In some places during Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was a social fraternity whose members enjoyed sophomoric high jinks and homemade liquor. In other areas, the KKK was a paramilitary group intent on keeping former slaves away from white women and Republicans away from ballot boxes. South Carolina saw the worst Klan violence and, in 1871, President Grant sent federal troops under the command of Major Lewis Merrill to restore law and order. Merrill did not eradicate the Klan, but he arguably did more than any other person or entity to expose the identity of the Invisible Empire as a group of hooded, brutish, homegrown terrorists. In compiling evidence to prosecute the leading Klansmen and restoring at least a semblance of order to South Carolina, Merrill and his men demonstrated that the portrayal of the KKK as a chivalric organization was at best a myth and at worst a lie. Book jacket.
An in-depth analysis of the workings and legacy of the Supreme Court led by Charles Evans Hughes. Charles Evans Hughes, a man who, it was said, "looks like God and talks like God," became chief justice in 1930, a year when more than 1,000 banks closed their doors. Today the Hughes Court is often remembered as a conservative bulwark against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. But that view, according to author Michael Parrish, is not accurate. In an era when Nazi Germany passed the Nuremberg Laws and extinguished freedom in much of Western Europe, the Hughes Court put the stamp of constitutional approval on New Deal entitlements, required state and local governments to bring their laws into conformity with the federal Bill of Rights, and took the first steps toward developing a more uniform code of criminal justice.
A splendid account of the Supreme Court's rulings on race in the first half of the twentieth century, From Jim Crow To Civil Rights earned rave reviews and won the Bancroft Prize for History in 2005. Now, in this marvelously abridged, paperback edition, Michael J. Klarman has compressed his acclaimed study into tight focus around one major case--Brown v. Board of Education--making the path-breaking arguments of his original work accessible to a broader audience of general readers and students. In this revised and condensed edition, Klarman illuminates the impact of the momentous Brown v. Board of Education ruling. He offers a richer, more complex understanding of this pivotal decision, going behind the scenes to examine the justices' deliberations and reconstruct why they found the case so difficult to decide. He recaps his famous backlash thesis, arguing that Brown was more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to change than for encouraging civil rights protest, and that it was only the resulting violence that transformed northern opinion and led to the landmark legislation of the 1960s. Klarman also sheds light on broader questions such as how judges decide cases; how much they are influenced by legal, political, and personal considerations; the relationship between Supreme Court decisions and social change; and finally, how much Court decisions simply reflect societal values and how much they shape those values. Brown v. Board of Education was one of the most important decisions in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. Klarman's brilliant analysis of this landmark case illuminates the course of American race relations as it highlights the relationship between law and social reform. Acclaim for From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: "A major achievement. It bestows upon its fortunate readers prodigious research, nuanced judgment, and intellectual independence." --Randall Kennedy, The New Republic "Magisterial." --The New York Review of Books "A sweeping, erudite, and powerfully argued book...unfailingly interesting." --Wilson Quarterly
Fresh, provocative, and full of vitality, this is a first-rate contribution to the study of political culture. It should be read not only by political scientists, political theorists, and sociologists, but also by students of American studies and literature."—Sheldon Wolin, Princeton University
Between 1854 and 1861, the struggle between pro-and anti-slavery factions over Kansas Territory captivated Americans nationwide and contributed directly to the Civil War. Combining political, social, and military history, Bleeding Kansas contextualizes and analyzes prewar and wartime clashes in Kansas and Missouri and traces how these conflicts have been remembered ever since. Michael E. Woods’s compelling narrative of the Kansas-Missouri border struggle embraces the diverse perspectives of white northerners and southerners, women, Native Americans, and African Americans. This wide-ranging and engaging text is ideal for undergraduate courses on the Civil War era, westward expansion, Kansas and/or Missouri history, nineteenth-century US history, and other related subjects. Supported by primary source documents and a robust companion website, this text allows readers to engage with and draw their own conclusions about this contentious era in American History.
