This New American

2019 ◽  
pp. 35-71
Author(s):  
Jean H. Baker

Chapter 2 begins with Latrobe’s emigration to the United States in 1796 and includes his exciting journey on the Eliza. He spent three and a half years in Virginia. After only a few months in Norfolk he moved to Richmond, the capital. There, he met Bushrod Washington, the president’s nephew, who introduced him to George Washington and arranged a visit to Mount Vernon. Socially, Latrobe benefited from his membership in the Freemasons, a connection that helped him in business as well. However, he continued to chafe against the common belief that an architect was an unnecessary expense, with most buildings requiring only skilled carpenters. Seeking more opportunities as an architect, Latrobe moved to Philadelphia. Here he built the Bank of Pennsylvania, a structure that brought him recognition, and the Philadelphia water supply system, a project that was hampered by his inability to match his artistic vision with financial reality. In Philadelphia, Latrobe met and married Mary Elizabeth Hazlehurst: a wife whom he adored, a woman who treated her stepchildren as if they were hers, a physical and intellectual partner who created the nurturing and intimate family he had never known.

1947 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-242
Author(s):  
Edith L. Kelly

In The year 1864, the Cuban-born poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, visited New York, Philadelphia, Niagara Falls, Mount Vernon, and other points of interest in the United States. The impressions she received at that time were crystallized in two poems: “A Washington” (soneto), “A vista del Niágara” (silva)There are pertinent notes to be revealed in connection with the writing of the sonnet to Washington. The version composed in 1864 was not the poet’s first dedicatory poem to George Washington. La Avellaneda’s first composition on the subject (written long before she had the opportunity to visit the United States) appeared in her earliest collection of verse in 1841.


1947 ◽  
Vol 4 (02) ◽  
pp. 235-242
Author(s):  
Edith L. Kelly

In The year 1864, the Cuban-born poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, visited New York, Philadelphia, Niagara Falls, Mount Vernon, and other points of interest in the United States. The impressions she received at that time were crystallized in two poems: “A Washington” (soneto), “A vista del Niágara” (silva) There are pertinent notes to be revealed in connection with the writing of the sonnet to Washington. The version composed in 1864 was not the poet’s first dedicatory poem to George Washington. La Avellaneda’s first composition on the subject (written long before she had the opportunity to visit the United States) appeared in her earliest collection of verse in 1841.


2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (2_suppl) ◽  
pp. 135-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Scawthorn ◽  
T. D. O'Rourke ◽  
F. T. Blackburn

Prior to 18 April 1906 the San Francisco Fire Department and knowledgeable persons in the insurance industry regarded a conflagration in San Francisco as inevitable. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and ensuing fire is the greatest single fire loss in U.S. history, with 492 city blocks destroyed and life loss now estimated at more than 3,000. This paper describes fire protection practices in the United States prior to 1906; the conditions in San Francisco on the eve of the disaster; ignitions, spread, and convergence of fires that generated the 1906 conflagration; and damage to the water supply system in 1906 that gave impetus to construction of the largest high-pressure water distribution network ever built—San Francisco's Auxiliary Water Supply System (AWSS). In the 1980s hydraulic network and fire simulation modeling identified weaknesses in the fire protection of San Francisco—problems mitigated by an innovative Portable Water Supply System (PWSS), which transports water long distances and helped extinguish the Marina fire during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The AWSS and PWSS concepts have been extended to other communities and provide many lessons, paramount of which is that communities need to develop an integrated disaster preparedness and response capability and be constantly vigilant in maintaining that capability. This lesson is especially relevant to highly seismic regions with large wood building inventories such as the western United States and Japan, which are at great risk of conflagration following an earthquake.


2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 91-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gene Gerzhoy

When does a nuclear-armed state's provision of security guarantees to a militarily threatened ally inhibit the ally's nuclear weapons ambitions? Although the established security model of nuclear proliferation posits that clients will prefer to depend on a patron's extended nuclear deterrent, this proposition overlooks how military threats and doubts about the patron's intentions encourage clients to seek nuclear weapons of their own. To resolve this indeterminacy in the security model's explanation of nuclear restraint, it is necessary to account for the patron's use of alliance coercion, a strategy consisting of conditional threats of military abandonment to obtain compliance with the patron's demands. This strategy succeeds when the client is militarily dependent on the patron and when the patron provides assurances that threats of abandonment are conditional on the client's nuclear choices. Historical evidence from West Germany's nuclear decisionmaking provides a test of this logic. Contrary to the common belief among nonproliferation scholars, German leaders persistently doubted the credibility and durability of U.S. security guarantees and sought to acquire an independent nuclear deterrent. Rather than preferring to renounce nuclear armament, Germany was compelled to do so by U.S. threats of military abandonment, contradicting the established logic of the security model and affirming the logic of alliance coercion.


1987 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-88
Author(s):  
CHARLOTTE M PORTER

A curious error affects the names of three North American clupeids—the Alewife, American Shad, and Menhaden. The Alewife was first described by the British-born American architect, Benjamin Henry Latrobe in 1799, just two years after what is generally acknowledged as the earliest description of any ichthyological species published in the United States. Latrobe also described the ‘fish louse’, the common isopod parasite of the Alewife, with the new name, Oniscus praegustator. Expressing an enthusiasm for American independence typical of his generation, Latrobe humorously proposed the name Clupea tyrannus for the Alewife because the fish, like all tyrants, had parasites or hangers-on.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick M. Kirkwood

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a rising generation of British colonial administrators profoundly altered British usage of American history in imperial debates. In the process, they influenced both South African history and wider British imperial thought. Prior usage of the Revolution and Early Republic in such debates focused on the United States as a cautionary tale, warning against future ‘lost colonies’. Aided by the publication of F. S. Oliver's Alexander Hamilton (1906), administrators in South Africa used the figures of Hamilton and George Washington, the Federalist Papers, and the drafting of the Constitution as an Anglo-exceptionalist model of (modern) self-government. In doing so they applied the lessons of the Early Republic to South Africa, thereby contributing to the formation of the Union of 1910. They then brought their reconception of the United States, and their belief in the need for ‘imperial federation’, back to the metropole. There they fostered growing diplomatic ties with the US while recasting British political history in-light-of the example of American federation. This process of inter-imperial exchange culminated shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles when the Boer Generals Botha and Smuts were publicly presented as Washington and Hamilton reborn.


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-185
Author(s):  
Edyta Sokalska

The reception of common law in the United States was stimulated by a very popular and influential treatise Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone, published in the late 18th century. The work of Blackstone strengthened the continued reception of the common law from the American colonies into the constituent states. Because of the large measure of sovereignty of the states, common law had not exactly developed in the same way in every state. Despite the fact that a single common law was originally exported from England to America, a great variety of factors had led to the development of different common law rules in different states. Albert W. Alschuler from University of Chicago Law School is one of the contemporary American professors of law. The part of his works can be assumed as academic historical-legal narrations, especially those concerning Blackstone: Rediscovering Blackstone and Sir William Blackstone and the Shaping of American Law. Alschuler argues that Blackstone’s Commentaries inspired the evolution of American and British law. He introduces not only the profile of William Blackstone, but also examines to which extent the concepts of Blackstone have become the basis for the development of the American legal thought.


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