History Commons^™

Dead Reckoning (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Long before she became the first female president of Harvard University in July 2007, Drew Gilpin Faust showed herself to be an inventive, energetic, and restless historian. Her first book, in 1977, focused on a subject many people had doubted was a subject, "the intellectual in the Old South." Five years later, she produced what is still the fullest — and most disturbing — portrayal of a white Southern planter, a man who sought complete mastery over the white women in his charge as well as over the enslaved people he claimed as property.

Soon after that, in a series …

The Burning And Reconstruction Of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania 1864-1870, Gordon Boyer Lawrence

Master's Theses

Although many studies of Chambersburg's devastation during the American Civil War have been researched, all have focused on the military actions taken by both sides during the conflict. This thesis instead attempts to explore some of the effects of military actions upon the permanent civilian population.

The Introduction develops a sense of the events which transpired in the town on the fateful day of July 30, 1864, provides an overview of potential research subjects, and details sources available to complete successfully the research parameters outlined. The early development of the community is explored in Chapter 1. This data is necessary …

The French Intrigue Of James Cole Mountflorence, Jud Campbell

Law Faculty Publications

In July 1793, less than three months after President George Washington had declared the United States impartial toward the conflict raging in Europe, French Minister Edmond-Charles-Edouard Genet tested America's incipient neutrality. With instructions from his government, Genet armed a French privateer in Philadelphia and simultaneously launched an offensive against Spanish Louisiana using disaffected American pioneers. The episode began on July 5, when Genet shared the French plans for western invasion in a private meeting with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Ten days later Genet's agents departed for Kentucky to rendezvous with American Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark. The effort, …

Personal Memoirs Of U.S. Grant, And Alternative Accounts Of Lee's Surrender At Appomattox, George R. Goethals

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

It is somewhat troubling that as we try to understand leaders and leadership we are confronted with the problem that our knowledge of central historical events is highly subject to the differing perspectives of various scholars. What can we know? How can we know it?

This chapter considers these questions by examining the implications of a particular variation on the general problem of differing historical perspectives. That is, how do we weigh autobiographical accounts of events by the actors themselves? Is there something distinctive about these accounts, or are they best thought of as just one more rendering of history, …

"Momentous Events In Small Places": The Coming Of The Civil War In Two American Communities, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Historians, professional and otherwise, have written thousands of regimental histories, county histories, and town histories of the Civil War years. These studies make the coming of the war concrete and compelling. Inspired by such accounts, it seemed to me that two local portrayals could be even better than one, that exploring communities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line as they each confronted the events from the late fifties to the late sixties might make both sides more comprehensible.