A gripping account of the underdog Senate lawyer who unmasked the financial wrongdoing that led to the Crash of 1929 and forever changed the relationship between Washington and Wall Street. In The Hellhound of Wall Street, Michael Perino recounts in riveting detail the 1933 hearings that put Wall Street on trial for the Great Crash. Never before in American history had so many financial titans been called to account before the public, and they had come within a few weeks of emerging unscathed. By the time Ferdinand Pecora, a Sicilian immigrant and former New York prosecutor, took over as chief counsel, the investigation had dragged on ineffectively for nearly a year and was universally written off as dead. The Hellhound of Wall Street provides a minute-by-minute account of the ten dramatic days when Pecora turned the hearings around, cross- examining the officers of National City Bank (today's Citigroup), particularly its chairman, Charles Mitchell, one of the best known bankers of his day. Mitchell strode into the hearing room in obvious disdain for the proceedings, but he left utterly disgraced. Pecora's rigorous questioning revealed that City Bank was guilty of shocking financial abuses, from selling worthless bonds to manipulating its stock price. Most offensive of all was the excessive compensation and bonuses awarded to its executives for peddling shoddy securities to the American public. Pecora became an unlikely hero to a beleaguered nation. The man whom the press called "the hellhound of Wall Street" was the son of a struggling factory worker. Precocious and determined, he became one of New York's few Italian American lawyers at a time when Italians were frequently stereotyped as anarchic criminals. The image of an immigrant lawyer challenging a blue-blooded Wall Street tycoon was just one more sign that a fundamental shift was taking place in America. By creating the sensational headlines needed to galvanize public opinion for reform, the Pecora hearings spurred Congress to take unprecedented steps to rein in the freewheeling banking industry and led directly to the New Deal's landmark economic reforms. A gripping courtroom drama with remarkable contemporary relevance, The Hellhound of Wall Street brings to life a crucial turning point in American financial history.
In 1864, General Sterling Price with an army of 12,000 ragtag Confederates invaded Missouri in an effort to wrest it from the United States Army's Department of Missouri. Price hoped his campaign would sway the 1864 presidential election, convincing war-weary Northern voters to cast their ballots for a peace candidate rather than Abraham Lincoln. It was the South's last invasion of Northern territory. But it was simply too late in the war for the South to achieve such an outcome, and Price grossly mismanaged the campaign, guaranteeing the defeat of his force and of the Confederate States. This book chronicles the Confederacy's desperate, final, ill-fated attempt to win a decisive victory.
Riccards and Flagg examine in detail the development of Franklin Delano Roosevelt from a young politician in Albany to assistant secretary of the Navy to governor of the state of New York. The volume shows how Roosevelt developed his rhetorical skills, his art of manipulation and coalition building, and his incredible bond to the American people through the Depression and World War II. As commander in chief, he mastered the leadership skills that made him a great military leader and a political leader who established himself as a paramount figure using control of the Democratic party. In the process, he solidified the party as a long-lasting coalition that set the United States as a world empire.
For more than twenty years Michael F. Holt has been considered one of the leading specialists in the political history of the United States. Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln is a collection of some of his more important shorter studies on the politics of nineteenth-century America.The collection focuses on the mass political parties that emerged in the 1820s and their role in broader political developments from that decade to 1865. Holt includes essays on the Democratic, Antimasonic, Whig, and Know Nothing parties, as well as one on Abraham Lincoln's relationship with the congressional wing of the Republican party during the Civil War. Almost all essays touch on the broad question of the role of partisan politics in explaining the outbreak of the war. Individual essays address the following questions as well: What explains the birth and death of powerful third parties? What was the relationship among economic conditions, party performance in office (especially legislative performance), and the mobilization of an unprecedented number of voters between 1836 and 1840? Why did the Whigs find it necessary to nominate military hero Zachary Taylor as their presidential candidate in 1848? What explains the death of the Whig party? What role did ethnoreligious issues and the Know Nothing party play in the realignment of the 1850s and the ultimate triumph of the Republican party? In what ways did the continuation of two-party competition after 1860 help the North win the Civil War?Most of the essays have been published previously over a twenty-year span, but there are also two new pieces. "The Mysterious Disappearance of the American Whig party," originally delivered as the Commonwealth Fund Lecture at University College London in February, 1990, seeks to explain why the Whig party died in the 1850s. This essay contrasts the fate of the Whig party with the fates of the Republican party in the 1930s and 1970s and the British Conservative party in the 1840s and 1850s - parties that survived similar, indeed graver, challenges than those to which the Whigs succumbed. In addition, Holt has written and excellent introduction in which he explains how he came to write the essays and reflects upon them in light of the current state of political history as a discipline.Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln offers provocative insights into both the history of nineteenth-century politics and the way it is studied.
