Michael Fitzgibbon Holt's Books

The Fate of Their Country

Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War

By: Michael F. Holt

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The Fate of Their Country

Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War

By: Michael F. Holt

How partisan politics lead to the Civil War What brought about the Civil War? Leading historian Michael F. Holt convincingly offers a disturbingly contemporary answer: partisan politics. In this brilliant and succinct book, Holt distills a lifetime of scholarship to demonstrate that secession and war did not arise from two irreconcilable economies any more than from moral objections to slavery. Short-sighted politicians were to blame. Rarely looking beyond the next election, the two dominant political parties used the emotionally charged and largely chimerical issue of slavery's extension westward to pursue reelection and settle political scores, all the while inexorably dragging the nation towards disunion. Despite the majority opinion (held in both the North and South) that slavery could never flourish in the areas that sparked the most contention from 1845 to 1861-the Mexican Cession, Oregon, and Kansas-politicians in Washington, especially members of Congress, realized the partisan value of the issue and acted on short-term political calculations with minimal regard for sectional comity. War was the result. Including select speeches by Lincoln and others, The Fate of Their Country openly challenges us to rethink a seminal moment in America's history.

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Page Count

185

Publisher

Macmillan + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

1429930276

ISBN 13

9781429930277

The Election of 1860

“A Campaign Fraught with Consequences”

By: Michael F. Holt

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The Election of 1860

“A Campaign Fraught with Consequences”

By: Michael F. Holt

Because of its extraordinary consequences and because of Abraham Lincoln's place in the American pantheon, the presidential election of 1860 is probably the most studied in our history. But perhaps for the same reasons, historians have focused on the contest of Lincoln versus Stephen Douglas in the northern free states and John Bell versus John C. Breckinridge in the slaveholding South. In The Election of 1860 a preeminent scholar of American history disrupts this familiar narrative with a clearer and more comprehensive account of how the election unfolded and what it was actually about. Most critically, the book counters the common interpretation of the election as a referendum on slavery and the Republican Party's purported threat to it. However significantly slavery figured in the election, The Election of 1860 reveals the key importance of widespread opposition to the Republican Party because of its overtly anti-southern rhetoric and seemingly unstoppable rise to power in the North after its emergence in 1854. Also of critical importance was the corruption of the incumbent administration of Democrat James Buchanan—and a nationwide revulsion against party. Grounding his history in a nuanced retelling of the pre-1860 story, Michael F. Holt explores the sectional politics that permeated the election and foreshadowed the coming Civil War. He brings to light how the campaigns of the Republican Party and the National (Northern) Democrats and the Constitutional (Southern) Democrats and the newly formed Constitutional Union Party were not exclusively regional. His attention to the little-studied role of the Buchanan Administration, and of perceived threats to the preservation of the Union, clarifies the true dynamic of the 1860 presidential election, particularly in its early stages.

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Page Count

272

Publisher

University Press of Kansas

Published Date

ISBN 10

0700624872

ISBN 13

9780700624874

Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln

By: Michael F. Holt

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Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln

By: Michael F. Holt

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.

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Page Count

384

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807126098

ISBN 13

9780807126097

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party

Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War

By: Michael F. Holt

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The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party

Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War

By: Michael F. Holt

Here, Michael F. Holt gives us the only comprehensive history of the Whigs ever written. He offers a panoramic account of the tumultuous antebellum period, a time when a flurry of parties and larger-than-life politicians--Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Martin Van Buren, and Henry Clay--struggled for control as the U.S. inched towards secession. It was an era when Americans were passionately involved in politics, when local concerns drove national policy, and when momentous political events--like the Annexation of Texas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act--rocked the country. Amid this contentious political activity, the Whig Party continuously strove to unite North and South, emerging as the nation's last great hope to prevent secession.

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Page Count

1298

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199830894

ISBN 13

9780199830893

The Fate of Their Country

Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War

By: Michael Fitzgibbon Holt

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The Fate of Their Country

Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War

By: Michael Fitzgibbon Holt

How partisan politics lead to the Civil War What brought about the Civil War? Leading historian Michael F. Holt convincingly offers a disturbingly contemporary answer: partisan politics. In this brilliant and succinct book, Holt distills a lifetime of scholarship to demonstrate that secession and war did not arise from two irreconcilable economies any more than from moral objections to slavery. Short-sighted politicians were to blame. Rarely looking beyond the next election, the two dominant political parties used the emotionally charged and largely chimerical issue of slavery's extension westward to pursue reelection and settle political scores, all the while inexorably dragging the nation towards disunion. Despite the majority opinion (held in both the North and South) that slavery could never flourish in the areas that sparked the most contention from 1845 to 1861-the Mexican Cession, Oregon, and Kansas-politicians in Washington, especially members of Congress, realized the partisan value of the issue and acted on short-term political calculations with minimal regard for sectional comity. War was the result. Including select speeches by Lincoln and others, "The Fate of Their Country" openly challenges us to rethink a seminal moment in America's history.

