Who Were The Progressives How Did American Slavery Begin Does The Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional

Convention has it that Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century confined themselves mainly to industrial cities of the East and Midwest. The truth is that Irish Catholics went everywhere in America and often had as much of a presence in the West as in the East. In Beyond the American Pale, David M. Emmons examines this multifaceted experience of westering Irish and, in doing so, offers a fresh and discerning account of America's westward expansion. "Irish in the West" is not a historical contradiction, but it is — and was — a historical problem. Irish Catholics were not supposed to be in the West—that was where Protestant Americans went to reinvent themselves. For many of the same reasons that the spread of southern slavery was thought to profane the West, a Catholic presence there was thought to contradict it — to contradict America's Protestant individualism and freedom. The Catholic Irish were condemned as the clannish, backward remnants of an old cultural world that Americans self-consciously sought to leave behind. The sons and daughters of Erin were not assimilated, and because they were not assimilable, they should be kept beyond the American pale. As Emmons amply demonstrates, however, western reality was far more complicated. Irish Catholicism may have outraged Protestant-inspired American republicanism, but Irish Catholics were a necessary component of America's equally Protestant-inspired foray into industrial capitalism. They were also necessary to the successive conquests of the "frontier," wherever it might be found. It was the Irish who helped build the railroads, dig the hard rocks, man the army posts, and do the other arduous, dangerous, and unattractive toiling required by an industrializing society. With vigor and panache, Emmons describes how the West was not so much won as continually contested and reshaped. He probes the self-fulfilling mythology of the American West, along with the far different mythology of the Irish pioneers. The product of three decades of research and thought, Beyond the American Pale is a masterful yet accessible recasting of American history, the culminating work of a singular thinker willing to take a wholly new perspective on the past.

In this forceful and original work in American political philosophy, H. Mark Roelofs challenges America's complacency about its politics. He maintains that the theoretical design of the American political system is inherently flawed. He sees the system as essentially split between its social democratic, egalitarian, legitimizing self-image and its liberal democratic, elitist, operational practice. Neither of these aspects of the system is politically productive beyond its immediate functions. Roelofs's devastating and closely reasoned critique traces our nation's political ills to fundamental flaws in the very design of its founding principles, the character of its major institutions, and the basic patterns of its processes. Roelofs traces the contradictions in our political culture to American adaptations of a profoundly religious, mostly Protestant individualism and a secular Bourgeois individualism rooted in Hobbes and Locke. The clashes between these perspectives in the political system's institutional processes brew, according to the author, "generous portions of bombast and hypocrisy, inefficiency and corruption, and all too often, violence in one form or another". He demonstrates why, with our present political structure, there is no possibility of achieving our goals. The system's ultimate poverty, he argues, is its congenital inability to comprehend, let alone reform, itself. No other book has viewed the ills of American politics so comprehensively or traced their sources so insistently to the system's theoretical design, to the character of its founding principles, and to the nature of its major institutions. With the Bicentennial of the Constitution as well as the recentcollapse of Eastern European communism, many Americans are proudly proclaiming that their system of government works, despite its obvious contradictions, chaos, and corruption. Roelofs lucidly but pessimistically contends that, unless the system is fundamentally and completely reformed, it will continue to breed hypocrisy and inefficiency, violence and military adventurism, and a systematically impoverished democratic politics.

A collection of biographical sketches providing an introduction to both the contrasts and continuities of American women's experience through nearly four centuries. Major subjects and themes emerge, including women's rights, suffrage, education, health, women's liberation, and marriage.

Is America unique? One of our major political analysts explores the deeply held but often unarticulated beliefs that shape the American creed. "(A) magisterial attempt to distill a lifetime of learning about America into a persuasive brief . . . (by) the dean of American political sociologists".--Carlin Romano, "Boston Globe".

2014 Reprint of 1894 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. The "Frontier Thesis" or "Turner Thesis," is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1894 that American democracy was formed by the American Frontier. He stressed the process-the moving frontier line-and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. He also stressed consequences of a ostensibly limitless frontier and that American democracy and egalitarianism were the principle results. In Turner's thesis the American frontier established liberty by releasing Americans from European mindsets and eroding old, dysfunctional customs. The frontier had no need for standing armies, established churches, aristocrats or nobles, nor for landed gentry who controlled most of the land and charged heavy rents. Frontier land was free for the taking. Turner first announced his thesis in a paper entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893 in Chicago. He won very wide acclaim among historians and intellectuals. Turner's emphasis on the importance of the frontier in shaping American character influenced the interpretation found in thousands of scholarly histories. By the time Turner died in 1932, 60% of the leading history departments in the U.S. were teaching courses in frontier history along Turnerian lines.

An acclaimed historian of 19th-century and African-American history presents the first narrative of the Civil War as told from the perspective of those whose destiny it decided.

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