Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty

Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty PDF Author: Benjamin H. Irvin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199314594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book

Book Description
In 1776, when the Continental Congress declared independence, formally severing relations with Great Britain, it immediately began to fashion new objects and ceremonies of state with which to proclaim the sovereignty of the infant republic. In this marvelous social and cultural history of the Continental Congress, Benjamin H. Irvin describes this struggle to create a national identity during the American Revolution. The book examines the material artifacts, rituals, and festivities by which Congress endeavored not only to assert its political legitimacy and to bolster the war effort, but ultimately to exalt the United States and to win the allegiance of its inhabitants. Congress, for example, crafted an emblematic great seal, celebrated anniversaries of U.S. independence, and implemented august diplomatic protocols for the reception of foreign ministers. Yet as Irvin demonstrates, Congress could not impose its creations upon a passive American public. To the contrary, "the people out of doors"-broadly defined to include not only the working poor who rallied in the streets of Philadelphia, but all persons unrepresented in the Continental Congress, including women, loyalists, and Native Americans-vigorously contested Congress's trappings of nationhood. Vividly narrating the progress of the Revolution in Philadelphia and the lived experiences of its inhabitants during the tumultuous war, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty sharpens our understanding of the relationship between political elites and crowds of workaday protestors as it illuminates the ways in which ideologies of gender, class, and race shaped the civic identity of the Revolutionary United States.

Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty

Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty PDF Author: Benjamin H. Irvin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199314594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book

Book Description
In 1776, when the Continental Congress declared independence, formally severing relations with Great Britain, it immediately began to fashion new objects and ceremonies of state with which to proclaim the sovereignty of the infant republic. In this marvelous social and cultural history of the Continental Congress, Benjamin H. Irvin describes this struggle to create a national identity during the American Revolution. The book examines the material artifacts, rituals, and festivities by which Congress endeavored not only to assert its political legitimacy and to bolster the war effort, but ultimately to exalt the United States and to win the allegiance of its inhabitants. Congress, for example, crafted an emblematic great seal, celebrated anniversaries of U.S. independence, and implemented august diplomatic protocols for the reception of foreign ministers. Yet as Irvin demonstrates, Congress could not impose its creations upon a passive American public. To the contrary, "the people out of doors"-broadly defined to include not only the working poor who rallied in the streets of Philadelphia, but all persons unrepresented in the Continental Congress, including women, loyalists, and Native Americans-vigorously contested Congress's trappings of nationhood. Vividly narrating the progress of the Revolution in Philadelphia and the lived experiences of its inhabitants during the tumultuous war, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty sharpens our understanding of the relationship between political elites and crowds of workaday protestors as it illuminates the ways in which ideologies of gender, class, and race shaped the civic identity of the Revolutionary United States.

Memory and American History

Memory and American History PDF Author: David Paul Thelen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780253359407
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Get Book

Book Description
""Memory and American History contains some of the most interesting explorations and significant recent results of work by scholars using traditional primary and secondary sources as well as oral history interviews."" -- Library Quarterly From true memory comes true history. Or does it? As this book demonstrates, the study of memory opens exciting opportunities for historians to ask fresh questions of conventional sources and to make new connections among subjects that have come to be regarded as specialized and distinct.

Reclaiming 42: Public Memory and the Reframing of Jackie Robinson’s Radical Legacy

Reclaiming 42: Public Memory and the Reframing of Jackie Robinson’s Radical Legacy PDF Author: David Naze
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 149621496X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book

Book Description
Reclaiming 42 centers on one of America’s most respected cultural icons, Jackie Robinson, and the forgotten aspects of his cultural legacy. Since his retirement in 1956, and more strongly in the last twenty years, America has primarily remembered Robinson’s legacy in an oversimplified way, as the pioneering first black baseball player to integrate the Major Leagues. The mainstream commemorative discourse regarding Robinson’s career has been created and directed largely by Major League Baseball (MLB), which sanitized and oversimplified his legacy into narratives of racial reconciliation that celebrate his integrity, character, and courage while excluding other aspects of his life, such as his controversial political activity, his public clashes with other prominent members of the black community, and his criticism of MLB. MLB’s commemoration of Robinson reflects a professional sport that is inclusive, racially and culturally tolerant, and largely postracial. Yet Robinson’s identity—and therefore his memory—has been relegated to the boundaries of a baseball diamond and to the context of a sport, and it is within this oversimplified legacy that history has failed him. The dominant version of Robinson’s legacy ignores his political voice during and after his baseball career and pays little attention to the repercussions that his integration had on many factions within the black community. Reclaiming 42 illuminates how public memory of Robinson has undergone changes over the last sixty-plus years and moves his story beyond Robinson the baseball player, opening a new, broader interpretation of an otherwise seemingly convenient narrative to show how Robinson’s legacy ultimately should both challenge and inspire public memory.

