This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1887 edition. Excerpt: ...build up a faith which should command their actions? Certainly not; they valued gold and silver only for their beauty, not for intrinsic worth. The national character had adapted itself to local circumstances, not been formed by them. As it is thus evident that the Northern and Southern aborigines were descendants of a widely difierent stock, the question is, on what nation of Asia might the latter, with some degree of credibility, make out a case of afliliation? Am I too fanciful in discovering numerous aflinities between the characteristics, moral and personal, of this race and the Chinese, weakened to their present degree of faintness by time and the distance of their transit, which might have taken place after some rebellion, when a leader and his party were expatriated. The nations have at least these features in common--configuration of countenance, worship of the sun, a love of congregating in cities, and an ingenuity in various arts arising from their social relations. Some of the principal Indian antiquities--with the general character of which most are acquainted--are to be found at Marietta, where a square area of forty acres is enclosed by a firm wall of peculiarly cemented earth, ten feet high, which has three openings at equal distances on each side. Similar constructions are to be seen on the banks of the Muskingum, where the ramparts are upwards of eighteen feet in height, and on a hill near the Tioga River, where the defences are surrounded by an entrenchment and various pits, which had evidently been dug and covered over to receive assailants--all attesting ingenuity and the existence of system---besides the sculpture of human and animal heads, helmets, spears, etc., on rocks in various parts of the country. The...

In 1711, the imperious Virginia patriarch William Byrd II spitefully refused his wife Lucy's plea for a book; a century later, Lady Jean Skipwith placed an order that sent the Virginia bookseller Joseph Swan scurrying to please. These vignettes bracket a century of change in white southern women's lives. Claiming the Pen offers the first intellectual history of early southern women. It situates their reading and writing within the literary culture of the wider Anglo-Atlantic world, thus far understood to be a masculine province, even as they inhabited the limited, provincial social circles of the plantation South.Catherine Kerrison uncovers a new realm of female education in which conduct-of-life advice—both the dry pedantry of sermons and the risqué plots of novels—formed the core reading program. Women, she finds, learned to think and write by reading prescriptive literature, not Greek and Latin classics, in impromptu home classrooms, rather than colleges and universities, and from kin and friends, rather than schoolmates and professors. Kerrison also reveals that southern women, in their willingness to "take up the pen" and so claim new rights, seized upon their racial superiority to offset their gender inferiority. In depriving slaves of education, southern women claimed literacy as a privilege of their whiteness, and perpetuated and strengthened the repressive institutions of slavery.

In They Will Have Their Game, Kenneth Cohen explores how sports, drinking, gambling, and theater produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions in early America. Pairing previously unexplored financial records with a wide range of published reports, unpublished correspondence, and material and visual evidence, Cohen demonstrates how investors, participants, and professional managers and performers from all sorts of backgrounds saw these "sporting" activities as stages for securing economic and political advantage over others. They Will Have Their Game tracks the evolution of this fight for power from 1760 to 1860, showing how its roots in masculine competition and risk-taking gradually developed gendered and racial limits and then spread from leisure activities to the consideration of elections as "races" and business as a "game." The result reorients the standard narrative about the rise of commercial popular culture to question the influence of ideas such as "gentility" and "respectability," and to put men like P. T. Barnum at the end instead of the beginning of the process, unveiling a new take on the creation of the white male republic of the early nineteenth century in which sporting activities lie at the center and not the margins of economic and political history.