During the Civil War, the state of Missouri witnessed the most widespread, prolonged, and destructive guerrilla fighting in American history. With its horrific combination of robbery, arson, torture, murder, and swift and bloody raids on farms and settlements, the conflict approached total war, engulfing the whole populace and challenging any notion of civility. Michael Fellman's Inside War captures the conflict from "inside," drawing on a wealth of first-hand evidence, including letters, diaries, military reports, court-martial transcripts, depositions, and newspaper accounts. He gives us a clear picture of the ideological, social, and economic forces that divided the people and launched the conflict. Along with depicting how both Confederate and Union officials used the guerrilla fighters and their tactics to their own advantage, Fellman describes how ordinary civilian men and women struggled to survive amidst the random terror perpetuated by both sides; what drove the combatants themselves to commit atrocities and vicious acts of vengeance; and how the legend of Jesse James arose from this brutal episode in the American Civil War.
In 1856, Benjamin Hedrick broke with his white North Carolinian peers by taking an antislavery position on the question of the incorporation of the territories. This biography tells the story of how developed that position, the loss of his position as a professor of chemistry and his subsequent exil
Winner of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for history, Kammen addresses three themes concerning the state of historical inquiry in America. Beginning with how history as a professional discipline has changed over the past century, the book treats the relationship of the historian's craft to American nationalism, the value of historical knowledge, and the shifting attitudes of historians toward society. Kammen appraises the significance of historiography as a measure of cultural change and shows how the past has been manipulated for social and ideological reasons, and how memories of the national and regional past have conflicted with the realities of historical experience. He also explains how traditional modes of interpreting the past have lost their cohesive force and why historians should pursue new approaches to the cultural history. ISBN 0-8014-1924-7: $24.95.
For the past three decades, many history professors have allowed their biases to distort the way America’s past is taught. These intellectuals have searched for instances of racism, sexism, and bigotry in our history while downplaying the greatness of America’s patriots and the achievements of “dead white men.” As a result, more emphasis is placed on Harriet Tubman than on George Washington; more about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II than about D-Day or Iwo Jima; more on the dangers we faced from Joseph McCarthy than those we faced from Josef Stalin. A Patriot’s History of the United States corrects those doctrinaire biases. In this groundbreaking book, America’s discovery, founding, and development are reexamined with an appreciation for the elements of public virtue, personal liberty, and private property that make this nation uniquely successful. This book offers a long-overdue acknowledgment of America’s true and proud history.
On May 22, 1863, after two failed attempts to take the city of Vicksburg by assault, Major General Ulysses S. Grant declared in a letter to the commander of the Union fleet on the Mississippi River that “the nature of the ground about Vicksburg is such that it can only be taken by a siege.” The 47-day siege of Vicksburg orchestrated by Grant resulted in the eventual surrender of the city and fulfilled a major strategic goal for the Union: command of the Mississippi River for the remainder of the war. In this revealing volume, Michael B. Ballard offers the first in-depth exploration of Grant’s thoughts and actions during this critical operation, providing a never-before-seen portrait of the general in the midst of one of his most notable achievements. After an overview of Grant’s early Civil War career from his first battle through the early stages of the attacks on Vicksburg, Ballard describes in detail how Grant conducted the siege, examining his military decisions, placement of troops, strategy and tactics, engineering objectives, and relationships with other officers. Grant’s worried obsession with a perceived danger of a rear attack by Joseph Johnston’s Confederate army, Ballard shows, affected his decision making, and shows how threats of Confederate action occupied more of Grant’s time than did the siege itself. In addition, Ballard soundly dispels a false story about Grant’s alleged drinking binge early in the siege that has been taken as truthful by many historians, examines how racism in Grant’s army impacted the lives of freed black people and slaves in the Vicksburg area, and explores Grant’s strained relationship with John McClernand, a politically appointed general from Illinois. The book concludes with the surrender of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, the expulsion of Johnston and his army from the region, and demonstrates the impact of the siege on the outcome on the short and long-terms of Grant’s military career. By analyzing Grant’s personality during the siege and how he dealt with myriad issues as both a general and an administrator, Grant at Vicksburg offers a revealing rendering of the legendary general.
