History Commons^™

Consolidating Power: Technology, Ideology, And Philadelphia's Growth In The Early Republic, Andrew M. Schocket

History Faculty Publications

Considers how during the 1780's-1820's wealthy Philadelphians adopted the British institutional structure of the corporation for purposes of organizing Philadelphia's economic and political life and how the corporate form was used to reconstruct and consolidate economic and political power. The corporation was part of a variety of "nexus technologies" that included canals and markets. These new social technologies allowed the coordination of physical and financial activities across greater distances, without relying on older forms of face-to-face control and coordination, thus permitting new elites to gain power as older, local patrician elites were displaced. These new corporate forms needed the legal …

"Rosebloom And Pure White," Or So It Seemed, Mary Niall Mitchell

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review: General Crook And The Western Frontier By Charles M. Robinson Iii, Michael L. Tate

History Faculty Publications

Few frontier military officers could claim a more varied and significant combat career during the second half of the nineteenth century than George Crook. Beginning with service as a young lieutenant in the Rogue River War and the Yakima War of the 1850s, he learned quickly about the weaknesses of an army that suffered from underfunding, congressional neglect, low morale, and petty bickering among its officer corps. Despite his commanding troops during the next three decades in some of the most celebrated Indian wars of the Great Plains and Southwest, he also developed an empathy for his adversaries who suffered …

Spain's Enterprise Of Evil, Charlotte M. Gradie

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Charlotte Gradie.

Rabasa, José . Writing violence on the northern frontier: the historiography of sixteenth century New Mexico and Florida and the legacy of conquest. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0-8223-2567-3.

Slavery, Economics And Constitutional Ideals, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

As we think about endings, however, it is also useful to think about beginnings. That is what President Abraham Lincoln did in his Second Inaugural Address, delivered just five weeks before the surrender at Appomattox and his own assassination soon thereafter. All knew, he said reflecting sadly and thoughtfully on how the Civil War came about, that slavery was, "somehow," the cause. In fact, "somehow," however, lay puzzles, contradictions, and questions. The connections between slavery and the Civil War have concerned Americans ever since the events at Appomattox.

The Inevitable Future Of The South, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

In some ways, the Consolidation started all the way back in the big war they had in the middle of the twentieth century, when the South was still way behind the rest of the country--behind even the ridiculously cold parts up north and the ridiculously dry parts out west. They had to build big army bases and big ships for the war, so they moved some of that to the South and paid people more than southerners had ever earned before. Cities grew real fast, and people got new cars and houses and things when the war ended, but the …

Why Were The Railroads The "Contested Terrain" Of Race Relations In The Postwar South?, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Most of the debates about race relations focused on the railroads of the New South. Travel was a different story, for members of both races had no choice but to use the same railroads. As the number of railroads proliferated in the 1880s, as the number of stations quickly mounted, as dozens of counties got on a line for the first time, as previously isolated areas found themselves connected to towns and cities with different kinds of black people and different kinds of race relations, segregation became a matter of statewide attention.