Antebellum America

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
William B. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Western World ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
British North America ◽  
Southern States ◽  
The North ◽  
Basic Law ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
History Of

In 1810, more than four in five Americans lived in one of the original thirteen seaboard states. Half a century later, though those states had grown considerably, they held less than half of the nation's population. The reason lay in the post-1815 rush of settlers beyond the Appalachians into the continental interior, "one of the great immigrations in the history of the western world." Chaotic though this movement was in many ways, it showed at least one orderly pattern. Individually these settlers followed many paths, but the typical ones moved due west, erring to the north or south only when their path was blocked by mountains or water or political boundaries or when they were pulled aside by the easier travel routes along navigable rivers. Most of the inhabitants of every inland state in i860 came from the states to the east within its own latitudes. It was mostly New Englanders and upstate New Yorkers—themselves mostly of New England origin—who occupied the territories and states bordering on British North America. They left the central and southern parts of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois mainly to settlers from the middle states and the Chesapeake. The frontier of the Deep South was colonized from the far southern coastal states much more than from Virginia or North Carolina, states that furnished Kentucky and Tennessee and Missouri with the bulk of their inhabitants. "Ohio Fever" swept the rural Northeast after 1815, followed by "Michigan Fever" in the 1830s, but it was "Alabama Fever" and "Texas Fever" that gripped the southern states. Modern research has documented what many Americans at the time spotted for themselves, what some who could agree on little else agreed was a constant truth of human behavior growing out of a basic law of climate-society relations. "The great law that governs emigration," announced a Massachusetts congressman during an argument against the spread of slavery, "is this: that emigration follows the parallels of latitude." It was "a great law of emigration," "fixed and certain," echoed a Louisiana editor in a defense of the South and its institutions, "that people follow the parallels of latitude." People were presumed to do so in order to avoid the change of climate that traveling north or south would have entailed.

Consumption

2020 ◽  
pp. 295-299
Author(s):  
Richard J. Kahn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
Southern States ◽  
History Of

This brief chapter begins with a letter dated December 20, 1831, from Samuel Emerson of Kennebunk, Maine, commending the manuscript, particularly the volume on consumption, and agreeing with the “necessity of copious and repeated bleedings.” Barker promises a history of consumptive diseases as they have appeared in Maine and some other parts of New England since 1768, to be preceded by a history of the disease back to Hippocrates by Thomas Young. He notes that earlier in the eighteenth century consumption made up only about one-tenth of the bills of mortality but by the close of the century, it appears to have made up one-fourth of all deaths. Several physicians in North America have made valuable observations on consumption, though chiefly in the middle and Southern states; Barker will provide results of his inquiries and observations as it has appeared in the northern and eastern parts of the Union. He remarks about some cures that have come about by what are called by some, “the efforts of nature.”

The Colonization of British North America as an Episode in the History of Christianity

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles L. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
Covenant Theology ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Faculty Psychology ◽  
British North America ◽  
History Of ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Historical Issues

The proposition that, to paraphrase Carl Degler, Christianity came to British North America in the first ships, has long enjoyed popular and scholarly currency. The popular account, sometimes found today in evangelical Christian circles, holds that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries colonists erected a mighty kingdom of God whose gates the humanist barbarians have unfortunately breached. The scholarly variation derives from Perry Miller's eloquent melodrama about Puritanism's rise and fall. Miller anatomized Puritanism as a carapace of Ramist logic, covenant theology, and faculty psychology surrounding the visceral vitality of Augustinian piety, an intellectual body that grew in health and cogency in Tudor-Stuart England and then suppurated on the American strand, corrupted by internal contradictions, creeping secularism, and periwigs. Miller understood that he was describing one single Christian tradition—Reformed Protestantism of a particularly perfervid variety—but such was his narrative's majesty that his tale of New England Puritanism ramified into the story of Christianity in the colonies; in the beginning, all the world was New England, and, at the end, the extent to which the colonists had created a common Christian identity owed mightily to Puritan conceptions of the national covenant. Miller was too good a scholar to miss the pettiness of Puritan religious politics and the myriad ways in which even the founding generation of Saints failed to live up to their own best values, but his chronicle of Puritan decline parallels the popular vision that the colonial period represented the “Golden Age” of Christianity in America: the faith began on a fortissimo chord but has decrescendoed ever since. The logic of this declension scheme spotlights some historical issues while ignoring others. The central problem for declension theory is to explain how and why Christianity's vigor ebbed, whereas the creation of a Christian culture in the colonies—the erection of churches, the elaboration of governing apparatuses, the routinization of personal devotion and moral order—is made unproblematic: it just spilled out of the Mayflower and the Arbella onto Plymouth Rock and Shawmut.

