As both a politician and a historian, Winthrop was an interpreter of foundational events in American history. Within his journal, therefore, lie resources for understanding the nature of leadership and the meaning of liberty in our past. Because of the ongoing Puritan legacy in American culture, Winthrop's journal may show us our own world, and possibly our future, in new ways. - Introduction.
What has the city meant to Americans? James L. Machor explores this question in a provocative analysis of American responses to urbanization in the context of the culture's tendency to valorize nature and the rural world. Although much attention has been paid to American rural-urban relations, Machor focuses on a dimension largely overlooked by those seeking to explain American conceptions of the city. While urban historians and literary critics have explicitly or implicitly emphasized the opposition between urban and rural sensibilities in America, an equally important feature of American thought and writing has been the widespread interest in collapsing that division. Convinced that the native landscape has offered special opportunities, Americans since the age of settlement have sought to build a harmonious urban-pastoral society combining the best of both worlds. Moreover, this goal has gone largely unchallenged in the culture except for the sophisticated responses in the writings of some of America's most eminent literary artists. Pastoral Cities explains the development of urban pastoralism from its origins in the prophetic vision of the New Jerusalem, applied to America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through its secularization in the urban planning and reform of the 1800s. Machor critiques the sophisticated treatment of urban pastoralism by writers such as Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Wharton, and James by skillfully by combining cultural analysis with a close reading of urban plans, travel narratives, sermons, and popular novels. The product of this multifaceted approach is an analysis that works to reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of the pastoral ideal as cultural mythology.
This is a reprint edition of Paul Allens 1814 edition. This is volume 1 of a 2 volume set. Volume 2 ISBN is 1582187037. Introduction and Index by James Hosmer. Published in 1903 for the centenial celebration.
A generation of magnificent scholars, from Peter Drucker to Jack Welch, have taught us that understanding business issues and the profound changes the world's economy is undergoing makes sense if set in historical context. Today the best managers in the world demand to know how things came to be as they are. This collection of essays is designed to give the reader an historical perspective on the fastest growing sector of the work force: knowledge workers. The articles tell you how knowledge workers evolved from manufacturing and agricultural jobs and then go on to give you some insight as to what the future roles of knowledge workers will be. The readings in this volume come from a variety of sources not normally looked at by managers and business executives. There are reports from historians, sociologists, academics, and economic experts. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction on the material, its significance, and something about the context in which it was written, including brief biographical comments on the author. The Rise of the Knowledge Worker is intended for business people, managers, leaders, government employees, and students.
The first major work to identify the original generation of American geographers—teachers, writers, surveyors, cartographers, engravers, and others—who made significant contributions to the field of geography during the early years of the republic. As such, it represents a powerful research tool for scholars interested in learning about this group and the products of their labors. A comprehensive and inclusive reference work, this book depicts the individuals who engaged in the establishment and description of the United States. It includes information on people who were involved in activities that led to a remarkable body of information, maps, and literature of a geographic nature about the country.
Annotation. Although the US is proud of being a secular state, religion lies at the heart of American politics. This volume looks at how the country came to have the soul of a church & the consequences - the moral crusades against slavery, alcohol, witchcraft & discrimination that time & again have prevailed upon the nation.
The extraordinary story of the Powhatan chief who waged a lifelong struggle to drive European settlers from his homeland In the mid-sixteenth century, Spanish explorers in the Chesapeake Bay kidnapped an Indian child and took him back to Spain and subsequently to Mexico. The boy converted to Catholicism and after nearly a decade was able to return to his land with a group of Jesuits to establish a mission. Shortly after arriving, he organized a war party that killed them. In the years that followed, Opechancanough (as the English called him), helped establish the most powerful chiefdom in the mid-Atlantic region. When English settlers founded Virginia in 1607, he fought tirelessly to drive them away, leading to a series of wars that spanned the next forty years—the first Anglo-Indian wars in America— and came close to destroying the colony. A Brave and Cunning Prince is the first book to chronicle the life of this remarkable chief, exploring his early experiences of European society and his long struggle to save his people from conquest.
No era in American history has been more fascinating to Americans, or more critical to the ultimate destiny of the United States, than the colonial era. Between the time that the first European settlers established a colony at Jamestown in 1607 through the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the outlines of America's distinctive political culture, economic system, social life, and cultural patterns had begun to emerge. Designed to complement the high school American history curriculum as well as undergraduate survey courses, "Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History" captures it all: the people, institutions, ideas, and events of the first three hundred years of American history. While it focuses on the thirteen British colonies stretching along the Atlantic, Colonial America sets this history in its larger contexts. Entries also cover Canada, the American Southwest and Mexico, and the Caribbean and Atlantic world directly impacting the history of the thirteen colonies. This encyclopedia explores the complete early history of what would become the United States, including portraits of Native American life in the immediate pre-contact period, early Spanish exploration, and the first settlements by Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish, and English colonists. This monumental five-volume set brings America's colonial heritage vibrantly to life for today's readers. It includes: thematic essays on major issues and topics; detailed A-Z entries on hundreds of people, institutions, events, and ideas; thematic and regional chronologies; hundreds of illustrations; primary documents; and a glossary and multiple indexes.
