You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This panoramic study combines a survey of the life of child prodigy and renowned African American poet Phillis Wheatley, her work and experiences, and uniquely, a careful rendering and reassessment of the opinions of her contemporaries and the ideas and motivations of present-day scholars regarding her verse and historical significance. Arthur Scherr, an expert on the transatlantic Enlightenment and such major figures of American political culture as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Monroe, adds a vital new perspective to our understanding of Phillis Wheatley. Also investigated is the relationship between Wheatley and the statesman whom scholars generally depict as Wheatley’s greatest adversary: Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and tarnished American icon. The book analyzes the meaning and significance of Jefferson’s three-sentence critique of Wheatley’s poetry in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), published in London three years after her death.
As a key to understanding the meaning of slavery in America, the Missouri controversy of 181921 is probably our most valuable text. The heat of sectional rhetoric during the Missouri debates reached a level never exceeded, and rarely matched, until the secession crisis of 1860. Moreover, nearly all the arguments for and against slavery in Americ...
From journalist and historian Richard Kreitner, a "powerful revisionist account"of the most persistent idea in American history: these supposedly United States should be broken up (Eric Foner). The novel and fiery thesis of Break It Up is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name—and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn’t limited to the South or the nineteenth century. It was there at our founding and has never gone away. With a scholar’s command and a journalist’s curiosity, Richard Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history...
How most presidents avoid upsetting the racial status quo—and why those who do pave the way for lawless, norm-violating successors When Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, becoming the nation’s first Black president, the stage was set for Donald Trump’s eventual rise to power. Backlash Presidents shows how, throughout American history, administrations that challenge the country’s racial status quo are followed by presidents who deal in racially charged politics and presidential lawlessness, culminating in impeachment crises. In this incisive book, Julia Azari traces the connections between racially transformative presidents and their successors, examining the presidencies of Ab...
Noll's magisterial work highlights not only the centrality of the Bible for the nation's most influential religious figures (Methodist Francis Asbury, Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Catholic Bishop Francis Kenrick, Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter, agnostic Robert Ingersoll), but also why it was important for presidents like Abraham Lincoln; notable American women like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frances Willard; dedicated campaigners for civil rights like Frederick Douglass and Francis Grimké; lesser-known figures like Black authors Maria Stewart and Harriet Jacobs; and a host of others of high estate and low. .
From the author of Mind and Matter, an intimate portrait of Louisa Catherine Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams, who witnessed firsthand the greatest transformations of her time Born in London to an American father and a British mother on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Louisa Catherine Johnson was raised in circumstances very different from the New England upbringing of the future president John Quincy Adams, whose life had been dedicated to public service from the earliest age. And yet John Quincy fell in love with her, almost despite himself. Their often tempestuous but deeply close marriage lasted half a century. They lived in Prussia, Massachusetts, Washington, Russia, and England, ...
None