Land Of Liberty Research Articles

"Is This the Land of Liberty?": Continental Soldiers and Slavery in the Revolutionary South

Late in the War for Independence, Continental soldiers from New England and mid-Atlantic regiments traveled through unfamiliar southern states. As they campaigned in Virginia and the Carolinas, these outsiders commented on enslavers and enslaved people in their letters and journals—and later in their memoirs. Existing scholarship has incorrectly connected these wartime observations by outsiders with the rising antislavery sentiments of the revolutionary era. Though some northern soldiers did note regional differences in slavery with surprise and disapproval, these reactions were not static. What they chose to record was powerfully shaped by the state of the war; their relationships with inhabitants, white and Black; and the expectations for the texts in which they penned these observations. These soldiers' writings about slavery changed as their relationships with southern inhabitants evolved. They embraced their white countrymen and either erased Black Virginians who sought freedom with the British or raged against Black men whom the British armed in South Carolina. Rather than cleanly connecting with the first wave of gradual emancipations, Continental soldiers' writings highlight how co-opting outsiders, agnostic or naive about intensive exploitation of enslaved people, proved a component of white Americans' nationalist project in the revolution.

Of 'Rage of Party' and the Coming of Civility

Of 'Rage of Party' and the Coming of Civility

Telling Stories of Freedom of the Press

Telling Stories of Freedom of the Press R. B. Bernstein (bio) Richard Kluger. Indelible Ink: The Trials of John Peter Zenger and the Birth of America's Free Press. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. xxi + 346 pp. Acknowledgments, Note on Sources, Notes, Selected Bibliography, Image Credits, Index. $27.95. Wendell Bird. Press and Speech under Assault: The Early Supreme Court Justices, the Sedition Act of 1798, and the Campaign against Dissent. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xli + 522 pp. Abbreviated Title List, Index. $74.00. The rhetoric of liberty and freedom pervades American political talk. Sometimes it lurks beneath the surface of other issues, and other times it has pride of place. In either case, that rhetoric gives rise to a perennial American habit—telling and retelling stories about liberty and freedom in American history. Like the recounting each year of the Passover story at Seders around the world, these stories of liberty remind and reassure us that America is a land of liberty, that we must never take our liberties for granted, and that retellings of how our liberties were won or nearly lost should inspire us to remain vigilant in defense of them. The books under review retell old stories in different ways and for different purposes. In Indelible Ink, Richard Kluger has written a familiar account of the Palatine printer John Peter Zenger, whose travails in New York in the 1730s as criminal defendant and persecuted printer built an imperishable monument to our reverence for freedom of the press. Kluger's purpose is to spur us, by invoking Zenger's example, to stand forth again in defense of press freedoms in an era when they are newly besieged. By contrast, in Press and Speech under Assault, Wendell Bird has given us a formidably researched and challenging account of the Sedition Act of 1798, its precedents, its uses, and its complicated relationship with the common law so often cited as justification for it. Kluger's well-crafted narrative tells us what we already know. By contrast, Bird's dense and powerful monograph warns us that we have been misled and that we ought to know far more, and it deduces conclusions radically different from those that we have often been told to draw. Bird's purpose is [End Page 565] to challenge the power of conventional understandings and to bring needed complexity and nuance to that task. Kluger is a prolific independent scholar whose works include Simple Justice (1975), The Paper (1986), and Ashes to Ashes (1996). His latest book, Indelible Ink, retells the story of John Peter Zenger, his newspaper the New-York Weekly Journal, and the efforts of colonial authorities to suppress it and to silence him and his political backers. Framing their story within concentric historical and modern contexts, Kluger insists that it is essential for modern readers to understand the value of press freedoms; the ways in which today they are threatened by such forces as market pressures, fear of terrorism, and governmental demands to protect national security; and, most important, how these modern threats were all implicit in the Zenger story nearly three centuries ago. Kluger's Preamble, "The Essential Liberty," begins constructing that modern frame for his historical story, eloquently extolling the value and necessity of press freedom; his Epilogue, "From Zenger to Snowden," completes that frame, drawing explicit links between past and present. Within that frame, Kluger recounts, with detail not found in previous versions of the story, Zenger's origins and career before he came to New York; his alliance with the political faction led by the prominent New York politician Lewis Morris; his collaboration with the Morrisites in creating a newspaper that became a powerful force challenging the colony's political establishment led by Royal Governor William Cosby; and his becoming the focus of the dispute between the Morrisites and the Cosbyites. The climax of Kluger's story is the prosecution by New York authorities of Zenger for the crime of seditious libel (punishing criticism of government or public officials), and the dramatic appearance at a critical moment in Zenger's trial of the great Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton, who took over Zenger's...