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Page Count

186

Publisher

Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

0809095181

ISBN 13

9780809095186

Franklin Pierce

The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857

By: Michael F. Holt

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Franklin Pierce

The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857

By: Michael F. Holt

The genial but troubled New Englander whose single-minded partisan loyalties inflamed the nation's simmering battle over slavery Charming and handsome, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire was drafted to break the deadlock of the 1852 Democratic convention. Though he seized the White House in a landslide against the imploding Whig Party, he proved a dismal failure in office. Michael F. Holt, a leading historian of nineteenth-century partisan politics, argues that in the wake of the Whig collapse, Pierce was consumed by an obsessive drive to unify his splintering party rather than the roiling country. He soon began to overreach. Word leaked that Pierce wanted Spain to sell the slave-owning island of Cuba to the United States, rousing sectional divisions. Then he supported repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which limited the expansion of slavery in the west. Violence broke out, and "Bleeding Kansas" spurred the formation of the Republican Party. By the end of his term, Pierce's beloved party had ruptured, and he lost the nomination to James Buchanan. In this incisive account, Holt shows how a flawed leader, so dedicated to his party and ill-suited for the presidency, hastened the approach of the Civil War.

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Page Count

174

Publisher

Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

1429922176

ISBN 13

9781429922173

Shanghai on the Metro

Spies, Intrigue, and the French Between the Wars

By: Michael B. Miller

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Shanghai on the Metro

Spies, Intrigue, and the French Between the Wars

By: Michael B. Miller

Secret agents, gun runners, White Russians, and con men—they all play a part in Michael B. Miller's strikingly original study of interwar France. Based on extensive research in security files and a mass of printed sources, Shanghai on the Métro shows how a distinctive milieu of spies and spy literature emerged between the two world wars, reflecting the atmosphere and concerns of these years. Miller argues that French fascination with intrigue between the wars reveals a far more assured and playful national mood than historians have hitherto discerned in the final decades of the Third Republic. But the larger history set in motion by World War I and the subsequent reading of French history into global history are the true subjects of this work. Reconstituting through his own narratives the histories of interwar travel and adventure and the willful turning of contemporary affairs into a source of romance, Miller recovers the ambience and special qualities of the age that produced its intrigues and its tales of spies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

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Page Count

464

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520309928

ISBN 13

9780520309920

Mammals of Africa

By: Jonathan Kingdon,David Happold,Thomas Butynski,Michael Hoffmann,Meredith Happold,Jan Kalina

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Mammals of Africa

By: Jonathan Kingdon,David Happold,Thomas Butynski,Michael Hoffmann,Meredith Happold,Jan Kalina

Mammals of Africa (MoA) is a series of six volumes which describes, in detail, every currently recognized species of African land mammal. This is the first time that such extensive coverage has ever been attempted, and the volumes incorporate the very latest information and detailed discussion of the morphology, distribution, biology and evolution (including reference to fossil and molecular data) of Africa's mammals. With 1,160 species and 16 orders, Africa has the greatest diversity and abundance of mammals in the world. The reasons for this and the mechanisms behind their evolution are given special attention in the series. Each volume follows the same format, with detailed profiles of every species and higher taxa. The series includes some 660 colour illustrations by Jonathan Kingdon and his many drawings highlight details of morphology and behaviour of the species concerned. Diagrams, schematic details and line drawings of skulls and jaws are by Jonathan Kingdon and Meredith Happold. Every species also includes a detailed distribution map. Extensive references alert readers to more detailed information. Volume I: Introductory Chapters and Afrotheria (352 pages) Volume II: Primates (560 pages) Volume III: Rodents, Hares and Rabbits (784 pages) Volume IV: Hedgehogs, Shrews and Bats (800 pages) Volume V: Carnivores, Pangolins, Equids and Rhinoceroses (560 pages) Volume VI: Pigs, Hippopotamuses, Chevrotain, Giraffes, Deer and Bovids (704 pages)

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Page Count

3500

Publisher

A&C Black

Published Date

ISBN 10

1408189968

ISBN 13

9781408189962

Political Parties and American Political Development

From the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln

By: Michael Fitzgibbon Holt

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Political Parties and American Political Development

From the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln

By: Michael Fitzgibbon Holt

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

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Age

Page Count

365

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807117285

ISBN 13

9780807117286

The Election of 1860

“A Campaign Fraught with Consequences”

By: Michael F. Holt

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The Election of 1860

“A Campaign Fraught with Consequences”

By: Michael F. Holt

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

272

Publisher

University Press of Kansas

Published Date

ISBN 10

0700624872

ISBN 13

9780700624874

Book's by Michael Fitzgibbon Holt

The Fate of Their Country

The Fate of Their Country

The Election of 1860

The Election of 1860

Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln

Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party

The Fate of Their Country

The Fate of Their Country

Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce

Shanghai on the Metro

Shanghai on the Metro

Mammals of Africa

Mammals of Africa

Political Parties and American Political Development

Political Parties and American Political Development

The Election of 1860

The Election of 1860

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