Forgotten Firebrand

Forgotten Firebrand PDF Author: John R. McKivigan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501732269
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The reformer James Redpath (1833–1891) was a focal figure in many of the key developments in nineteenth-century American political and cultural life. He befriended John Brown, Samuel Clemens, and Henry George and, toward the end of his life, was a ghostwriter for Jefferson Davis. He advocated for abolition, civil rights, Irish nationalism, women's suffrage, and labor unions. In Forgotten Firebrand, the first full-length biography of this fascinating American, John R. McKivigan portrays the many facets of Redpath's life, including his stint as a reporter for the New York Tribune, his involvement with the Haitian emigration movement, and his time as a Civil War correspondent. Examining Redpath's varied career enables McKivigan to cast light on the history of journalism, public speaking, and mass entertainment in the United States. Redpath's newspaper writing is credited with popularizing the stenographic interview in the American press, and he can be studied as a prototype for later generations of newspaper writers who blended reportage with participation in reform movements. His influential biography of John Brown justified the use of violent actions in the service of abolitionism. Redpath was an important figure in the emerging professional entertainment industry in this country. Along with his friend P. T. Barnum, Redpath popularized the figure of the "impresario" in American culture. Redpath's unique combination of interests and talents—for politics, for journalism, for public relations—brought an entrepreneurial spirit to reform that blurred traditional lines between business and social activism and helped forge modern concepts of celebrity.

Forgotten Firebrand

Forgotten Firebrand PDF Author: John R. McKivigan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501732269
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The reformer James Redpath (1833–1891) was a focal figure in many of the key developments in nineteenth-century American political and cultural life. He befriended John Brown, Samuel Clemens, and Henry George and, toward the end of his life, was a ghostwriter for Jefferson Davis. He advocated for abolition, civil rights, Irish nationalism, women's suffrage, and labor unions. In Forgotten Firebrand, the first full-length biography of this fascinating American, John R. McKivigan portrays the many facets of Redpath's life, including his stint as a reporter for the New York Tribune, his involvement with the Haitian emigration movement, and his time as a Civil War correspondent. Examining Redpath's varied career enables McKivigan to cast light on the history of journalism, public speaking, and mass entertainment in the United States. Redpath's newspaper writing is credited with popularizing the stenographic interview in the American press, and he can be studied as a prototype for later generations of newspaper writers who blended reportage with participation in reform movements. His influential biography of John Brown justified the use of violent actions in the service of abolitionism. Redpath was an important figure in the emerging professional entertainment industry in this country. Along with his friend P. T. Barnum, Redpath popularized the figure of the "impresario" in American culture. Redpath's unique combination of interests and talents—for politics, for journalism, for public relations—brought an entrepreneurial spirit to reform that blurred traditional lines between business and social activism and helped forge modern concepts of celebrity.

Early History of Malden, An

Early History of Malden, An PDF Author: Frank Russell
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1467139416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Settled in the 1640s and originally a part of Charlestown, Malden grew over two centuries into a thriving residential and manufacturing city. Meet fiery revolutionary Peter Thacher and Malden industrialist and philanthropist Elisha Converse. Explore the details of the first bank robbery homicide in the United States. Learn about Malden's instructions for independence, which predated the Declaration of Independence. Delve into the suspicion and intrigue surrounding the infamous murder of Frank Converse. Author Frank Russell brings to life the first 250 years of Malden history.

John Brown Still Lives!

John Brown Still Lives! PDF Author: R. Blakeslee Gilpin
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807869277
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
From his obsession with the founding principles of the United States to his cold-blooded killings in the battle over slavery's expansion, John Brown forced his countrymen to reckon with America's violent history, its checkered progress toward racial equality, and its resistance to substantive change. Tracing Brown's legacy through writers and artists like Thomas Hovenden, W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Penn Warren, Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, and others, Blake Gilpin transforms Brown from an object of endless manipulation into a dynamic medium for contemporary beliefs about the process and purpose of the American republic. Gilpin argues that the endless distortions of John Brown, misrepresentations of a man and a cause simultaneously noble and terrible, have only obscured our understanding of the past and loosened our grasp of the historical episodes that define America's struggles for racial equality. By showing Brown's central role in the relationship between the American past and the American present, Gilpin clarifies Brown's complex legacy and highlights his importance in the nation's ongoing struggle with the role of violence, the meaning of equality, and the intertwining paths these share with the process of change.

