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A "Topping People" is the first comprehensive study of the political, economic, and social elite of colonial Virginia. Evans studies twenty-one leading families from their rise to power in the late 1600s to their downfall over one hundred years later. These families represented the upper echelons of power, serving in the upper and lower houses of the General Assembly, often as speaker of the House of Burgesses. Their names--Randolph, Robinson, Byrd, Carter, Corbin, Custis, Nelson, and Page, to note but a few--are still familiar in the Old Dominion some three hundred years later. Their decline was due to a variety of factors--economic, social, and demographic. The third generations showed an ...
This book is a history that explains the adoption of the US Constitution in terms of what the proponents of the Constitution were trying to accomplish. The Constitution was a revolutionary document replacing the confederation mode with a complete three-part national government supreme over the states. The most pressing need was to allow the federal government to tax to pay off the Revolutionary War debts. In the next war, the United States would need to borrow again. The taxes needed to restore the public credit proved to be quite modest, however, and the Constitution went far beyond the immediate fiscal needs. This book argues that the proponents' anger at the states for their recurring breaches of duty to the united cause explains both critical steps and the driving impetus for the revolution. Other issues were less important.
Inspired by the major themes in Steele's scholarship, the original essays in English Atlantics Revisited examine British Atlantic contexts and political economy, as well as maritime, military, Amerindian, and social history. The contributors offer challenging new findings and perspectives as they revisit the English Atlantics: chapters on specific personalities, regions, and topics reveal the extent of transatlantic, cross-cultural, and trans-national interactions. English Atlantics Revisited help assess the current state of Atlantic history.
A social, economic, and political study of Philadelphia merchants, this study presents both the spirit and statistics of merchant life. Doerflinger studies the Philadelphia merchant community from three perspectives: their commercial world, their confront
Others introduce readers to historical figures who are less familiar: freedmen schoolteacher Caroline Putnam; reformer Orra Gray Langhorne; Sadie Heath Cabaniss, the founder of professional nursing in Virginia; and Marie Kimball, an early preservationist. Essays on cotton textile workers in the late nineteenth century and home demonstration agents in the early twentieth examine women's collective experiences in these important areas. Altogether, the essays in this collection offer readers an engaging and personal window into the experiences of women in the Old Dominion. Contributors: Anna Berkes on Marie Kimball; Ray Bonis on Adèle Clark; Arica L. Coleman on Mildred Loving; Beth English on Wage-Earning Women; Warren R. Hofstra on Virginia "Patsy" Cline; Caroline E. Janney on Janet Henderson Weaver Randolph; Catherine Jones on Lucy Goode Brooks; Jodi L. Koste on Sadie Heath Cabaniss; Pamela R. Matthews on Ellen Glasgow; Ann E.
Who was William Henry Harrison, and what does his military career reveal about the War of 1812 in the Great Lakes Region? In his study of William Henry Harrison, David Curtis Skaggs sheds light on the role of citizen-soldiers in taming the wilderness of the old Northwest. Perhaps best known for the Whig slogan in 1840—"Tippecanoe and Tyler Too"—Harrison used his efforts to pacify Native Americans and defeat the British in the War of 1812 to promote a political career that eventually elevated him to the presidency. Harrison exemplified the citizen-soldier on the Ohio frontier in the days when white men settled on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains at their peril. Punctuated by ...