In this volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen explores the U.S. Constitution's place in the public consciousness and its role as a symbol in American life, from ratification in 1788 to our own time. As he examines what the Constitution has meant to the American people (perceptions and misperceptions, uses and abuses, knowledge and ignorance), Kammen shows that although there are recurrent declarations of reverence most of us neither know nor fully understand our Constitution. How did this gap between ideal and reality come about? To explain it, Kammen examines the complex and contradictory feelings about the Constitution that emerged during its preparation and that have been with us ever since. He begins with our confusion as to the kind of Union we created, especially with regard to how much sovereignty the states actually surrendered to the central government. This confusion is the source of the constitutional crisis that led to the Civil War and its aftermath. Kammen also describes and analyzes changing perceptions of the differences and similarities between the British and American constitutions; turn-of-the-century debates about states' rights versus national authority; and disagreements about how easy or difficult it ought to be to amend the Constitution. Moving into the twentieth century, he notes the development of a "cult of the Constitution" following World War I, and the conflict over policy issues that persisted despite a shared commitment to the Constitution.
Liberty, one of the most consequential words in our language, is one of the most treasured concepts in American thought—and one of the most intensely debated. Its meaning is constantly shifting, changing not only from one culture to another but also, over time, within the same culture. No two definitions of liberty seem alike. In this subtle and illuminating work Michael Kammen traces the evolving concept of liberty throughout American history and provides a solid framework for understanding the meaning of the term today. He shows that by the early seventeenth century a tension between liberty and authority was well recognized. Throughout the eighteenth century and especially during the American Revolution a bond between liberty and property was asserted. By the end of the eighteenth century this concept of liberty was so well established that it remained dominant throughout the nineteenth. By the early twentieth century, as the notion of social justice gained prominence, liberty and justice were paired frequently, and by midcentury the two had become allied to general American values. Since the 1960s the union of liberty and equality has been the prevailing notion and achieving them has proved a major objective. In a lively and learned manner Kammen also shows that Americans have subscribed to different definitions of liberty concurrently. Above all, there has been a steady expansion of what is embraced by the concept of liberty. This expansion has created difficulties in public discourse, causing groups to misunderstand one another. On the other hand, interpretations of liberty have broadened to include such concepts as constraints on authority, a right to privacy, and the protection of personal freedoms. In a new preface for this Banner Books edition, Kammen responds to evaluations of earlier editions and places his views within the context of more recent studies.
A primer on the history of American fascism Most people in the United States have been trained to recognize fascism in movements such as Germany’s Third Reich or Italy’s National Fascist Party, where charismatic demagogues manipulate incensed, vengeful masses. We rarely think of fascism as linked to the essence of monopoly-finance capitalism, operating under the guise of American free-enterprise. But, as Michael Joseph Roberto argues, this is exactly where fascism’s embryonic forms began gestating in the United States, during the so-called prosperous 1920s and the Great Depression of the following decade. Drawing from a range of authors who wrote during the 1930s and early 1940s, Roberto examines how the driving force of American fascism comes, not from reactionary movements below, but from the top, namely, Big Business and the power of finance capital. More subtle than its earlier European counterparts, writes Roberto, fascist America’s racist, top-down quashing of individual liberties masqueraded as “real democracy,” “upholding the Constitution,” and the pressure to be “100 Percent American.” The Coming of the American Behemoth is intended as a primer, to forge much-needed discourse on the nature of fascism, and its particular forms within the United States. The book focuses on the role of the capital-labor relationship during the period between the two World Wars, when the United States became the epicenter of the world-capitalist system. Concentrating on specific processes, which he characterizes as terrorist and non-terrorist alike, Roberto argues that the interwar period was a fertile time for the incubation of a protean, more salable form of tyranny – a fascist behemoth in the making, whose emergence has been ignored or dismissed by mainstream historians. This book is a necessity for anyone who fears America tipping ever closer, in this era of Trump, to full-blown fascism.
