William H. Cook, of the village of Ticonderoga, exemplified the strong, high-minded farmer of the nineteenth century. Devoted to his only son, Joseph, William's one consuming desire was to see that this boy should have an education with the best. Although it meant years of financial sacrifices for the old farmer, Joseph was sent to the finest schools: Phillips Andover, Yale, Harvard, and universities in Germany.After twenty years of education, Joseph became famous as the "Boston Monday Lecturer," whose talks on subjects ranging from theology and science to current events and world history attracted thousands of listeners every week and were reprinted in newspapers around the world. His lecture tours took him around the world and his books became bestsellers in their day. After leaving home at the age of thirteen, Joseph only returned to Ticonderoga infrequently. But father and son kept in close touch by letter over a thirty-year period.In Letters of a Ticonderoga Farmer (first published by Cornell in 1946), Frederick G. Bascom has made selections from their correspondence between 1851 and 1885, which together present a delightful running narrative of both William's day-to-day life in nineteenth-century upstate New York, revealing a shrewd yet generous nature and a homely genius, and Joseph's experiences in higher education and as a celebrity. Letters from Joseph's mother to her son, though fewer in number, round out the portrait of both farm and family life in this period.Introduced and lightly annotated by Bascom, these letters continue to offer useful and charming insights into the social history of upstate New York, from economic and industrial developments to local politics and religious controversies, as well as offering much human interest and considerable local color.

Between 1865 and 1920, Congress passed laws to regulate obscenity, sexuality, divorce, gambling, and prizefighting. It forced Mormons to abandon polygamy, attacked interstate prostitution, made narcotics contraband, and stopped the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Gaines Foster explores the force behind this unprecedented federal regulation of personal morality--a combined Christian lobby. Foster analyzes the fears of appetite and avarice that led organizations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the National Reform Association to call for moral legislation and examines the efforts and interconnections of the men and women who lobbied for it. His account underscores the crucial role white southerners played in the rise of moral reform after 1890. With emancipation, white southerners no longer needed to protect slavery from federal intervention, and they seized on moral legislation as a tool for controlling African Americans. Enriching our understanding of the aftermath of the Civil War and the expansion of national power, Moral Reconstruction also offers valuable insight into the link between historical and contemporary efforts to legislate morality.

Finalist for the 2022 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Biography Category One hundred fifty years ago, the Adirondack Mountains were overrun. Thousands of middle-class urbanites from Boston and New York City abandoned the comfort of their homes and rushed into the unknown, northern wilderness, believing they would find great restorative and even curative powers. These would-be adventurers were informed by one man, William Henry Harrison Murray, a preacher from Boston. A Passionate Life is the first comprehensive biography of Murray, a man who has been described as the father of the American outdoor movement and the modern vacation. While he is best known for his promotion of the Adirondacks in the late nineteenth century, Murray was a complex character who was driven to promote his many passions. From the 1860s until his early twentieth-century death, Murray was a famous preacher, popular writer and lecturer, an equine enthusiast, patent owner, publisher, businessman, lumberman, temperance advocate, free lover, women's rights advocate and advocate for educational reform. In many ways, Murray's passions followed the progressive movements within nineteenth-century America and attempted to address questions still relevant to today's society.

Who uses "skeeter hawk," "snake doctor," and "dragonfly" to refer to the same insect? Who says "gum band" instead of "rubber band"? The answers can be found in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS), the largest single survey of regional and social differences in spoken American English. It covers the region from New York state to northern Florida and from the coastline to the borders of Ohio and Kentucky. Through interviews with nearly twelve hundred people conducted during the 1930s and 1940s, the LAMSAS mapped regional variations in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation at a time when population movements were more limited than they are today, thus providing a unique look at the correspondence of language and settlement patterns. This handbook is an essential guide to the LAMSAS project, laying out its history and describing its scope and methodology. In addition, the handbook reveals biographical information about the informants and social histories of the communities in which they lived, including primary settlement areas of the original colonies. Dialectologists will rely on it for understanding the LAMSAS, and historians will find it valuable for its original historical research. Since much of the LAMSAS questionnaire concerns rural terms, the data collected from the interviews can pinpoint such language differences as those between areas of plantation and small-farm agriculture. For example, LAMSAS reveals that two waves of settlement through the Appalachians created two distinct speech types. Settlers coming into Georgia and other parts of the Upper South through the Shenandoah Valley and on to the western side of the mountain range had a Pennsylvania-influenced dialect, and were typically small farmers. Those who settled the Deep South in the rich lowlands and plateaus tended to be plantation farmers from Virginia and the Carolinas who retained the vocabulary and speech patterns of coastal areas. With these revealing findings, the LAMSAS represents a benchmark study of the English language, and this handbook is an indispensable guide to its riches.

In the 1870s and 1880s, Joseph Cook was a fiery young congregational minister in the industrial town of Lynn, Massachusetts. His extraordinarily successful series of "music hall" lectures on factory reform and industrialism earned him renown as an articulate spokesman for the troubled middle class in the industrializing Northeast. The lectures touch on such topics as child labor, social control, urbanization, the theater and the press—with Cook always vehemently opposing the evils of the factory system. The first full-length study contains these fascinating lectures, as well as responses to them by the manufacturers and the community. They are presented in the context of the changing times in which they originated.

"How We Are Changed by War examines the changes to Americans during wartime through the medium of their diaries and correspondence, beginning with the colonial period of the early seventeenth century, and ending with diaries and letters from Iraq War veterans. The book clearly discusses and describes the universal themes of war such as reintegration to society and the horrors of war through private writings regardless of the narrator's historical era. This allows the writers to "speak" to each other across time to reveal a profound commonality of cultural experience." "How We Are Changed by War is a fascinating look at the writings of individuals who served their military in different eras, and a great example of how history is shaped by both memory and experience."--Jacket.

Kidnapping was a lucrative crime in antebellum America, and many American citizens—especially free blacks—were abducted for profit. This book reveals the untold stories of the captured. The story of Solomon Northup, subject of the Academy Award-winning best picture 12 Years a Slave, is representative of the deplorable treatment many African Americans experienced in the period leading up to the Civil War. This book examines antebellum kidnapping, delving into why and how it occurred, and illustrating the active role the U.S. government played in allowing it to continue. It presents case studies of dozens of victims' experiences that illustrate a grim and little-remembered chapter in American history. David Fiske's Solomon Northup's Kindred reveals the abhorrent conditions and greed that resulted in the kidnapping of American citizens. Factors like early fugitive slave laws, the invention of the cotton gin, the 1808 ban on importing slaves into the United States, and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision made these crimes highly profitable. Fiske sheds much-needed light on the practice of kidnapping, explaining how it was carried out, identifying conditions that allowed kidnappers to operate, and describing methods for combating the crime. He offers dozens of case studies along with documentation from across historical newspaper reports, anti-slavery literature, local history books, and academic publications to provide an accurate account of kidnapping crimes of the time.

Includes Part 1, Books, Group 1 (1946)