Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy (1812-1899), the youngest daughter of Josiah Quincy-onetime U.S. Congressman, former Mayor of Boston, and President of Harvard University-was a discerning twenty-one-year-old woman of privilege when she kept a diary during the spring and summer of 1833. Although Anna was respectful in polite company regarding her limited status in a male-dominated society, her journal entries of the Quincy family's social activities reveal an unexpectedly trenchant and amused view of the affectation in the Harvard community as well as in upper class life in Boston. Quincy's lively, lighthearted, and satirical accounts of Harvard University soirees and Boston cotillions portray a world where rites of courtship predominate, appearances are both significant and deceiving, and callow young men vie for an eligible woman's attention. Evoking the style of her admired Jane Austen, Anna re-creates a comfortable life-akin to Pride and Prejudice-spent walking, drawing, reading, writing letters, attending the theatre, and entertaining visitors. She describes receiving Harvard students and faculty at biweekly socials, dancing at formal balls, visits from "Cambridge Worthies" and dignitaries such as Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, naturalist John J. Audubon, and President Andrew Jackson, and seeing the acclaimed British actress Fanny Kemble in Much Ado About Nothing. Above all, Anna's diary presents a young woman keenly aware of her early nineteenth-century milieu and her own place in society. She ponders her role in a prominent family clearly governed, professionally and economically, by men. She recounts dutifully receiving gentlemen callers in the gracious manner expected of young ladies, yet dismisses the "ridiculous and the unmeaning behavior of the young men" who end up as targets for her pen rather than potential suitors. While dramatizing her own position, Anna inexorably mocks society's pretensions, superficiality, and emphasis on appearance.
A collection of colorful stories about some of New Hampshire’s most notable newsmakers and remarkable historic events. Includes photos. Hidden in the cracks and crevices of the Granite State are the stories of pioneers who pursued their passions, creating legacies along the way. Compiled by a Smithsonian researcher and former Boston Globe contributor, this treasury includes tales of: the mountain man who became an innkeeper the “Bird Man” who took his passion to the White House the gentleman who ascended the highest peak in the Northeast in a steam-powered locomobile the story of one skier’s dramatic win at the 1939 “American Inferno” Mount Washington race the Shaker Meetinghouse, built in just one day, in complete silence the gallant efforts to save the Old Man of the Mountain and much more
In the final years of his political career, President John Quincy Adams was well known for his objections to slavery, with rival Henry Wise going so far as to label him "the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of southern slavery that ever existed." As a young statesman, however, he supported slavery. How did the man who in 1795 told a British cabinet officer not to speak to him of "the Virginians, the Southern people, the democrats," whom he considered "in no other light than as Americans," come to foretell "a grand struggle between slavery and freedom"? How could a committed expansionist, who would rather abandon his party and lose his U.S. Senate seat than attack Jeffersonian slave power, later come to declare the Mexican War the "apoplexy of the Constitution," a hijacking of the republic by slaveholders? What changed? Entries from Adams's personal diary, more extensive than that of any American statesman, reveal a highly dynamic and accomplished politician in engagement with one of his generation's most challenging national dilemmas. Expertly edited by David Waldstreicher and Matthew Mason, John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery offers an unusual perspective on the dramatic and shifting politics of slavery in the early republic, as it moved from the margins to the center of public life and from the shadows to the substance of Adams's politics. The editors provide a lucid introduction to the collection as a whole and frame the individual documents with brief and engaging insights, rendering both Adams's life and the controversies over slavery into a mutually illuminating narrative. By juxtaposing Adams's personal reflections on slavery with what he said-and did not say-publicly on the issue, the editors offer a nuanced portrait of how he interacted with prevailing ideologies during his consequential career and life. John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the complicated politics of slavery that set the groundwork for the Civil War.
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