Fear of a Black Republic

Fear of a Black Republic PDF Author: Leslie M. Alexander
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252053869
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander’s study reveals the untold story of how free and enslaved Black people in the United States defended the young Caribbean nation from forces intent on maintaining slavery and white supremacy. Concentrating on Haiti’s place in the history of Black internationalism, Alexander illuminates the ways Haitian independence influenced Black thought and action in the United States. As she shows, Haiti embodied what whites feared most: Black revolution and Black victory. Thus inspired, Black activists in the United States embraced a common identity with Haiti’s people, forging the idea of a united struggle that merged the destinies of Haiti with their own striving for freedom. A bold exploration of Black internationalism’s origins, Fear of a Black Republic links the Haitian revolution to the global Black pursuit of liberation, justice, and social equality.

Dragon's Progress

Dragon's Progress PDF Author: Florence Vilen
Publisher: novum pro Verlag
ISBN: 399064355X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
The late 13th century of China: land of the future, but also of the legendary past, and a period of dramatic changes. Along the roads of Asia, dragons of many descriptions swarm, among them a fiery European dragon that meets with the water-related flying serpents of the utmost East. Against a background of religious beliefs, Firebrand, a dragon aptly named, confronts problems both human and divine, as he gets involved in the lives of various beings, from an incestuous marriage to the aspirations of spirits like the malaria. Vivid and colourful, there are surprises on many levels until the end meets the beginning. Join Firebrand on his adventurous mission to find his purpose.

Reconstruction and Empire

Reconstruction and Empire PDF Author: David Prior
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823298663
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
This volume examines the historical connections between the United States’ Reconstruction and the country’s emergence as a geopolitical power a few decades later. It shows how the processes at work during the postbellum decade variously foreshadowed, inhibited, and conditioned the development of the United States as an overseas empire and regional hegemon. In doing so, it links the diverse topics of abolition, diplomacy, Jim Crow, humanitarianism, and imperialism. In 1935, the great African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois argued in his Black Reconstruction in America that these two historical moments were intimately related. In particular, Du Bois averred that the nation’s betrayal of the South’s fledgling interracial democracy in the 1870s put reactionaries in charge of a country on the verge of global power, with world-historical implications. Working with the same chronological and geographical parameters, the contributors here take up targeted case studies, tracing the biographical, ideological, and thematic linkages that stretch across the postbellum and imperial moments. With an Introduction, eleven chapters, and an Afterword, this volume offers multiple perspectives based on original primary source research. The resulting composite picture points to a host of countervailing continuities and changes. The contributors examine topics as diverse as diplomatic relations with Spain, the changing views of radical abolitionists, African American missionaries in the Caribbean, and the ambiguities of turn-of-the century political cartoons. Collectively, the volume unsettles familiar assumptions about how we should understand the late nineteenth-century United States, conventionally framed as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It also advances transnational approaches to understanding America’s Reconstruction and the search for the ideological currents shaping American power abroad.

The Frederick Douglass Papers

The Frederick Douglass Papers PDF Author: Frederick Douglass
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300218303
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 715

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Book Description
A second volume of the collected correspondence of the great African-American reformer and abolitionist features correspondence written during the Civil War years The second collection of meticulously edited correspondence with abolitionist, author, statesman, and former slave Frederick Douglass covers the years leading up to the Civil War through the close of the conflict, offering readers an illuminating portrait of an extraordinary American and the turbulent times in which he lived. An important contribution to historical scholarship, the documents offer fascinating insights into the abolitionist movement during wartime and the author's relationship to Abraham Lincoln and other prominent figures of the era.

Lincoln's Lost Colony

Lincoln's Lost Colony PDF Author: Boyce Thompson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476649359
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Abraham Lincoln is renowned for his stance on the emancipation of enslaved people in a period when America was sorely divided. At the same time, there was a little-known event that took place--one that left a stain on Lincoln's legacy, and has apologists still trying to expunge it today. This book tells the quiet but bloody history of Bernard Kock, a New Orleans entrepreneur with an ill-fated attempt at establishing a cotton plantation on Ile-a-Vache, a deserted Haitian island, using formerly enslaved Americans. It also covers Lincoln's involvement and support of Kock's plan, as well as his pledge of $50 in government funding for each of the 453 colonists. With chapters on Lincoln's encouragement of black deportation, the establishment of the plantation, the futile attempts at damage control and more, this text reveals an untold part of Lincoln's history.

