Suchergebnisse

Jeremiah Reynolds and the empire of knowledge -- The United States exploring expedition as Jacksonian capitalism -- The United States exploring expedition in popular culture -- The Dead Sea expedition and the empire of faith -- Proslavery explorations of South America -- Arctic exploration and US-UK rapprochement.

Introduction: America's Business with China -- Founding a Free, Trading Republic -- The Paradox of a Pacific Policy -- Troubled Waters -- Sovereign Rights, or America's First Opium Problem -- The Empire's New Roads -- This Slave Trade of the Nineteenth Century -- A Propped-Open Door -- Death of a Trade, Birth of a Market.

"Is marriage a privilege or a right? A sacrament or a contract? Is it a public or a private matter? Where does ultimate jurisdiction over it lie? And when a marriage goes wrong, how do we adjudicate marital disputes-particularly in the usual circumstance, where men and women do not have equal access to power, justice, or even voice? These questions have long been with us because they defy easy, concrete answers. Kirsten Sword here reveals that contestation over such questions in early America drove debates over the roles and rights not only of women but of all unfree people. Sword shows how and why gendered hierarchies change-and why, frustratingly, they don't"--

Overviews. A tour of the province: October 18, 1769 ; Illness in the "social credit" and "money" economies of eighteenth-century New England --- Competency. Family competency: scenes from the life course of illness ; Household competency: work, responsibility, and belonging -- Dependency. Smallpox, public health, and town governance ; The domestic costs of war: wartime afflictions -- Agency. Colonial pensioners, the revolutionary invalid corps, and the advent of "decisive disability" ; State paupers and patients -- Epilogue.

The early modern marketplace and its colonial encounter:A journey through early modern trading spaces --The market turned upside down --Remaking the marketplace:Making a colonial marketplace --The resurgence of early modern market value --Confronting the colonial marketplace:Revolution in the marketplace --Making a republican marketplace --Conclusion.Constitution making and the marketplace --Epilogue.The colonial marketplace's American legacy.

The elusive sovereign -- Paper money and the problem of circulation in the colonial era -- John Wise and the natural law of commerce -- William Douglass and the natural history of credit -- Commercial banking and the problem of representation in the Jacksonian era -- William Leggett and the melodrama of the market -- Nicholas Biddle and the beauty of banking -- Big business and the problem of association in the Gilded Age and progressive era -- Charles Macune and the currency of cooperation -- Charles Conant and the fund of trust -- Conclusion: the magician's glass

Contents -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Archival Sources -- Introduction -- Part I. Revolution: Philadelphia, 1769 -- 1. Custom Houses, Negotiated Authority, and the Bonds of Empire, 1714-1776 -- Part II. Revenue and Empire: Bermuda Hundred, 1795 -- 2. Political Economy and the Making of the Customs System -- 3. Negotiating Authority in Federalist America, 1789-1800 -- Part III. Revenue and Crisis: Baltimore, 1808 -- 4. Commerce or War? -- 5. Jefferson's Embargo and the Era of Commercial Restrictions, 1807-1815 -- Part IV. Reform: Boston, 1817 -- 6. Dismantling Discretion, 1816-1828 -- Epilogue: Charleston, 1832 -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Index.

"In the wake of the American Revolution, if you had asked a citizen whether his fledgling state would survive more than two centuries, the answer would have been far from confident. The problem, as is so often the case, was money. Left millions of dollars of debt by the war, the nascent federal government created a system of taxes on imported goods and installed custom houses at the nation's ports, which were charged with collecting these fees. Gradually, the houses amassed enough revenue from import merchants to stabilize the new government. But, as the fragile United States was dependent on this same revenue, the merchants at the same time gained outsized influence over the daily affairs of the custom houses. As the United States tried to police this commerce in the early nineteenth century, the merchants' stranglehold on custom house governance proved to be formidable. In National Duties, Gautham Rao makes the case that the origins of the federal government and the modern American state lie in these conflicts at government custom houses between the American Revolution and the presidency of Andrew Jackson. He argues that the contours of the government emerged from the push-and-pull between these groups, with commercial interests gradually losing power to the administrative state, which only continued to grow and lives on today."--Provided by publisher.

Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first to draw attention to Americans' propensity to form voluntary associations--and to join them with a fervor and frequency unmatched anywhere in the world. For nearly two centuries, we have sought to understand how and why early nineteenth-century Americans were, in Tocqueville's words, "forever forming associations." In The Making of Tocqueville's America, Kevin Butterfield argues that to understand this, we need to first ask: what did membership really mean to the growing number of affiliated Americans? Butterfield explains that the first generations of American citizens found in the concept of membership--in churches, fraternities, reform societies, labor unions, and private business corporations--a mechanism to balance the tension between collective action and personal autonomy, something they accomplished by emphasizing law and procedural fairness. As this post-Revolutionary procedural culture developed, so too did the legal substructure of American civil society. Tocqueville, then, was wrong to see associations as the training ground for democracy, where people learned to honor one another's voices and perspectives. Rather, they were the training ground for something no less valuable to the success of the American democratic experiment: increasingly formal and legalistic relations among people.