"The Land of Liberty": Henry Bibb's Free Soil Geographies

"The Land of Liberty": Henry Bibb's Free Soil Geographies

Crossing cultural frontiers: representations of the Amish in American culture

The paper deals with the typology of Amish fiction, representations of the Amish in literature, and the roles of authors, publishers and readers. Special attention is dedicated to the role of film directors as cultural travellers when crossing cultural frontiers by entering the Amish cultural milieu. The paper also presents a more critical view of the Amish by demonstrating how the perception of the Amish groups has changed with time - from victims of religious persecution in their homeland to becoming highly romanticised people in the Land of Liberty via literature and film.

Empire for Liberty. A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz; Imperium. Geschichte und Theorie eines politischen Systems; Demokratie und Imperium. Die Vereinigten Staaten zwischen Fundamentalismus, Liberalismus und Populismus

Empire for Liberty. A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz; Imperium. Geschichte und Theorie eines politischen Systems; Demokratie und Imperium. Die Vereinigten Staaten zwischen Fundamentalismus, Liberalismus und Populismus

Book Review: Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North

Book Review: Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North

Love of freedom: black women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England

Introduction 1. Stolen from Angola 2. Conditions of Life 3. Property and Patriarchy 4. Spiritual Thirsting 5. Going Abroad and Idling Her Time 6. Possession of Her Liberty 7. Land of Liberty

Review: Greg Burgess, Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and its Refugees, from the Revolution to the End of Asylum, 1787—1939, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2008; 287 pp.; 9780230507753, £55.00 (hbk)

Review: Greg Burgess, Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and its Refugees, from the Revolution to the End of Asylum, 1787—1939, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2008; 287 pp.; 9780230507753, £55.00 (hbk)

Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and its Refugees, from the Revolution to the End of Asylum, 1787-1939. By Greg Burgess.

Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and its Refugees, from the Revolution to the End of Asylum, 1787-1939. By Greg Burgess.

Relating the Civil Rights and Community Organizing Movements

Seligman's article asserts that Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty brings many strands together in a single narrative of the struggles of northern African Americans to combat discrimination in the twentieth century. By discovering the breadth of racial exclusion in the north and linking activists with diverse agendas and strategies, Sugrue does an important scholarly service. He particularly emphasizes the significance of actors—especially women—at the grassroots, who pushed the NAACP to pursue legal cases it might not have otherwise taken. Seligman's writes that the book, however, largely follows the traditional line of civil rights movement historiography in recognizing which areas were targets of urban activism: housing, education, and employment. If Sugrue had investigated the breadth of causes that African American community organizations were involved with, the book would have been much richer and much longer. Sweet Land of Liberty opens up the question of the relationship between the civil rights movement and the community organizing movement but does not close it.

Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and Its Refugees, from the Revolution to the End of Asylum, 1787–1939. By Greg Burgess. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. x+287. $69.95.

<i>Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and Its Refugees, from the Revolution to the End of Asylum, 1787–1939</i>. By Greg Burgess. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. x+287. $69.95.

Still Shackled in the Land of Liberty

The troubled-teen industry has come under federal scrutiny after over a decade of reported abuses and the reported deaths of at least 10 children. This article provides a brief overview of the development of the troubled-teen industry, addresses the thorny issue of parents' right to send their children to these facilities vis-a-vis the rights of their children, and argues that nurses and other health professionals have a collective obligation to speak out against them in the strongest possible terms. Suggestions for action by nurses are proposed that could protect vulnerable children against this continuous cycle of institutionalized child abuse masquerading as therapy.

Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and its Refugees, from the Revolution to the end of Asylum, 1787–1939 By Greg Burgess

<i>Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and its Refugees, from the Revolution to the end of Asylum, 1787–1939</i> By Greg Burgess

Refuge in the land of liberty: France and its refugees, from the Revolution to the end of asylum, 1787-1939

France has a long tradition of asylum for refugees. Since the Revolution, this has made it the land of liberty (pays de la liberte) and the land of asylum (la terre d'asile). In practice, responses have been shaped less by principle than by political and social conditions. Various refugee movements - from the late eighteenth-century Lowlands, to Spanish and Italian liberals in the 1820s, Polish nationalists in the 1830s. German social revolutionaries of 1848-9, anti-Bolsheviks from the Russian Revolution, Christians from the former Ottoman Empire, and Jews from Nazi Germany - have met with mixed responses, which shifted uneasily between sympathy, principle, pragmatism, and open hostility. This book examines the tensions between refugee rights and political responses to refugees, and between humanitarian concern for their plight and hostility to their imposition on the state. Increasingly punitive measures against refugees saw, in 1939, the end of asylum in the internment of republican exiles from the Spanish Civil War.