The revealing story of Franklin Roosevelt, Joe Kennedy, and a political alliance that changed history, from a New York Times–bestselling author. When Franklin Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, he gained the support of Joseph Kennedy, a little-known businessman with Wall Street connections. Instrumental in Roosevelt’s victory, their partnership began a longstanding alliance between two of America’s most ambitious power brokers. Kennedy worked closely with FDR as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and later as ambassador to Great Britain. But at the outbreak of World War II, sensing a threat to his family and fortune, Kennedy lobbied against American intervention—putting him in direct conflict with Roosevelt’s intentions. Though he retreated from the spotlight to focus on the political careers of his sons, Kennedy’s relationship with Roosevelt would eventually come full circle in 1960, when Franklin Roosevelt Jr. campaigned for John F. Kennedy’s presidential win. With unprecedented access to Kennedy’s private diaries as well as firsthand interviews with Roosevelt’s family and White House aides, New York Times–bestselling author Michael Beschloss—called “the nation’s leading presidential historian” by Newsweek—presents an insightful study in contrasts. Roosevelt, the scion of a political dynasty, had a genius for the machinery of government; Kennedy, who built his own fortune, was a political outsider determined to build a dynasty of his own. From the author of The Conquerors and Presidential Courage, this is a “fascinating account of the complex, ambiguous relationship of two shrewd, ruthless, power-hungry men” (The New York Times Book Review).
By the 1920s, Jews were--by all economic, political, and cultural measures of the day--making it in America. But as these children of immigrants took their places in American society, many deliberately identified with groups that remained excluded. Despite their success, Jews embraced resistance more than acculturation, preferring marginal status to assimilation. The stories of Al Jolson, Felix Frankfurter, and Arnold Rothstein are told together to explore this paradox in the psychology of American Jewry. All three Jews were born in the 1880s, grew up around American Jewish ghettos, married gentile women, entered the middle class, and rose to national fame. All three also became heroes to the American Jewish community for their association with events that galvanized the country and defined the Jazz Age. Rothstein allegedly fixed the 1919 World Series--an accusation this book disputes. Frankfurter defended the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Jolson brought jazz music to Hollywood for the first talking film, The Jazz Singer, and regularly impersonated African Americans in blackface. Each of these men represented a version of the American outsider, and American Jews celebrated them for it. Michael Alexander's gracefully written account profoundly complicates the history of immigrants in America. It challenges charges that anti-Semitism exclusively or even mostly explains Jews' feelings of marginality, while it calls for a general rethinking of positions that have assumed an immigrant quest for inclusion into the white American mainstream. Rather, Alexander argues that Jewish outsider status stemmed from the group identity Jews brought with them to this country in the form of the theology of exile. Jazz Age Jews shows that most Jews felt culturally obliged to mark themselves as different--and believed that doing so made them both better Jews and better Americans.
Freedom, Union, and Power analyzes the beliefs of the Republican Party during the Civil War, how those beliefs changed, and what those changes foreshadowed for the future. The party's pre-war ideology of "free soil, free labor, free men" changed with the Republican ascent to power in the White House. With Lincoln's election, Republicans faced something new-responsibility for the government. With responsibility came the need to wage a war for the survival of that government, the country, and the party. And with victory in the war came responsibility responsibility for saving the Union-by ending slavery-and for pursuing policies that fit into their belief in a strong, free Union. Michael Green shows how Republicans had to wield federal power to stop a rebellion against freedom and union. Crucial to their use of federal power was their hope of keeping that power-the intersection of policy and politics.
