Search results for ""Author Norman K. Risjord""

Populists and Progressives, Norman K Risjord's next book in the Representative Americans series, gives readers a fascinating glimpse into the tumultuous turn of the twentieth century. Risjord brings together brief biographies to explore the political, social, and cultural dimensions of the period from 1890–1920. The work begins by personifying the rise of big business and the early struggle between capital and labor with profiles of John D. Rockefeller and Mother Jones. Next, a comparison of William Graham Sumner and Lester Frank Ward illuminates the intellectual debate over social Darwinism. The Great Plains’ form of Populism comes to life through the story of William Peffer, while Louis Brandeis represents the Wilsonian variety of Progressivism. A portrait of Carrie Chapman Catt provides a window into the women's suffrage movement and sketches of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Richard Harding Davis, and John Hay explore the shaping of American policies and politics. Finally, John Muir, W.E.B. DuBois, and Margaret Sanger represent individuals ahead of their time and mark the transition from Progressivism to the liberal thought of the latter half of the twentieth century.

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In 1700, Maryland's new capital at Annapolis was a hamlet in a wilderness whose shoreline looked, according to one new arrival, "like a forest standing in water." By the middle of the 18th century a remarkable collection of men and women had made it into "one of the most sparkling communities in British America."

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Americans in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were a people with boundless energy capable of heroic deeds, monumental achievements, and tragic errors. In The Civil War Generation, his newest volume in The Representative Americans series, noted scholar Norman K. Risjord uses biographical sketches to create a composite portrait of the United States during and immediately after the Civil War. Risjord begins his study with Stephen A. Douglas and Frederick Douglass, who provide two different viewpoints on the events leading to the conflict, while Harriet Tubman represents a form of social activism during the same years. Profiles of Stonewall Jackson and William Tecumseh Sherman, as well as infantryman James Anderson, give the reader an insightful view of the men fighting the war. Risjord then leads the reader inside both the Northern and Southern governments as well as the Reconstruction Era through the eyes of people such as William H. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens. Looking at the postwar period, Risjord examines the social and economic changes the conflict wrought, describing the lives of Clara Barton and Cornelius Vanderbilt. As the nation's eyes turned westward, the tragic tale of Crazy Horse unfolds, as well as the chronicle of two of the first scientists to explore the new land. Masterfully written and eminently readable, The Civil War Generation brings to life one of our nation's most turbulent decades and will be of great value to students of the Civil War.

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