Search results for ""Author Joyce Appleby""

At a time when public commemorations and remembrances often develop into battlefields of contested meanings, historians play an even greater role in shaping the way the American public sees and understands its past. Distinguished historian Joyce Appleby has been at the forefront of many of the recent debates about historians and the public's history. In this engaging work, she brings together her most important reflections on the historian's craft and its importance. A Restless Past carefully examines the ways in which the dynamic events of the second half of the twentieth century have significantly altered the way historians approach the past and highlights the incredible power they hold in shaping a national identity. Through the considerable ideological shifts of the last half century, historians have responded by asking new questions about those who preceded us and created powerful identities for those who had been long ignored.

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An engrossing history of the voyages of exploration that ignited curiosity about nature and gave birth to modern science.

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When Columbus first returned to Europe from the Caribbean, he presented King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella with exotic parrots, tropical flowers and bits of gold. The search for riches spurred Columbus and others to voyage the oceans with similar ambitions and these seafarers continued to return with mysterious specimens encountered in the New World. Curiosity began to percolate through Europe. The Church, long fearful of challenges to its authority, could no longer suppress the mantra "Dare to know!" Recounting the triumphs and mishaps of these explorers, Joyce Appleby’s book follows the naturalists, both famous and obscure, whose investigations of the world’s fauna and flora fuelled the rise of science and technology that propelled Western Europe towards modernity.

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Seven distinguished historians explain how a national political culture developed in America. A political culture is both the collectivity of a community's values and a mode of behavior—an end as well as a process of obtaining that end which is always changing. J.G.A. Pocock examines how Americans wrote their own history rather than relying on others. Jack Greene shows how British institutions and the common law were modified by unique colonial American experiences. Richard Vernier suggests that the economic crises of the mid-1780s resulted in the triumph of a national fiscal policy enunciated by Alexander Hamilton. Andrew Robertson demonstrates how election rituals transformed the American political culture of deference into an expanded, abstract world of electoral opinion knit together by newspapers. Joyce Appleby examines the importance of literacy to the exchange of ideas that created a national political culture. She also highlights the importance of volunteer associations to effect social and economic reform in America (including the abolition of slavery). Lawrence Goldman's case study of the National Reform Association, a nineteenth-century group of radical workers, describes how the reform movement's advocacy of cheap land led to the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. Rebecca Starr uses South Carolina to illustrate how the South developed its own political culture by the end of the eighteenth century that persisted well beyond the Civil War.

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