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 …

Joan Of Arc And The Crusade: Memorizing Medieval Examples To Improve A Renaissance King, Lidia Radi

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

In 1518, Le Penser de royal memoire was published in Paris by Guillaume Michel de Tours.²Thanks to the pioneering research conducted by Anne-Marie Lecoq in her monumental book Francois I^er imaginaire, this allegorical text has recently caught the attention of scholars as part of an important moral and political literary production that was published under the reign of King Francis I (r. 1515-1547). Lecoq's study and subsequent works, such as the critical edition of Jean Thenaud's Triomphe des Vertus by Titia Schuurs-Janssen, shed new light on the literature of propaganda addressed to Francis I, the king …

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, …

Latino Louisiana, LáZaro Lima

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

When Louisiana became the 18th state of the Union in 1812, the territory was already seeped in the linguistic, historical, and cultural antecedents that had made New Orleans, its most important city at the time, one of the first multilingual, multiracial, and multiethnic cosmopolitan centers in the United States. The origins of Spanish-speaking Latino Louisiana can be traced to the arrival of Alonso Alvarez de Pineda (c. 1492-1520) in 1519. Alvarez de Pineda sailed from Cuba to explore the uncharted territories between the Florida peninsula -- modern-day Arkansas and Louisiana -- and the southern Gulf of Mexico region. The purpose …

"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.