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Ships That Sail No More: Marine Transportation from San Diego to Puget Sound 1910–1940
This chronicle of coastal shipping in the western United States forms an important but hitherto neglected part of the history of transportation in America. From the beginning the seaways were a vital link among the developing West Coast settlements, and even after the completion of a north-south rail line sturdy steamers continued to serve as the major carriers of freight and passengers along the Pacific Coast and as the chief economic and cultural contact of this region with the rest of America.
Here, Giles T. Brown surveys this transportation system at the height of its activity and in particular he ...Read More
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The Road to Independence: The Revolutionary Movement in New York, 1773–1777
In this description and analysis of the organization of the revolutionary movement in New York, Bernard Mason focuses upon the intricate political alignments which the cause of independence created. He finds that the revolutionaries, contrary to the long-standing thesis, formed a decisive majority, although their effectiveness was hampered by vacillation and by a protracted struggle for leadership. Despite the timidity of the Whig leaders, the polemicists gave vent to their militancy and public attitudes tended to lead rather than follow those of the politicians. Moreover, independence was only half of the great question. Intertwined with it was the nature of ...Read More
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The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest
This is a study of a disturbing phenomenon in American society—the Ku Klux Klan—and that eruption of nativism, racism and moral authoritarianism during the 1920s in the four states of the Southwest—Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas—in which the Klan became especially powerful. The hooded order is viewed here as a move by frustrated Americans, through anonymous acts of terror and violence, and later through politics), to halt a changing social order and restore familiar orthodox traditions of morality. Entering the Southwest during the post-World War I period of discontent and disillusion, the Klan spread rapidly over the region and by ...Read More
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Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787–1862
The great, pre-Civil War attempt of Protestant missionaries to Christianize Native Americans is found by Robert F. Berkofer, Jr. to be a significant point of contact with enduring lessons for American thought. The irony displayed by this relationship, he says, did not really lie in the disparity between Anglo-Saxon ideals and the actual treatment of first peoples but in the failure of all, including the missions, to see that both sides had ultimately behaved according to their cultural values.
Using the records of missions to sixteen tribes in various regions of the United States, Berkofer has carefully followed the hopeful ...Read More
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Occupied City: New Orleans Under the Federals 1862–1865
New Orleans is the largest American city ever occupied by enemy forces for an extended period of time. Falling to an amphibious Federal force in the spring of 1862, the city was threatened with the possibility of Confederate recapture even as late as 1864. How this tension affected the lives of both civilians and soldiers during the occupation is here examined.
Gerald M. Capers finds that the occupation policies of General Benjamin F. Butler and General Nathaniel P. Banks were successful and that Butler’s harsh policies were by no means as vicious as legend would have it. Banks at first ...Read More
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Crèvecoeur's Eighteenth-Century Travels in Pennsylvania and New York
Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecouer, long regarded as a chief figure in American letters of the Revolutionary period, is remembered as the author of Letters from an American Farmer and the posthumous Sketches of Eighteenth Century of America, but his last and most ambitious work has been almost entirely neglected. Published in France as Le Voyage dans la haute Pensylvanie et dans d’état de New York, Crèvecouer’s last book was never popular and has not heretofore appeared in English. Yet the Voyage has much to add to Crèvecouer’s picture of eighteenth-century America, and to our own picture of the American Farmer ...Read More
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Cattle Kingdom in the Ohio Valley 1783–1860
The great beef-cattle industry of the American West was not born full grown beyond the Mississippi. It had its antecedents in the upper South, the Midwest, and the Ohio Valley, where many Texas cattlemen learned their trade. In this book Mr. Henlein tells the story of the cattle kingdom of the Ohio Valley—a kingdom which encompassed the Bluegrass region in Kentucky and the valleys of the Scioto, Miami, Wabash, and Sangamon in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.
The book begins with the settlement of the Ohio Valley, by emigration from the South and East, in the latter part of the eighteenth ...Read More
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Bluegrass Craftsman: Being the Reminiscences of Ebenezer Hiram Stedman Papermaker 1808–1885
Ebenezer Hiram Stedman, whose lively reminiscences of antebellum Kentucky were written as a series of letters to his daughter, was one of the pioneer papermakers of the state. Stedman paints a vivid picture of the life of the numerous and thriving middle class who sought opportunity in the expanding economy of the new West. The vivid detail of Stedman’s personal experiences is supplemented by a more formal account of early Kentucky papermaking.
Frances L. S. Dugan, associate archivist at the University of Kentucky, was curator of the special collection in the history of books and printing.
Jacqueline P. Bull was ...Read More
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The Clays of Alabama: A Planter-Lawyer-Politician Family
Of unique interest to the student of nineteenth century America is this account of the Alabama Clays, who in their private life were typical of the slaveholding aristocracy of the old South, but as lawyer-politicians played significant roles in state and national politics, in the development of the Democratic party, and in the affairs of the Confederacy.
In the period from 1811 to 1915, the Clays were involved in many of the great problems confronting the South. This study of the Clay family includes accounts of the wartime legislation of the Confederate Congress and the activities of the Confederate Commission ...Read More
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Children of the Levee
Cincinnati in the 1870’s was the largest inland city in the nation. Much of its prosperity and growth it owed to the commerce which floated along its Ohio River boundary on the way between Pittsburgh and New Orleans. This traffic also sustained a unique African American culture—saloonkeepers, boardinghouse operators, entertainers, and women who served the steamboat hands between trips.
Into this great western metropolis came young Lafcadio Hearn, who after several tentative starts became a newspaper reporter first for the Enquirer and then for the Commercial. Drawn to the Ohio River by his interest in the unusual, Hearn found beneath ...Read More
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