Resuscitation and Surgery for Soldiers of the American Civil War (1861–1865)

1985 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Watson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
United States Army ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Surgeon General ◽  
Southern States ◽  
The North ◽  
Surgical History ◽  
History Of

On June 2, 1862, William A. Hammond, Surgeon General of the United States Army, announced the intention of his office to collect material for the publication of a “Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1861–1865)” (1), usually called the Civil War of the United States of America, or the War Between the Union (the North; the Federal Government) and the Confederacy of the Southern States. Forms for the monthly “Returns of Sick and Wounded” were reviewed, corrected and useful data compiled from these “Returns” and from statistics of the offices of the Adjutant General (payroll) and Quartermaster General (burial of decreased soldiers).

Piracy in Colonial North America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark G. Hanna
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
North American ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
British North America ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
British North American

Historians of colonial British North America have largely relegated piracy to the marginalia of the broad historical narrative from settlement to revolution. However, piracy and unregulated privateering played a pivotal role in the development of every English community along the eastern seaboard from the Carolinas to New England. Although many pirates originated in the British North American colonies and represented a diverse social spectrum, they were not supported and protected in these port communities by some underclass or proto-proletariat but by the highest echelons of colonial society, especially by colonial governors, merchants, and even ministers. Sea marauding in its multiple forms helped shape the economic, legal, political, religious, and cultural worlds of colonial America. The illicit market that brought longed-for bullion, slaves, and luxury goods integrated British North American communities with the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Pacific and Indian Oceans throughout the 17th century. Attempts to curb the support of sea marauding at the turn of the 18th century exposed sometimes violent divisions between local merchant interests and royal officials currying favor back in England, leading to debates over the protection of English liberties across the Atlantic. When the North American colonies finally closed their ports to English pirates during the years following the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), it sparked a brief yet dramatic turn of events where English marauders preyed upon the shipping belonging to their former “nests.” During the 18th century, colonial communities began to actively support a more regulated form of privateering against agreed upon enemies that would become a hallmark of patriot maritime warfare during the American Revolution.

Establishment of Canada as a sovereign state: from dominion to kingdom

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Сергей Котов ◽  
Sergey Kokotov
Keyword(s):  
Nova Scotia ◽  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
New France ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
British North America ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial

The history of the establisment of Canada as a sovereign state is inseparably linked with the history of the English (later British) colonial empire. Initially land amounting then to Canada, are peripheral areas of the continental possessions of the British Crown in North America. First of all, they include the possession of Hudson´s Bay, Nova Scotia peninsula and the island of Newfoundland. A stronghold of the British presence in the New World colonies were New England, which followed the metropolis actively at odds with the neighboring colonies of France. The long period of Anglo-French wars culminated in the defeat of France and inclusion of its holdings (Louisiana, New France) to the British colonial empire. The territory of the future of Canada became part of a vast political and legal space, which some researchers call the British-American colonial empire. On the socio-economic point of view nothing has changed - these lands were still underdeveloped periphery of the colonies of New England. There had no prerequisites to the formation here of their own institutions of statehood. In the course of the war for the independence of the inhabitants of the colony of Quebec (the former New France), the peninsula of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, for various reasons did not support the rebellious colonies, so many supporters of the unity of the British Empire (the so-called loyalists) moved to these areas. This led to the formation of a number of new colonies, such as Upper Canada, Nyubransuik, Prince Edward Island. Together, they accounted for British North America - in contrast to the United States. It is important to emphasize that even in the middle of the XIX century British North America remained a conglomerate of disparate, sparsely populated, economically underdeveloped areas, both in the immediate possession of the British Crown, and under the control of private companies. Their transformation into a self-governing federation certainly reflected the interests of the nascent trade and economic elite of these colonies. However, this was no less exposed to "US factor" and the liberal-democratic changes that took place in the metropolis itself. Exploring the complex of concrete historical factors that determine the character of the process of establishing Canada as a sovereign state, the author of this article analyzes the formal and legal aspects of the system of power and administration, established under the British colonial empire, as well as the key points of the doctrine of English law, refers to the institution of the Crown, Parliament and the status of imperial colonial government. Emphasized is the idea that the evolution of Canada from the set of "royal" to the self-governing colonies of the federation in the status of dominion and then gaining the status of the kingdom carried out on the basis of gradual development of constitutional conventions of political practice that leaves open to interpretation the question of when exactly Canada acquired the status of a sovereign state.

scholarly journals Les douze circonscriptions électorales « privilégiées » du Québec

2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (12) ◽  
pp. 161-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Charles Bonenfant
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Ottawa River ◽  
British North America ◽  
North Shore ◽  
The North ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Eastern Townships

Article 80 of the British North America Act expressly disallows any modification of the boundaries of twelve of the electoral districts of the province of Québec (all located in the Eastern Townships and along the north shore of the Ottawa River) without the majority consent of the deputies representing these districts. In 1867 the districts were predominantly English-speaking but most now contain a French-speaking majority. The author traces the history of application of Article 80 from 1867 to the present, and by citing numerous boundary changes that have occurred shows that the Article has been more honoured in the breach than the observance. The author concludes that the Article is obsolete and antidemocratic. He then outlines some of the procedural difficulties involved in a possible repeal of the Article.