The Overlooked Jewish Identity of Roy Cohn in Kushner's “Angels in America”: American Schmucko

Hannah Arendt, describing the marginalization of as outside society first articulated this liminal space which exposes them to suspicion, hostility, and discrimination (70; Ginsberg 7). The land of liberty, indeed, proved no different in its treatment of Jews. By the mid twentieth century, American achieved, at best, a tenuous stance in both political and cultural American life. Successive waves of anti-Semitism, particularly in the 1930s and 1950s, periodically resurged as if to test Jewish loyalty to the American way of life.1 These waves primarily served to attack liberal regimes: anti-Semitism was used, in part, to delegitimate liberal democracy by exposing it as a creature of, or cover of, the Jews (Ginsberg 6). Of the 1930s wave, political members of the right crudely renamed the New Deal the Jew Deal, in an anti-Semitic attempt to discredit Roosevelt's policies. Writing of the years before Pearl Harbor and American participation in World War II, Morton Horwitz notes anti-Semitism's increase in volume and virulence as well; between Charles

GREG BURGESS, Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and its Refugees, from the Revolution to the End of Asylum, 1787-1939

GREG BURGESS, Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and its Refugees, from the Revolution to the End of Asylum, 1787-1939

Sons of Providence: the Brown brothers, the slave trade, and the American Revolution

In 1774, as the new world simmered with tensions that would lead to the violent birth of a new nation, two Rhode Island brothers were heading toward their own war over the issue that haunts America to this day: slavery.Set against a colonial backdrop teeming with radicals and reactionaries, visionaries, spies, and salty sea captains, of is the biography of John and Moses Brown, two classic American archetypes bound by blood yet divided by the specter of more than half a million Africans enslaved throughout the colonies. John is a profit-driven robber baron running slave galleys from his wharf on the Providence waterfront; his younger brother Moses is an idealist, a conscientious Quaker hungry for social reform who -- with blood on his own hands -- strikes out against the hypocrisy of slavery in a land of liberty. Their story spans a century, from John's birth in 1736, through the Revolution, to Moses' death in 1836. The brothers were partners in business and politics and in founding the university that bears their name. They joined in the struggle against England, attending secret sessions of the Sons of Liberty and, in John's case, leading a midnight pirate raid against a British revenue cutter. But for the Browns as for the nation, the institution of slavery was the one question that admitted no middle ground. Moses became an early abolitionist while John defended the slave trade and broke the laws written to stop it. The brothers' dispute takes the reader from the sweltering decks of the slave ships to the taverns and town halls of the colonies and shows just how close America came to ending slavery eighty years before the conflagration of civil war. Thisdual biography is drawn from voluminous family papers and other primary sources and is a dramatic story of an epic struggle for primacy between two very different brothers. It also provides a fresh and panoramic view of the founding era. Samuel Adams and Nathanael Greene take turns here, as do Stephen Hopkins, Rhode Island's great revolutionary leader and theorist, and his brother Esek, first commodore of the United States Navy. We meet the Philadelphia abolitionists Anthony Benezet and James Pemberton, and Providence printer John Carter, one of the pioneers of the American press. For all the chronicles of America's primary patriarch, none documents, as this book does, George Washington's sole public performance in opposition to the slave trade.Charles Rappleye brings the skills of an investigative journalist to mine this time and place for vivid detail and introduce the reader to fascinating new characters from the members of our founding generation. Raised in a culture of freedom and self-expression, Moses and John devoted their lives to the pursuit of their own visions of individual liberty. In so doing, each emerges as an American archetype -- Moses as the social reformer, driven by conscience and dedicated to an enlightened sense of justice; John as the unfettered capitalist, defiant of any effort to constrain his will. The story of their collaboration and their conflict has a startlingly contemporary feel. And like any good yarn, the story of the Browns tells us something about ourselves.

A "Segregated" Asia?: Race, the Bandung Conference, and Pan-Asianist Fears in American Thought and Policy, 1954-1955

Writing in a March 1927 editorial for the Negro World, Amy Jacques Garvey conjectured that a “guilty conscience [had] begun to torture the white race. They foresee in awakened Asia the stern hand of retribution preparing to return measure for measure all that it has received. They are in the throes of a horrid nightmare. … The cycle of civilization is shifting, and with it the battleground of the future. The age of the Atlantic has passed, the age of the Pacific is here.” With the coming of Pacific dominance, the “superior force of Asiatic arms,” aroused against Western influence, could eventually be turned against the United States. In such circumstances, Garvey asked, would fifteen million oppressed American Negroes “say that the Asiatics are wrong to demand racial equality, or will they sing, ‘My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty’?” Although there was a future possibility that the United States might offer a hand of friendship to China, she was not optimistic the racial divide between the white and nonwhite worlds could be bridge...

A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727, by Julian Hoppit

<i>A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727</i>, by Julian Hoppit