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Author
Series
History of the United States 2nd Edition volume 38
Language
English
Description
This episode highlights the failure of national institutions to push compromise on slavery and its extension into the territories. It also emphasizes the Dred Scott case of 1857, debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, and the impact of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. These controversies helped set the stage for the breakup of the Union in 1860-1861.
Author
Series
History of the United States 2nd Edition volume 39
Language
English
Description
Deep South states seceded in response to Lincoln's election, but only the crisis at Fort Sumter in April 1861 convinced the Upper South to secede. A range of opinion existed in most slaveholding states regarding secession. This episode also describes the formation of the Confederate States of America.
Author
Series
America's Founding Fathers volume 22
Language
English
Description
First, examine hurdles to electing George Washington as the first president of the United States. Then, follow the story of how the Constitution finally got its Bill of Rights, and how this task was undertaken by the one man who most vehemently opposed such a bill: James Madison.
Author
Series
History of the United States 2nd Edition volume 40
Language
English
Description
This episode stresses that either side could have won the Civil War and offers a careful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses each brought to the early stages of the fight. The war mushroomed from a limited military contest at the time of First Bull Run in July 1861 into a massive struggle by the time of Shiloh and the Seven Days battles in the spring and early summer of 1862.
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
The broad stretch of coastal territory between the Chesapeake and Long Island had been settled by the Swedes along the Delaware Bay and the Dutch along the Hudson River. Dutch settlements (renamed New York) developed into a major commercial center. Quaker William Penn's Pennsylvania emerged, by the 1750s, with a commercial aristocracy similar to that of New England.
Author
Series
History of the United States 2nd Edition volume 21
Language
English
Description
In 1812, Madison sent a request to Congress for a declaration of war, but the War of 1812 was a debacle. In October 1814, the Massachusetts legislature passed a peace resolution and threatened secession from the Union. Only the signing of the Treaty of Ghent at the end of 1814 ended talk of a New England separatist movement.
Author
Series
History of the United States 2nd Edition volume 30
Language
English
Description
Jackson's Democrats thought of freedom as the privilege to be wealthy, and that liberty was a negative, not positive, idea. Blaming Martin van Buren for the depression, voters elected William Henry Harrison as the first Whig president. But Harrison died a month after inauguration; his vice president, John Tyler, was an old-line Democrat who promptly reinstalled the Jackson agenda.
Author
Series
History of the United States 2nd Edition volume 27
Language
English
Description
By 1824, Jefferson's Republican Party was becoming two parties: the National Republicans and the Democratic-Republicans. John Quincy Adams, the heir apparent, was unmistakably a National Republican. The most unpredictable candidate was Andrew Jackson. He swept the popular vote, but his 99 electoral votes did not constitute a majority of the 216 electoral votes cast.
Author
Series
America's Founding Fathers volume 17
Language
English
Description
It was Rufus King who, at the debates, questioned the admission of slaves into the rule of representation. First, explore the dissonance between liberty and slavery in the new United States. Then, come to see how Rufus King predicted the angry tiger slavery would become in America.
Author
Series
America's Founding Fathers volume 12
Language
English
Description
One speech by William Paterson, a member of the New Jersey delegation, halted the Randolph Plan from sailing smoothly to adoption. What were Paterson's arguments? Why did he support a simple amendment to the Articles of Confederation instead of a rewrite? What did his alternative plan look like?
Author
Series
History of the United States 2nd Edition volume 81
Language
English
Description
Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential race but was presented with an ugly combination of economic stagnation and inflation (stagflation), the Iranian revolution, and the Tehran hostage crisis. Ronald Reagan escalated the Cold War by planning space-based weapons, and aimed to diminish the reach of the federal government. His masterful use of the media made him a popular president.
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
If the southern English colonies were motivated by economic self-interest, the northern settlements were motivated by ideas. In New England's case, the ideas were religious. The "godly commonwealth" of the first Puritans was succeeded by the same slow tendency toward aristocracy, based on transatlantic commerce rather than commodities, that characterized Virginia.
Author
Series
America's Founding Fathers volume 19
Language
English
Description
One day after the Constitutional Convention ended, the document was printed in 500 copies by John Dunlap and David Claypoole and shared with the general public. What happened next? How did George Washington use a cover letter to mitigate shock? How did the Founders brace themselves for the inevitable state conventions?
Author
Series
America's Founding Fathers volume 34
Language
English
Description
Explore the court of Chief Justice John Marshall. In major court cases like Marbury v. Madison and McCulloch v. Maryland, Marshall would devise a national judicial sovereignty to match the constitutional and economic sovereignty envisioned by Madison and Hamilton, and to save the United States from Jacobin Republicanism.
Author
Series
America's Founding Fathers volume 23
Language
English
Description
As the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton had the responsibility of handling the new nation's foreign, state, and domestic debts. In this episode, learn how Hamilton saw debt not as a problem but an asset, and discover how he argued for the establishment of a national bank.
Author
Series
America's Founding Fathers volume 21
Language
English
Description
The fate of the new constitution depended on the state ratifying conventions. And because Virginia's consent was necessary to make the overall ratification process work, neutralizing Patrick Henry was the Federalists' most important task. Go inside the battleground of the ratifying convention at Richmond on June 2, 1788.
Author
Series
America's Founding Fathers volume 20
Language
English
Description
Chief Justice John Marshall would call the Federalist Papers the "complete commentary on our constitution." Here, Professor Guelzo explains the daring act of aggression these landmark political writings were, and outlines the six themes Hamilton (under the pseudonym "Publius") believed would demonstrate the indispensability of the new constitution.
Author
Series
History of the United States 2nd Edition volume 32
Language
English
Description
The sense that the American Republic represented the vanguard of a new age of freedom spawned campaigns to advance American perfection and freedom. Their common message was one of optimism, but it carried the threat that a democracy would find itself incapable of achieving stability. Alexis de Tocqueville, in "Democracy in America," gave a favorable reading to the American future.
Author
Series
History of the United States 2nd Edition volume 23
Language
English
Description
By the 1820s, immigrants flowed through America's seaports from Europe; and with the clearance of Indian resistance, the Northwest Territory was opened by massive government land sales. Many emigrants, however, chose to stay in the cities they first entered, and their numbers soon swelled the size of the American urban population.
Author
Series
America's Founding Fathers volume 29
Language
English
Description
Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer presented Americans at the end of the 18th century as a people unlike any other nation. From this starting point, explore the demographics of the early United States, witness the early stirrings of abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, and probe America's cultural fear of strangers.
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