The United States in the Long Twentieth Century explores the nature of American politics and society in the period from 1900 to the present day, illuminating both the changes and the continuities. This was a period largely characterized by exceptional growth and international power, though one also assailed by the crises and divisions that Michael Heale carefully examines. A strength of the book is its integration of political with social history, and it thus explores a range of social, demographic and economic phenomena that have been central to American history in the long twentieth century, such as immigration and ethnicity, the labour, civil rights and environmental movements, and the role and achievements of women. This new and fully revised edition of the seminal student textbook Twentieth-Century America has been updated throughout to take recent scholarship in the field into account and also includes a number of important new features, including: - a brand new chapter on the years from 2000 onwards, covering 9/11, the financial crisis, and the rise of Barack Obama; - substantial revisions to Part III, covering 1969 to the present day, and in particular to the material on Reagan, Clinton, African Americans, immigrants, the growth of the financial sector and (de)regulation and global warming; one theme is the limits of conservatism and the resilience of liberalism; - greater emphasis on the United States in a transnational world and within the context of the rise of globalization. The United States in the Long Twentieth Century is a detailed guide to American political and social history since 1900 and an essential text for all students interested in the modern history of the United States of America.
The fourth edition of The Cognitive Neurosciences continues to chart new directions in the study of the biologic underpinnings of complex cognition - the relationship between the structural and physiological mechanisms of the nervous system and the psychological reality of the mind. The material in this edition is entirely new, with all chapters written specifically for it." --Book Jacket.
NEW! The first complete revision of John Bouvier s great law dictionary in more than a century made relevant and authoritative for modern students of the law Derived from the famous 1853 law dictionary used by Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The Aspen Publishing Bouvier Law Dictionary Quick Reference has been brought completely up-to-date by a distinguished and widely-published legal scholar and teacher. Steve Sheppard, with law degrees from Oxford and Columbia Universities, brings his scholarship, international practice, and litigation experience to bear in making the famous text as relevant today as it was when it first broke ground in American law. Definitions derived from contemporary as well as classic sources give the reference book its depth and authority. Building on Bouvier's structure and entries, Professor Sheppard has added thousands of new terms and rewritten many original definitions. 8,500 short definitions explain more than 11,200 words and phrases, giving readers a general understanding of a term when a quick grasp of a concept is required. Each entry is written to be understood by the modern student, argued by the modern lawyer, and cited by the modern judge. An intuitive structure and thorough cross-referencing makes the first complete revision of this essential dictionary in more than a hundred years accessible and easy to use. Features of The Aspen Publishing Bouvier Law Dictionary Quick Reference: The classic becomes contemporary. Definitions derived from ancient and contemporary sources, with current statutes, regulations, cases, and treatises building on ancient and medieval sources Designed for modern use and contemporary issues Authority in General Editor Stephen Sheppard: Widely published by Cambridge, Oxford and other leading presses Holds law degrees from Oxford and Columbia Universities, including a doctorate in the science of law Draws on international legal practice, litigation, and teaching experience for the selection of terms Encyclopedic in scope: 8,500 entries, explaining more than 11,200 words and phrases, far more than Bouvier's original two-volume set with 6,600 entries Short definitions give readers a quick grasp of a concept and a general understanding in a hurry Clear statement of meanings, context and usage of key terms Intuitive structure, for ease of use: Major terms organize concepts and related terms: e.g. exceptions to Hearsay under hearsay, the forms of estate under Estate Thorough cross-referencing, making terms easy to find Summary of Contents: Welcome to the Bouvier Law Dictionary How to Use the Bouvier Law Dictionary Compact Edition The Order of Words and Phrases The Bouvier Law Dictionary Project The Entries, A-Z First Appendix: The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution Second Appendix: Justices of the United States Supreme Court
A Gentle Conversation, Third Edition, is meant to be a student-friendly introduction to research methodology and statistics, aimed at allaying students' fears and anxieties about studying these topics. Our more conversational approach should help students feel as if the authors are standing by them, explaining concepts and procedures as they read through the text. We use examples throughout to clarify concepts and strengthen the connections between statistics, data, and research questions. The authors emphasize understanding not only the manipulation of statistical data, but also what the actual findings mean in relation to significance issues, samples, and populations. We cover effect size for all statistical inquiries, from correlation to ANOVA.
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