The Journal of American History

The Journal of American History PDF Author: Francis Trevelyan Miller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 792

Get Book

Book Description


The Secular Enlightenment

The Secular Enlightenment PDF Author: Margaret Jacob
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216762
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book

Book Description
Provides a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Jacob reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Jacob demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come. --Adapted from publisher description.

The Geography and Map Division

The Geography and Map Division PDF Author: Library of Congress. Geography and Map Division
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 56

Get Book

Book Description


Equality on Trial

Equality on Trial PDF Author: Katherine Turk
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812248201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
In 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act outlawed workplace sex discrimination, but its practical meaning was uncertain. Equality on Trial examines how a generation of workers and feminists fought to infuse the law with broad notions of sex equality, reshaping workplaces, activist channels, state agencies, and courts along the way.

Race, Nation, and Empire in American History

Race, Nation, and Empire in American History PDF Author: James T. Campbell
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1442993987
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Get Book

Book Description
While public debates over America's current foreign policy often treat American empire as a new phenomenon, this lively collection of essays offers a pointed reminder that visions of national and imperial greatness were a cornerstone of the new country when it was founded. In fact, notions of empire have long framed debates over western expansio...

Why You Can't Teach United States History without American Indians

Why You Can't Teach United States History without American Indians PDF Author: Susan Sleeper-Smith
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469621215
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book

Book Description
A resource for all who teach and study history, this book illuminates the unmistakable centrality of American Indian history to the full sweep of American history. The nineteen essays gathered in this collaboratively produced volume, written by leading scholars in the field of Native American history, reflect the newest directions of the field and are organized to follow the chronological arc of the standard American history survey. Contributors reassess major events, themes, groups of historical actors, and approaches--social, cultural, military, and political--consistently demonstrating how Native American people, and questions of Native American sovereignty, have animated all the ways we consider the nation's past. The uniqueness of Indigenous history, as interwoven more fully in the American story, will challenge students to think in new ways about larger themes in U.S. history, such as settlement and colonization, economic and political power, citizenship and movements for equality, and the fundamental question of what it means to be an American. Contributors are Chris Andersen, Juliana Barr, David R. M. Beck, Jacob Betz, Paul T. Conrad, Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom, Margaret D. Jacobs, Adam Jortner, Rosalyn R. LaPier, John J. Laukaitis, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Robert J. Miller, Mindy J. Morgan, Andrew Needham, Jean M. O'Brien, Jeffrey Ostler, Sarah M. S. Pearsall, James D. Rice, Phillip H. Round, Susan Sleeper-Smith, and Scott Manning Stevens.

The House I Live In

The House I Live In PDF Author: Robert J. Norrell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198023777
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book

Book Description
In The House I Live In, award-winning historian Robert J. Norrell offers a truly masterful chronicle of American race relations over the last one hundred and fifty years. This scrupulously fair and insightful narrative--the most ambitious and wide-ranging history of its kind--sheds new light on the ideologies, from white supremacy to black nationalism, that have shaped race relations since the Civil War. For, Norrell argues, it is ideology, more than politics or economics, that has powerfully sculpted the landscape of race in America. Beginning with Reconstruction, Norrell shows how the democratic values of liberty and equality were infused with new meaning by Abraham Lincoln, yet soon became meaningless for generations of African Americans, as white supremacy drove a wedge between the races. Indeed, the heart of this book paints a vivid portrait of the long, dangerous struggle of African Americans to defeat this pernicious mode of thought. Along the way, Norrell offers fresh and at times controversial appraisals of figures such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and dissects the ideas of racists such as novelist Thomas Dixon. Most important, he offers striking new insights into black-white history, observing for instance that the Civil Rights movement really began as early as the 1930s, and that contrary to much recent writing, the Cold War was a setback rather than a boost to the quest for racial justice. He also breaks new ground on the role of popular culture and mass media in first promoting, but later helping defeat, notions of white supremacy. Though the struggle for equality is far from over, Norrell writes that today we are closer than ever to fulfilling the promise of our democratic values, a promise first made by Lincoln at the battlefield of Gettysburg.