History Of The Great Western Sanitary Fair

The Civil War is often credited with giving birth to the modern American state. The demands of warfare led to the centralization of business and industry and to an unprecedented expansion of federal power. But the Civil War did more than that: as Melinda Lawson shows, it brought about a change in American national identity, redefining the relationship between the individual and the government. Though much has been written about the Civil War and the making of the political and economic American nation, this is the first comprehensive study of the role that the war played in the shaping of the cultural and ideological nation-state. In Patriot Fires, Lawson explains how, when threatened by the rebellious South, the North came together as a nation and mobilized its populace for war. With no formal government office to rally citizens, the job of defining the war in patriotic terms fell largely to private individuals or associations, each with their own motives and methods. Lawson explores how these "interpreters" of the war helped instill in Americans a new understanding of loyalty to country. Through efforts such as sanitary fairs to promote the welfare of soldiers, the war bond drives of Jay Cooke, and the establishment of Union Leagues, Northerners cultivated a new sense of patriotism rooted not just in the subjective American idea, but in existing religious, political, and cultural values. Moreover, Democrats and Republicans, Abolitionists, and Abraham Lincoln created their own understandings of American patriotism and national identity, raising debates over the meaning of the American "idea" to new heights. Examining speeches, pamphlets, pageants, sermons, and assemblies, Lawson shows how citizens and organizations constructed a new kind of nationalism based on a nation of Americans rather than a union of states—a European-styled nationalism grounded in history and tradition and celebrating the preeminence of the nation-state. Original in its insights and innovative in its approach, Patriot Fires is an impressive work of cultural and intellectual history. As America engages in new conflicts around the globe, Lawson shows us that issues addressed by nation builders of the nineteenth century are relevant once again as the meaning of patriotism continues to be explored.

Tracing their development from the early 1800s to the present day, Gordon shows how women's fairs have reflected and influenced American culture, including styles of display and presentation, forms of public entertainment, attitudes about consumption and commodities, and perceptions of other cultures and of the past.

This vivid history of the Civil War era reveals how unexpected bonds of union forged among diverse peoples in the Ohio-Kentucky borderlands furthered emancipation through a period of spiraling chaos between 1830 and 1865. Moving beyond familiar arguments about Lincoln's deft politics or regional commercial ties, Bridget Ford recovers the potent religious, racial, and political attachments holding the country together at one of its most likely breaking points, the Ohio River. Living in a bitterly contested region, the Americans examined here--Protestant and Catholic, black and white, northerner and southerner--made zealous efforts to understand the daily lives and struggles of those on the opposite side of vexing human and ideological divides. In their common pursuits of religious devotionalism, universal public education regardless of race, and relief from suffering during wartime, Ford discovers a surprisingly capacious and inclusive sense of political union in the Civil War era. While accounting for the era's many disintegrative forces, Ford reveals the imaginative work that went into bridging stark differences in lived experience, and she posits that work as a precondition for slavery's end and the Union's persistence.

Describes the events surrounding Abraham Lincoln's historic speech following the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, how he responded to the politics of the time, and the importance of that speech.

"Consequently, to fill the gaps within the correspondence, 542 editorial entries are chronologically interspersed for letters both by and to Melville for which no full text has been located but for which some evidence survives. These entries, like the editorial headnotes for the known letters, flesh out the specific historical and biographical contexts for the unlocated letters. Both supply Horth's full annotations, placing circumstances, persons, and allusions, from a wide range of documentary and scholarly sources, and drawing upon family archives of both Melville and his wife, including the recently recovered portion, now in the New York Public Library, of a trove preserved by his sister Augusta." "The aim of this edition, volume fourteen in the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, is to present a text as close to the author's intention at the time of inscription as his difficult handwriting or other surviving evidence permits. On this basis, the texts earlier presented in The Letters of Herman Melville (1960), edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, have been revised, with differences in almost every letter in spelling and punctuation, and some forty-five differences in wording. Fifty-two newly discovered letters by Melville, more than half of which are first published here, are added to those printed in the 1960 edition. This text of Correspondence is an Approved Text of the Committee on Scholarly Editions (Modern Language Association of America)."--BOOK JACKET.