Why the Fight against Hunger Mattered

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Rachel B. Herrmann

This introductory chapter discusses the important role of hunger during the American Revolution. Enduring, ignoring, creating, and preventing hunger were all ways to exercise power during the American Revolution. Hunger prompted violence and forged ties; it was a weapon of war and a tool of diplomacy. In North America, Cherokee, Creek, Delaware, Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), Miami, and Shawnee Indians grew and destroyed foodstuffs during the Revolutionary War, which forced their British and American allies to hunger with them, and to furnish provisions that accommodated Native tastes. By the 1810s, the United States had learned how to prevent Indian hunger, to weaponize food aid, and to deny Indians the power gained by enduring and ignoring scarcity. Meanwhile, people of African descent gained some power by creating white hunger during the Revolutionary War, but more so as formerly enslaved communities, primarily after leaving the new United States and migrating to British colonies in Nova Scotia and then Sierra Leone. After white officials in Sierra Leone realized that colonists' hunger-prevention efforts gave them too much freedom, black colonists lost their hunger-preventing rights. Ultimately, three key behaviors changed and were, in turn, changed by evolving ideas about hunger: food diplomacy, victual warfare, and victual imperialism.

Author(s):  
Ann Taves

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book analyzes the role of revelatory claims in three groups that emerged in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Mormonism, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the network of students associated with A Course in Miracles. These three case studies are not only richly documented but also present intriguing comparative possibilities. Each had a key figure whose unusual experiences and/or abilities led to the emergence of a new spiritual path and to the production of scripture-like texts that were not attributed directly to them. However, the three groups do not make the same claims for their scripture-like texts, and their respective collaborations generated very different social formations.


Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds

‘An ad hoc navy: the Revolutionary War (1775–1783)’ describes the Patriots’ response to the British Royal Navy strongholds in Boston and New York and the role of armed vessels during the Revolutionary War. It begins with George Washington’s attempts to threaten the British supply line using boats. The Continental Navy was founded on October 13, 1775, but the new program could hardly challenge the Royal Navy. With the exception of John Paul Jones, the Continental Navy proved mostly disappointing. The United States won its independence largely because the determination of the Patriot forces outlasted the British willingness to fight—and to pay for—a war three thousand miles away.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Claire Priest

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the origins of the credit economy in the United States. The British American colonial credit economy must be understood as part of the broader financial revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were many facets to the eighteenth-century economy: from the politics of empire, to the revolution in government finance, to the Atlantic slave trade, to legal reforms related to land. One pivotal moment was Parliament's Stamp Act of 1765, which many historians view as the act that triggered the American Revolution. The book suggests that the legal commodification of land and slaves as collateral and the creation of legal institutions for recording property titles and foreclosing on mortgages and debts were important underpinnings of the future capitalist society.


Author(s):  
Justin du Rivage

This introductory chapter briefly considers why the British American colonists had broken away from an empire that they had long revered. Americans like to think of themselves as fundamentally different from Europeans—both more democratic and more libertarian. But during the eighteenth century, Britain and its North American colonies were actually becoming more alike. However, the United States followed a different path from the dramatic transformation that painted the globe French blue and British red. That path reflected the fact that the American Revolution was a revolution not for or against monarchy, but against the authoritarian transformation of the British Empire.


Author(s):  
Mary Gilmartin ◽  
Patricia Burke Wood ◽  
Cian O’Callaghan

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book addresses three key issues that are central to the current politicisation of migration and citizenship, but that take particular forms in the United Kingdom and the United States. These three issues, each of which is discussed in a separate chapter, are borders and walls, mobility, and belonging. Borders and walls are the material articulation of state boundaries and state sovereignty. The role of borders is increasingly seen as the regulation of the movement of people: facilitating easy movement across borders for some, but making that movement more difficult for most. In contrast, the mobility of capital, through the actions of transnational corporations in particular, receives little attention.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Hume B. Douglas ◽  
Stéphane Dumont ◽  
Karine Savard ◽  
Claude Chantal