Colonel Henry Theodore Titus

Colonel Henry Theodore Titus PDF Author: Antonio Rafael de la Cova
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611176573
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
The first full-length biography of a saloon-brawling braggart and frontier opportunist turned justice of the peace Henry Theodore Titus (1822-1881) was the quintessential adventurer, soldier of fortune, and small-time entrepreneur, a man for whom any frontier—geographical, cultural, social—was an opportunity for advancement. Although born in Trenton, New Jersey, and raised in New York and Pennsylvania, Titus bore no allegiance to his native soil or the Yankee values of his ancestors. In the 1850s he became a staunch defender of southern slavery, United States expansionism into the Caribbean Basin, and ultimately the Confederacy's war of disunion. In Colonel Henry Theodore Titus, the first full-length biography of Titus, Antonio Rafael de la Cova reveals a man whose life and adventures offer glimpses into nineteenth-century America not often examined; these indicate the extent to which personal and collective violence, racial prejudice, and moral ambiguities shaped the country at the time. Belligerent, intemperate, egomaniacal, and of imposing stature, Titus was the bête noire of the abolitionist press. Despite his northern roots, he became a caricature of the southern braggart and frontier opportunist. National newspapers followed his reckless exploits during most of his adult life. Titus fought brawls in the saloons of luxury hotels and narrowly escaped the hangman's noose as a Border Ruffian leader in Bleeding Kansas, a Nicaraguan firing squad as a filibuster, and death in a Comanche ambush in Texas. He nearly prompted an international incident between the United States and Great Britain when he was arrested in Nicaragua for threatening to shoot a British naval officer and disparaging the queen of England. The colonel was jailed in New York City for disorderly conduct and trying "to organize the desperate classes for a riot." During his lifetime Titus held more than a dozen occupations, including sawmill owner, postal inspector, soldier of fortune, grocer, planing mill salesman, farmer, slave overseer, turtler, bartender, land speculator, and hotel keeper. He pursued silver mining in the Gadsden Purchase portion of the Arizona Territory where his brother was killed and their hacienda destroyed by Apaches. Despite his violent character and his pro-Confederate values, Titus was politically savvy. He did not take up arms during the Civil War. After a brief stint as assistant quartermaster in the Florida militia, he returned to civilian life and sold foodstuffs and slave labor to the Confederacy. Florida Reconstruction governors later appointed him as notary public and justice of the peace. Rheumatism and gout kept Titus bound to a wheelchair during the last few years of his life when he became an avid civic leader. His greatest legacy was ironically his most benign. Borrowing today's equivalent income value sum of half a million dollars, he established a grocery store and a sawmill in a hardscrabble Florida frontier settlement that became the city of Titusville, the county seat of Brevard County and tourist gateway to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center.

The Southern Hospitality Myth

The Southern Hospitality Myth PDF Author: Anthony Szczesiul
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820350737
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Hospitality as a cultural trait has been associated with the South for well over two centuries, but the origins of this association and the reasons for its perseverance of­ten seem unclear. Anthony Szczesiul looks at how and why we have taken something so particular as the social habit of hospitality—which is exercised among diverse individuals and is widely varied in its particular practices—and so generalized it as to make it a cultural trait of an entire region of the country. Historians have offered a variety of explanations of the origins and cultural practices of hospitality in the antebellum South. Economic historians have at times portrayed southern hospitality as evidence of conspicuous consumption and competition among wealthy planters, while cultural historians have treated it peripherally as a symptomatic expression of the southern code of honor. Although historians have offered different theories, they generally agree that the mythic dimensions of southern hospitality eventually outstripped its actual practices. Szczesiul examines why we have chosen to remember and valorize this particular aspect of the South, and he raises fundamental ethical questions that underlie both the concept of hospitality and the cultural work of American memory, particularly in light of the region’s historical legacy of slavery and segregation.