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Land Fever: Dispossession and the Frontier Myth
James Marshall's illuminating study of dispossession on the frontier begins with the autobiography of a pioneer who met repeated failure. Writing in his old age, Omar Morse (1824-1901) loked back on the successive loss of three homesteads in mid-nineteenth century Wisconsin and Minnesota. The frontier as Morse encountered it was a place of runaway land speculation, of high railroad freight rates, of mortgage foreclosures, and of political and economic chaos. Stoic and resilient in adversity, Morse nevertheless expressed the anger of those for whom the Jeffersonian ideal of an independent yeomanry proved to be a cruel illusion. Marshall moves from ...Read More
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The Rise of the Urban South
Operating under an outmoded system of urban development and faced by the vicissitudes of the Civil War and Reconstruction, southerners in the nineteenth century built a network of cities that met the needs of their society. In this pioneering exploration of that intricate story, Lawrence H. Larsen shows that in the antebellum period, southern entrepreneurs built cities in layers to facilitate the movement of cotton. First came the colonial cities, followed by those of the piedmont, the New West, the Gulf Coast, and the interior. By the Civil War, cotton could move by a combination of road, rail, and river ...Read More
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America Overcommitted: United States National Interests in the 1980s
Is the United States seriously overcommitted in its worldwide relationships? Donald Nuechterlein examines the foreign policy priorities of the United States as it enters the latter half of the 1980s and contemplates its future international role; he argues that whether the United States remains a superpower into the twenty-first century depends on how it decides its international priorities in this decade and then marshals its resources to defend and enhance them.
The hard decisions needed to establish priorities among United States military and economic commitments abroad must be made if the United States is to remain financially strong and emotionally ...Read More
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Whistle Stops: Adventures in Public Life
Wilson Wyatt was Jack Kennedy's presidential emissary to Sukarno in a crisis that might have cost the West the oil of the East Indies and lost Indonesia to the Communist orbit. He headed a mission to North Africa during World War II, managed Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign, and played varied roles on stage and behind the scenes at seven Democratic conventions. He helped guide Kentucky's quiet governmental revolution in the Combs-Wyatt administration, served as wartime mayor of Louisville, launched the nation's postwar housing program under Harry Truman, and today is a leader in Louisville's renaissance.
Wyatt's candid and informal memoir ...Read More
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Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865-1980
No general history of southern farming since the end of slavery has been published until now. For the first time, Gilbert C. Fite has drawn together the many threads that make up commercial agricultural development in the eleven states of the old Confederacy, to explain why agricultural change was so slow in the South, and then to show how the agents of change worked after 1933 to destroy the old and produce a new agriculture.
Fite traces the decline and departure of King Cotton as the hard taskmaster of the region, and the replacement of cotton by a somewhat more ...Read More
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Excellence and Equity: The National Endowment for the Humanities
Since its establishment in 1965 the National Endowment for the Humanities has distributed many millions of dollars in grants. Has the money been well spent? What impact have the Endowment’s programs had on the academic community, the schools, and the public at large?
In this first book-length study of the Endowment, Stephen Miller offers a trenchant analysis of the agency’s origins, its accomplishments, and the criticisms leveled against it. In the political maneuvering that led to its establishment, Miller sees a basic misunderstanding between those in academia who lobbied for NEH and those in Congress who were its most enthusiastic ...Read More
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Antebellum Politics in Tennessee
Tennessee played a critical and vital role in national politics in the mid-nineteenth century. Two Tennesseans, for example, served as president and two others were presidential candidates. Such prominence be-speaks the importance of politics in the state's antebellum culture. For the first time in its history Tennessee developed a two-party system, one that was vigorous and exciting.
In his study Paul H. Bergeron examines the development of this two-party competition by focusing on statewide contests. Two-party politics in Tennessee was marked by intense and evenly balanced competition, so much so that the outcome of virtually every election was un-certain. In ...Read More
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Cities in the Commonwealth: Two Centuries of Urban Life in Kentucky
From the 1780s, when Louisville and Lexington were tiny clusters of houses in the wilderness, to the 1980s, when more than half of all Kentuckians live in urban areas, the growth of cities has affected nearly all aspects of life in the Commonwealth. These urban centers have led the state in economic, social, and cultural change.
Cities in the Commonwealth examines the crises that have shaped the history of Kentucky’s cities and sheds light on such continuing concerns as urban competition, provision of essential services, the importance of the arts, and the struggle for racial justice.
By allowing contemporaries to ...Read More
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The Rise of the Midwestern Meat Packing Industry
The history of the meat packing industry of the Midwest offers an excellent illustration of the growth and development of the economy of that major industrial region. In the course of one generation, meat packing matured from a small-scale, part-time activity to a specialized manufacturing operation. Margaret Walsh's pioneering study traces the course of that development, shedding light on an unexamined aspect of America's economic history.
As the Midwest emerged from the frontier period during the 1840s and 1850s, the growing urban demand for meat products led to the development of a seasonal industry conducted by general merchants during the ...Read More
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Historic Maps of Kentucky
Maps published frorn the third quarter of the eighteenth century through the Civil War reflect in colorful detail the emergence of the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the unfolding art of American cartography. Ten maps, selected and annotated by the most eminent historian of Kentucky, have been reproduced in authentic facsimiles. The accompanying booklet includes an illuminating historical essay, as well as notes on the individuaL facsimiles, and is illustrated with numerous details of other notable Kentucky maps.
Among the rare maps reproduced are one of the battlefield of Perryville (1877), a colorful travelers' map (1839), and a map of the ...Read More
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