scholarly journals Rhode Island's Tragic Era

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-240
Author(s):  
Charles B. Quirk
Keyword(s):  
Social Responsibility ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
Economic Evolution ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
Interesting Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
Laissez Faire

Summary This article is only a short extract from an interesting study on the employment problems of Rhode Island from 1935-1950; it has as objective to make known to the reader the historical and economic evolution of the textile industry in Rhode Island. The author describes the competition which arose between the North and the South; very unimportant at the beginning, it increased afterwards to take on disastrous proportions and bring about fatal consequences: decrease in productivity, migration of the mills to the South and general unemployment. The history of the textile industry of New England furnishes an example of a system conforming to the "laissez-faire" of free capitalism: the seeking of the highest possible profit without worrying about social responsibility. This system must be subjected to the ethics of business or destroy itself.

scholarly journals Scientific Instruments on the move in the North American Magnetic Survey, 1843-1844

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Matthew Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Survey ◽  
Scientific Instruments ◽  
French Canadian ◽  
British North America ◽  
The North ◽  
Geomagnetic Survey ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Historical Accounts

In 1843-4, John Henry Lefroy conducted a geomagnetic survey of Hudson’s Bay Company territory in British North America. Lefroy and his instruments, guided by French Canadian voyageurs and Indigenous guides moved within the HBC network of forts and outposts. This paper complements and extends historical accounts of Lefroy’s survey by examining how, and how well, Lefroy’s instruments moved on this extensive survey. The recent material turn in the history and historical geography of science provides the framework for a closer reading of the spatial biographies of several of Lefroy’s instruments. Focusing on their varying states of disrepair—and solutions to repair them—this paper not only recaptures the materiality of these instruments, but adds to our understanding of repair and maintenance in the history of survey science. Looking at instruments as objects to be carried and managed also helps illuminate the overlooked role of Indigenous and French Canadian voyageurs in scientific expeditions.

Restorationists and New Movements

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Grass
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Civil War ◽  
New England ◽  
Regional Distribution ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
British North America ◽  
The North

Presbyterians and Congregationalists arrived in colonial America as Dissenters; however, they soon exercised a religious and cultural dominance that extended well into the first half of the nineteenth century. The multi-faceted Second Great Awakening led within the Reformed camp by the Presbyterian James McGready in Kentucky, a host of New Divinity ministers in New England, and Congregationalist Charles Finney in New York energized Christians to improve society (Congregational and Presbyterian women were crucial to the three most important reform movements of the nineteenth century—antislavery, temperance, and missions) and extend the evangelical message around the world. Although outnumbered by other Protestant denominations by mid-century, Presbyterians and Congregationalists nevertheless expanded geographically, increased in absolute numbers, spread the Gospel at home and abroad, created enduring institutions, and continued to dominate formal religious thought. The overall trajectory of nineteenth-century Presbyterianism and Congregationalism in the United States is one that tracks from convergence to divergence, from cooperative endeavours and mutual interests in the first half the nineteenth century to an increasingly self-conscious denominational awareness that became firmly established in both denominations by the 1850s. With regional distribution of Congregationalists in the North and Presbyterians in the mid-Atlantic region and South, the Civil War intensified their differences (and also divided Presbyterians into antislavery northern and pro-slavery southern parties). By the post-Civil War period these denominations had for the most part gone their separate ways. However, apart from the southern Presbyterians, who remained consciously committed to conservatism, they faced a similar host of social and intellectual challenges, including higher criticism of the Bible and Darwinian evolutionary theory, to which they responded in varying ways. In general, Presbyterians maintained a conservative theological posture whereas Congregationalists accommodated to the challenges of modernity. At the turn of the century Congregationalists and Presbyterians continued to influence sectors of American life but their days of cultural hegemony were long past. In contrast to the nineteenth-century history of Presbyterian and Congregational churches in the United States, the Canadian story witnessed divergence evolving towards convergence and self-conscious denominationalism to ecclesiastical cooperation. During the very years when American Presbyterians were fragmenting over first theology, then slavery, and finally sectional conflict, political leaders in all regions of Canada entered negotiations aimed at establishing the Dominion of Canada, which were finalized in 1867. The new Dominion enjoyed the strong support of leading Canadian Presbyterians who saw in political confederation a model for uniting the many Presbyterian churches that Scotland’s fractious history had bequeathed to British North America. In 1875, the four largest Presbyterian denominations joined together as the Presbyterian Church in Canada. The unifying and mediating instincts of nineteenth-century Canadian Presbyterianism contributed to forces that in 1925 led two-thirds of Canadian Presbyterians (and almost 90 per cent of their ministers) into the United Church, Canada’s grand experiment in institutional ecumenism. By the end of the nineteenth century, Congregationalism had only a slight presence, whereas Presbyterians, by contrast, became increasingly more important until they stood at the centre of Canada’s Protestant history.

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