied entrance to trade guilds and universities, was proclaimed one of the greatest men of his day in courts throughout Europe. Equally affecting are some of the less well-known but no less fascinating figures, such as James Smithson, the disinherited son of an English duke, whose bequest to a country he never visited founded the largest museum in the world, the Smithsonian Institution. Deftly blending biography and history, political intrigue, melodrama, and psychological analysis, this is a collection that will uplift, entertain, and inform, while yielding fresh perspectives on some of the most significant events from our past.