In this sweeping reinterpretation of American political culture, James Block offers a new perspective on the formation of the modern American self and society. Block roots both self and society in the concept of agency, rather than liberty, and dispenses with the national myth of the "sacred cause of liberty"--with the Declaration of Independence as its "American scripture." Instead, he recovers the early modern conception of agency as the true synthesis emerging from America's Protestant and liberal cultural foundations. Block traces agency doctrine from its pre-Commonwealth English origins through its development into the American mainstream culture on the eve of the twentieth century. The concept of agency that prevailed in the colonies simultaneously released individuals from traditional constraints to participate actively and self-reliantly in social institutions, while confining them within a new set of commitments. Individual initiative was now firmly bounded by the modern values and ends of personal Protestant religiosity and collective liberal institutional authority. As Block shows, this complex relation of self to society lies at the root of the American character. A Nation of Agents is a new reading of what the "first new nation" did and did not achieve. It will enable us to move beyond long-standing national myths and grasp both the American achievement and its legacy for modernity. Table of Contents: Preface 1. The American Narrative in Crisis Part I. The English Origins of the American Self and Society 2. The Early Puritan Insurgents and the Origins of Agency 3. The Protestant Revolutionaries and the Emerging Society of Agents 4. Thomas Hobbes and the Founding of the Liberal Politics of Agency 5. John Locke and the Mythic Society of Free Agents Part II. The Ascendancy of Agency and the First New Nation 6. The Great Awakening and the Emergent Culture of Agency 7. The Revolutionary Triumph of Agency Part III. The Dilemma of Nationhood 8. The Liberal Idyll amidst Republican Realities 9. From the Idyll: Liberation and Reversal in a World without Bounds Part IV. The Creation of an Agency Civilization 10. National Revival as the Crucible of Agency Character 11. From Sectarian Discord to Civil Religion 12. The Protestant Agent in Liberal Economics 13. John Dewey and the Modern Synthesis Conclusion: The Recovery of Agency Notes Index Reviews of this book: A Nation of Agents is a work of extravagant erudition and originality. James E. Block has read voraciously in the sources, seen things that few have seen before, and put them together as none have done before. He sets forth a new view of American culture, threading his thesis through three centuries of American thought and the preceding century of English thinking besides. --Michael Zuckerman, Journal of American History Reviews of this book: What a wonder then is James Block's book, a daring master narrative and bracing theoretical exercise of the first order. It promises and delivers nothing less than a fundamental recasting of 'the American path to a modern self and society.' --Robert Westbrook, Christian Century Reviews of this book: James Block's big, ambitious A Nation of Agents leaves no doubt about its aspirations in the contest to solve the Gordian knot of the relationship between the one and the many in American social thought...The subtlety and acuity with which Block develops these themes through scores of thinkers and over 500 pages can scarcely be exaggerated. A Nation of Agents is a genuinely prodigious work of scholarship. --Daniel T. Rodgers, Modern Intellectual History This is an original and exciting work of scholarship, in which the idea of agency takes on the characteristics of a deep cultural imperative in American life. Block's agency thesis is at once a genealogy of modern American identity and a theoretical exploration of the horizon within which American political and moral self-reflection is conducted. --Eldon J. Eisenach, The University of Tulsa The most remarkable aspect of this book is the author's ability to weave a single thread -- the thread of "agency" -- through four centuries of Anglo-American intellectual history. Block's great achievement is to propound a new "common theme" to American history. A Nation of Agents is a beacon for scholars seeking a usable past. If ever intellectual history is to regain its prominence in the field of American history it will require works like this. --Harry S. Stout, Yale University
Deals with the encounters of Europeans and Indians in colonial North America. A blending of history and anthropology, the author draws on a wide variety of sources, including archaeological findings, linguistics, accounts of colonists, art, and published scholarship.
The emphasis on practical experience over ideology is viewed by many historians as a profoundly American characteristic, one that provides a model for exploring the colonial challenge to European belief systems and the creation of a unique culture. Here Jim Egan offers an unprecedented look at how early modern American writers helped make this notion of experience so powerful that we now take it as a given rather than as the product of hard-fought rhetorical battles waged over ways of imagining one's relationship to a larger social community. In order to show how our modern notion of experience emerges from a historical change that experience itself could not have brought about, he turns to works by seventeenth-century writers in New England and reveals the ways in which they authorized experience, ultimately producing a rhetoric distinctive to the colonies and supportive of colonialism. Writers such as John Smith, William Wood, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Benjamin Tompson, and William Hubbard were sensitive to the challenge experiential authority posed to established social hierarchies. Egan argues that they used experience to authorize a supplementary status system that would at once enhance England's economic, political, and spiritual status and provide a new basis for regulating English and native populations. These writers were assuaging fears over how exposure to alien environments threatened actual English bodies and also the imaginary body that authorized English monarchy and allowed English subjects to think of themselves as a nation. By reimagining the English nation, these supporters of English colonialism helped create a modern way of imagining national identity and individual subject formation.
Soldier and explorer William H. Emory traveled the length and breadth of the United States and participated in some of the most significant events of the nineteenth century. This first complete biography of Emory offers new insight on this often overlooked figure and provides an important look at an expanding America. Emory was a West Point graduate who became a civil engineer with the newly formed Corps of Topographical Engineers. He was selected to accompany Stephen Watts Kearny and the Army of the West in their trek to California in 1846, and his map from that expedition helped guide Forty-Niners bound for the goldfields. He then worked for nine years on the new border between the United States and Mexico. When the Civil War broke out, he commanded a regiment defending Washington, D.C., and later saw action at Manassas, in the Red River campaign, and in the Shenandoah Valley, where he served under Phil Sheridan. This biography draws on Emory's personal papers to reveal other significant episodes of his life. While commanding a cavalry unit in the Indian Territory, he was the only officer to bring an entire command out of insurrectionary territory; in hostile action of a different kind, he was a major witness in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson and offered testimony that helped save the president. William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist is an important resource for scholars of western expansion and the Civil War. More than that, it is a rousing story of an unsung but distinguished hero of his age.
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