Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585-1828Harper Collins, 2004 M03 30 - 638 páginas A powerful reinterpretation of the founding of America, by a Pulitzer Prize -- winning historian "The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years," declares Walter McDougall in his preface to Freedom Just Around the Corner. With this statement begins McDougall's most ambitious, original, and uncompromising of histories. McDougall marshals the latest scholarship and writes in a style redolent of passion, pathos, and humor in pursuit of truths often obscured in books burdened with political slants. From the origins of English expansion under Henry VIII to the founding of the United States to the rollicking election of President Andrew Jackson, McDougall rescues from myth or oblivion the brave, brilliant, and flawed people who made America great: women and men, native-born and immigrant; German, Latin, African, and British; as well as farmers, engineers, planters, merchants; Protestants, Freemasons, Catholics, and Jews; and -- last but not least -- the American scofflaws, speculators, rogues, and demagogues. With an insightful approach to the nearly 250 years spanning America's beginnings, McDougall offers his readers an understanding of the uniqueness of the "American character" and how it has shaped the wide-ranging course of historical events. McDougall explains that Americans have always been in a unique position of enjoying "more opportunity to pursue their ambitions...than any other people in history." Throughout Freedom Just Around the Corner the character of the American people shines, a character built out of a freedom to indulge in the whole panoply of human behavior. The genius behind the success of the United States is founded on the complex, irrepressible American spirit. A grand narrative rich with new details and insights about colonial and early national history, Freedom Just Around the Corner is the first installment of a trilogy that will eventually bring the story of America up to the present day -- story as epic, bemusing, and brooding as Bob Dylan's "Jokerman," the ballad that inspires its titles. |
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... royal clerks (cler- ics, or churchmen) to administer it. But they left in place the Common Law, defined by the eighteenth-century juridical scholar Sir Henry Blackstone as “the custom of the realm from time immemorial.” Thus, the ...
... royal impositions, and the Parliamentary rebellion against Charles I swept them away. Finally, the kingdom of England possessed no internal barriers to trade. Unlike other European realms it was a ready-made national market for goods.2 ...
... royal monopoly could not keep pace with unlicensed alehouses. Drunkenness and its offspring—crime, fights, and promiscuous sex—seemed out of control. Vagrants accosted travelers, footpads haunted London, gangs of rootless toughs of both ...
... royal bribes, and university men and merchants already sympathetic to Lutheran ideas.17 Reinforcing these carrots was Henry's stick: ruthless use of chancery courts to condemn opponents and even supporters who fell into disfavor ...
... royal prerogative . This was typi- cal Renaissance state - building , but it betrayed a total misunderstanding of Irish practice , whereby land belonged to the septs , or clans , and chiefs received life tenures only by dint of the ...
Contenido
17 | |
38 | |
BARBADIANS YORKERS AND QUAKERS | 71 |
PAPISTS WITCHES SCOFFLAWS AND PREACHERS | 99 |
GERMANS FOUR SORTS OF BRITONS AND AFRICANS | 136 |
SOLDIERS SPECULATORS AND SAVAGES | 168 |
SONS OF LIBERTY AND TwoBOTTLE TYRANTS | 202 |
PATRIOTS TORIES SLACKERS AND SPIES | 239 |
RELUCTANT NATIONALISTS EAGER IMPERIALISTS | 371 |
ENGINEERS PIONEERS PEDDLERS AND DEMOCRATS | 422 |
TRAVELERS | 498 |
Notes | 515 |
PHYSIOGRAPHIC MAP OF THE UNITED STATES 41 | 527 |
NORTH AMERICA EAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI IN 1763 199 | 557 |
THE SIEGE OF YORKTOWN 275 | 580 |
RATIFYING THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 309 | 587 |
FEDERALISTS ANTIS VESTALS AND VICTIMS | 280 |
MASTER BUILDERS PARTY MEN AND A ROGUE | 321 |
Otras ediciones - Ver todas
Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585–1828 Walter A. McDougall Vista previa limitada - 2009 |
Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585–1828 Walter A. McDougall Vista previa limitada - 2009 |
Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585-1828 Walter A. McDougall Sin vista previa disponible - 2004 |