History Commons^™

[Introduction To] Thinking Of The Laity In Late Tudor England, Peter Iver Kaufman

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Thinking of the Laity explains why proposals for expanding lay prerogatives failed to shape the Elizabethan religious settlement from the 1560s through the 1580s. It also greatly adds to our understanding of the policy debates that are closely associated with the origins of puritanism, presbyterianism, and congregationalism. This book will be essential reading for people interested in the history of early modern England and in the progress of sixteenth-century religious reform.

[Introduction To] American Passages: A History Of The United States, Edward L. Ayers, Lewis L. Gould, David M. Oshinsky, Jean R. Soderlund

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American Passages places a unique emphasis on time as the defining nature of history, how events lead to other events, actions, changes, and often-unexpected outcomes. Rather than grouping facets of historical change into themes or topics, the authors offer students a complete, compelling narrative with balanced coverage of political, economic, social, cultural, military, religious, and intellectual history.

[Introduction To] In The Presence Of Mine Enemies: Civil War In The Heart Of America, 1859-1863, Edward L. Ayers

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Winner of the Bancroft Prize: Through a gripping narrative based on massive new research, a leading historian reshapes our understanding of the Civil War.

Our standard Civil War histories tell a reassuring story of the triumph, in an inevitable conflict, of the dynamic, free-labor North over the traditional, slave-based South, vindicating the freedom principles built into the nation's foundations.

But at the time, on the borderlands of Pennsylvania and Virginia, no one expected war, and no one knew how it would turn out. The one certainty was that any war between the states would be fought in their fields and …

[Introduction To] South To A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture, Suzanne W. Jones, Sharon Monteith

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Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth.

In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains …

[Introduction To] National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture And The Formation Of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956, David Brandenberger

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During the 1930s, Stalin and his entourage rehabilitated famous names from the Russian national past in a propaganda campaign designed to mobilize Soviet society for the coming war. Legendary heroes like Aleksandr Nevskii and epic events like the Battle of Borodino quickly eclipsed more conventional communist slogans revolving around class struggle and proletarian internationalism. In a provocative study, David Brandenberger traces this populist "national Bolshevism" into the 1950s, highlighting the catalytic effect that it had on Russian national identity formation.

Beginning with national Bolshevism's origins within Stalin's inner circle, Brandenberger next examines its projection into Soviet society through education and …

Colonial Lessons: Africans' Education In Southern Rhodesia, 1918-1940, Carol Summers

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Studying of the meanings of education, mission identities, and cultural change in Southern Rhodesia, Summers shows how mission-educated Africans negotiated new identities for themselves and their communities within the confines of segregation. From the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the Second World War, Africans in Southern Rhodesia experienced massive changes. Colonialism was systematized, segregation grew rigid and intensive, and economic changes affected every aspect of life from assembling bridewealth to entrepreneurial opportunities. This book provides a challenging portrayal of the possibilities and limits of African agency within the colonial context.

Mission-educated Africans who aspired to elements …

[Introduction To] Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators And American Identities, Laura Browder

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In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.

Significantly, notes …

[Introduction To] Valley Of The Shadow: Two Communities In The American Civil War, Edward L. Ayers

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Two communities in America's Great Valley--Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia--separated by only a few hundred miles, share much in their politics and ways of life. Yet they emerge on opposing sides of a war in which they zealously send their sons to fight and die. Here we see a Civil War that is not the inevitable conflict of rival societies, but a human drama, immediate, particular, engrossing.

[Introduction To] The Oxford Book Of The American South: Testimony, Memory, And Fiction, Edward L. Ayers, Bradley C. Mittendorf

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Resonating with the testimony of slaves and slaveholders, the powerful and the powerless, women and men, black people and white, The Oxford Book of the American South combines the most telling fiction and nonfiction produced in the South from the late eighteenth century to the present. The first anthology to put short stories, novels, autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and journalism together, this collection is a rich and varied record of life below the Mason Dixon line. We see the antebellum period both from the perspective of those who experienced it first-hand, such as Thomas Jefferson and Harriet Jacobs, as well as …

[Introduction To] A House Divided: A Century Of Great Civil War Quotations, Edward L. Ayers

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This book is a collection of over 1,000 unforgettable quotations from America's defining experience, the Civil War. These quotes bring the passion and power of the people and events of the war to life. The voices are diverse, from Generals and soldiers, to enslaved and freed African Americans, to poets, journalists and writers. This collection contains quotes from those who participated, observers of the war, and perspectives of historians from the 20th century.

[Introduction To] All Over The Map: Rethinking American Regions, Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, Peter S. Onuf

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Even as Americans keep moving "all over the map" in the late twentieth century, they cherish memories of the places they come from. But where do these places—these regions—come from? What makes them so real? In this groundbreaking book a distinguished group of historians explores the concept of region in America, traces changes the idea has undergone in our national experience, and examines its meaning for Americans today.

Far from diminishing in importance, the authors conclude, regional differences continue to play a significant role in Americans' self-image. Regional identity, in fact, has always been fed by the very forces that …

[Introduction To] From Civilization To Segregation: Social Ideals And Social Control In Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1934, Carol Summers

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This study examines the social changes that took place in Southern Rhodesia after the arrival of the British South Africa Company in the 1890s. Summer’s work focuses on interactions among settlers, the officials of the British South America Company and the administration, missionaries, humanitarian groups in Britain, and the most vocal or noticeable groups of Africans. Through this period of military conquest and physical coercion, to the later attempts at segregationist social engineering, the ideals and justifications of Southern Rhodesians changed drastically. Native Policy, Native Education policies, and, eventually, segregationist Native Development policies changed and evolved as the white and …

[Introduction To] The Promise Of The New South: Life After Reconstruction, Edward L. Ayers

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At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century.

Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee …

[Introduction To] The Edge Of The South: Life In Nineteenth-Century Virginia, Edward L. Ayers, John C. Willis

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The chapters in this volume explore diverse scenes of nineteenth-century Virginia: the big house and the slave quarters, small farms and battlefields, freed slaves in the country and freed slaves in the city, dark coal mines and brightly illuminated caverns, raucous political rallies and genteel meetings of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Each essay offers a new perspective on a past which refuses to fit familiar ways of thinking about the nation and the South.

[Introduction To] Redeeming Politics, Peter Iver Kaufman

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Peter Iver Kaufman explores how various Christian leaders throughout history have used forms of "political theology" to merge the romance of conquest and empire with hopes for political and religious redemption. His discussion covers such figures as Constantine, Augustine, Charlemagne, Pope Gregory VII, Dante, Zwingli, Calvin, and Cromwell.

[Introduction To] Vengeance And Justice: Crime And Punishment In The 19th Century American South, Edward L. Ayers

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Exploring the major elements of southern crime and punishment at a time that saw the formation of the fundamental patterns of class and race, Edward L. Ayers studies the inner workings of the police, prison, and judicial systems, and the nature of crime.

The Soul Of Black Worship, Wyatt Tee Walker

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No abstract provided.