Abstract First North American records are presented for Cryptocephalus moraei (Linnaeus, 1758) (Coleoptera: Cryptocephalinae) and Psylliodes dulcamarae (Koch, 1803) (Coleoptera: Galerucinae: Alticini), as confirmed by morphology and DNA barcoding. Additional information is presented about phenology and host use for C. moraei, the first European Cryptocephalinae to be found elsewhere as conclusively adventive. Cryptocephalus moraei is expected to have no ecological impact on its host, the adventive Hypericum perforatum Linnaeus (Hypericaceae). However, P. dulcamarae, the second recently discovered flea beetle associated with the adventive Solanum dulcamara Linnaeus (Solanaceae), probably does harm that host. Both species are hypothesised to have arrived from Europe with woody plant material imported with soil during 1960–1965. A literature review of introduced Chrysomelidae found that Canada and the United States of America are together home to 68–78 species of adventive Chrysomelidae. All non-Bruchinae species among these are both native to Europe and occur either in Canada or both Canada and United States of America, except for intentionally introduced biological control agents and two species that feed on Eucalyptus L’Héritier de Brutelle (Myrtaceae). This suggests a dominant role of accidental introductions of cool-climate European species in recent unplanned additions to the fauna of leaf-feeding Chrysomelidae in North America.


Author(s):  
Sarah H Cleveland ◽  
Paul B. Stephan

This introductory chapter serves as a foreword for the volume. It sketches the history of past restatements and the evolution of the latest one. The first (confusingly called Second) Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States brought widespread attention to the term “foreign relations law.” It staunchly defended the proposition that foreign relations, no matter how imbued with discretion and prerogative, still must rest on law. The Third Restatement, prepared during a period of what to many seemed constitutional retrenchment and a loosening of judicial supervision over public life, offered a robust defense of the proposition that, “In conducting the foreign relations of the United States, Presidents, members of Congress, and public officials are not at large in a political process; they are under law.” Moreover, it insisted that the judiciary, as much as the executive and Congress, creates and enforces this law. To the extent that the Third Restatement rested its claims on its view of the state of customary international law, other influential actors pushed back. The Fourth Restatement revisits the Third’s claims, especially about the central role of the judiciary, in light of the evolution of both U.S. and international law and practice.


Author(s):  
Udi Greenberg

This introductory chapter discusses Germany's transition from a racist dictatorship into a liberal democracy. Having fought for the Nazi regime with ferocity throughout the war, Germans performed a volte-face and, within just a few years, embraced democracy. With astonishing speed, this previously polarized and violent society developed democratic institutions, electoral organs, the rule of law, vibrant democratic norms, and an active participatory public. Two explanations have been given for Germany's rapid change. One credits the decisive role of the United States and its heavy investment in the postwar reconstruction of Germany's political institutions, economy, and educational system. In contrast, a second interpretation of Germany's transformation sees it primarily as the work of Germans. Many historians argue that Germans embraced democracy primarily because of postwar domestic conditions and experiences.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-133
Author(s):  
E. Charles Nelson

In the 1790s, newspapers in Britain, Ireland and the United States carried brief reports about the activities of Maurice Spillard, described as a “celebrated English pedestrian traveller”. Spillard, who may have been Irish, served in the British forces during the American Revolutionary War in the late 1770s. His exploits as a “pedestrian” were reported to have included botanical and geographical exploration, particularly in eastern and central North America including the Mississippi and Missouri basins, in which he was improbably linked with Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Spillard's botanical collections (including seeds and living plants), if they existed, were reported to have been seized by French privateers, resulting in a decree by the French Minister for the Navy requesting the safe return of this property. Spillard had contacts in London, including with the publisher Cadell & Davies, who paid an advance to Spillard. Said to have died in Dublin in 1800, Spillard reappeared in Paris in 1802, when his claims were refuted by Milfort Tastenagy (Jean-Antoine Le Clerc), and the “pedestrian traveller” was shown up as a fraud.


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