The Life of Caleb Cushing


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The Life of Caleb Cushing


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Conflicting Loyalties


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Baker provides the first comprehensive analysis of the history and structure of the U.S. Attorney General. She documents how attorneys general have differed in their responses, seeing themselves as either advocates of the president or neutral expounders of the law. She focuses in particular on Robert Kennedy, Edwin Meese, Elliot Richardson, Griffin Bell, Robert Jackson, Edward Levi, A. Mitchell Palmer, and Roger Taney.







Reconstruction and Empire


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This volume examines the historical connections between the United States’ Reconstruction and the country’s emergence as a geopolitical power a few decades later. It shows how the processes at work during the postbellum decade variously foreshadowed, inhibited, and conditioned the development of the United States as an overseas empire and regional hegemon. In doing so, it links the diverse topics of abolition, diplomacy, Jim Crow, humanitarianism, and imperialism. In 1935, the great African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois argued in his Black Reconstruction in America that these two historical moments were intimately related. In particular, Du Bois averred that the nation’s betrayal of the South’s fledgling interracial democracy in the 1870s put reactionaries in charge of a country on the verge of global power, with world-historical implications. Working with the same chronological and geographical parameters, the contributors here take up targeted case studies, tracing the biographical, ideological, and thematic linkages that stretch across the postbellum and imperial moments. With an Introduction, eleven chapters, and an Afterword, this volume offers multiple perspectives based on original primary source research. The resulting composite picture points to a host of countervailing continuities and changes. The contributors examine topics as diverse as diplomatic relations with Spain, the changing views of radical abolitionists, African American missionaries in the Caribbean, and the ambiguities of turn-of-the century political cartoons. Collectively, the volume unsettles familiar assumptions about how we should understand the late nineteenth-century United States, conventionally framed as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It also advances transnational approaches to understanding America’s Reconstruction and the search for the ideological currents shaping American power abroad.




Spain in America


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Setting aside the pastiche of bullfighters and flamenco dancers that has dominated the U.S. image of Spain for more than a century, this innovative volume uncovers the roots of Spanish studies to explain why the diversity, vitality, and complexity of Spanish history and culture have been reduced in U.S. accounts to the equivalent of a tourist brochure. Spurred by the complex colonial relations between the United States and Spain, the new field of Spanish studies offered a way for the young country to reflect a positive image of itself as a democracy, in contrast with perceived Spanish intolerance and closure. Spain in America investigates the political and historical forces behind this duality, surveying the work of the major nineteenth-century U.S. Hispanists in the fields of history, art history, literature, and music. A distinguished panel of contributors offers fresh examinations of the role of U.S. writers, especially Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in crafting a wildly romantic vision of Spain. They examine the views of such scholars as William H. Prescott and George Ticknor, who contrasted the "failure" of Spanish history with U.S. exceptionalism. Other essays explore how U.S. interests in Latin America consistently colored its vision of Spain and how musicology in the United States, dominated by German émigrés, relegated Spanish music to little more than a footnote. Also included are profiles of the philanthropist Archer Mitchell Huntington and the pioneering art historians Georgiana Goddard King and Arthur Kingsley Porter, who spearheaded U.S. interest in the architecture and sculpture of medieval Spain. Providing a much-needed look at the development and history of Hispanism, Spain in America opens the way toward confronting and modifying reductive views of Spain that are frozen in another time.




Broken Glass


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"First as a spokesman for the Whig and then the Democratic parties, Cushing served in Congress, as the minister to China, as a general in the Mexican War, as U.S. attorney general, and as a legal advisor and diplomatic operative for Presidents Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant. With an unharnessed mind and probing intellect, Cushing inspired and infuriated contemporaries with his strident views on such topics as race relations and gender roles, national expansion, and the legitimacy of secession. While his positions generated arguments and garnered enemies, his views often mirrored those of many Americans. His abilities and talents sustained him in public service and made him one of the most outstanding and fascinating figures of the era."--Jacket.




The Outlook


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The Making of an Abolitionist


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William Lloyd Garrison's life as an abolitionist and advocate for social change was dependent on his training as a printer. None who have studied Garrison can ignore his editorship of The Liberator but many have not fully understood his belief in the central role of a well-edited newspaper in the maintenance of a healthy republic and the struggle to reform society. Church, politics and publishing were the three foundations of Garrison's life. Newspapers, he believed, were especially important, for they provided citizens in a democracy the information necessary to make their own choices. When ministers and politicians in the North and the South refused to address the horror of slavery and became tacit advocates for the "peculiar institution," he was compelled to employ the printing press in protest. This book traces his path from printer to publisher of The Liberator. Garrison had not become a publisher to advocate abolition; he was a mechanic and an editor, later a reformer, but always a printer. His expertise with the printing press and the practice of journalism became for him the natural means for ending slavery.




Between History and Romance


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It demonstrates that, even though Washington Irving's sojourn in Spain from 1826 until 1829 marked a distinct shift in the literary commodification of things Spanish, the transition from an enlightened to a romantic representation of Spain was a process triggered by a group of writers who produced Spanish travel narratives of lasting influence.