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Full-Text Articles in History
Trading Identities: National Identity, Loyalty, And Backcountry Merchants In Revolutionary America, 1740-1816, Timothy Charles Hemmis
Trading Identities: National Identity, Loyalty, And Backcountry Merchants In Revolutionary America, 1740-1816, Timothy Charles Hemmis
Dissertations
This project tracks the lives a select group of Philadelphia frontier merchants such as George Morgan, David Franks, and others from 1754-1811. “Trading Identities” traces the trajectory of each man’s economic and political loyalties during the Revolutionary period. By focusing on the men of trading firms operating in Philadelphia, the borderlands and the wider world, it becomes abundantly clear that their identities were shaped and sustained by their commercial concerns—not by any new political ideology at work in this period. They were members not of a British (or even American) Atlantic World, but a profit-driven Atlantic World. The Seven Years’ …
Herbert Spencer And His American Audience, Joel F. Yoder
Herbert Spencer And His American Audience, Joel F. Yoder
Dissertations
The philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) is little remembered today, but in the late nineteenth century he was a world-renowned figure and widely read. Spencer was popular in his native England, but even more highly regarded in America. Modern scholars generally understand this popularity as stemming from Spencer’s social Darwinism—that is, his belief that natural selection does and should operate on humans to improve mankind. On the other hand, many of those who have studied Spencer’s work claim that he was not a social Darwinist at all. It is my contention that Spencer was a social Darwinist, but that other aspects …