The Early American Republic

The Early American Republic
Author: Reeve Huston
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Mexican War, 1846-1848
ISBN: 9780195108125
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The early years of the American republic witnessed wrenching conflict and change. Northerners created an industrial order, which brought with it new relationships and conflicts at work and within families. Plantation slavery flourished and spread in the South as a powerful anti-slaverymovement took root in the North. Farmers, entrepreneurs, planters, and slaves moved west, sparking widespread conflict with Indians and among white Americans. Numerous groups - African Americans, poor white men, women - fought for citizenship and recognition as equals to other Americans, whileothers opposed their bids for equality. Ordinary citizens fought for the right to participate in politics and, in the process, helped to create a democratic political order.Featuring diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper debates, and memoirs of participants, The Early American Republic: A History in Documents recreates the conflicts and changes of that era. Rebecca Burlend recounts the hardships and victories of life on the Illinois frontier. In a letter to an ally,Thomas Jefferson explains his Indian policy. The Native American leader Tecumseh makes his case for Indian unity against white Americans. James Henry Hammond, a wealthy planter, instructs his overseer on how to manage slaves. Joseph Taper writes his former master about the freedom he enjoys afterescaping to Canada. A blackface minstrel tune and Frederick Douglass's account of being beaten up by white ship workers narrate the entrenchment of racism. A list of instructions from New York Democratic leaders shows how parties drew ordinary voters into politics. Congressional speeches reveal theviolent emotions that fueled the sectional crisis.Author Reeve Huston provides students with a context for understanding the documents and leaves them to interpret events and ideas for themselves. Introducing students to the human drama and to the political, social, and religious passions of the early republic, The Early American Republic: AHistory in Documents provides a deeper understanding of the foundational years of the nation.

American Cookery

American Cookery
Author: Amelia Simmons
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Total Pages: 73
Release: 2012-10-16
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1449423981
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This eighteenth century kitchen reference is the first cookbook published in the U.S. with recipes using local ingredients for American cooks. Named by the Library of Congress as one of the eighty-eight “Books That Shaped America,” American Cookery was the first cookbook by an American author published in the United States. Until its publication, cookbooks used by American colonists were British. As author Amelia Simmons states, the recipes here were “adapted to this country,” reflecting the fact that American cooks had learned to prepare meals using ingredients found in North America. This cookbook reveals the rich variety of food colonial Americans used, their tastes, cooking and eating habits, and even their rich, down-to-earth language. Bringing together English cooking methods with truly American products, American Cookery contains the first known printed recipes substituting American maize for English oats; the recipe for Johnny Cake is the first printed version using cornmeal; and there is also the first known recipe for turkey. Another innovation was Simmons’s use of pearlash—a staple in colonial households as a leavening agent in dough, which eventually led to the development of modern baking powders. A culinary classic, American Cookery is a landmark in the history of American cooking. “Thus, twenty years after the political upheaval of the American Revolution of 1776, a second revolution—a culinary revolution—occurred with the publication of a cookbook by an American for Americans.” —Jan Longone, curator of American Culinary History, University of Michigan This facsimile edition of Amelia Simmons's American Cookery was reproduced by permission from the volume in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, founded in 1812.

Becoming America

Becoming America
Author: Jon Butler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2001-12-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674006674
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Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago -- and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society -- a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of prerevolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto "dark ages") of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, Becoming America shows us transformations before 1776 among an unusually diverse assortment of peoples. Here is a polyglot population of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to Africans or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and remade itself many times during the next centuries -- asociety that, for ninety years before 1776, was becoming America.