The Picky Eagle

Download or read book The Picky Eagle written by Richard W. Maass and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Picky Eagle explains why the United States stopped annexing territory by focusing on annexation's domestic consequences, both political and normative. It describes how the US rejection of further annexations, despite its rising power, set the stage for twentieth-century efforts to outlaw conquest. In contrast to conventional accounts of a nineteenth-century shift from territorial expansion to commercial expansion, Richard W. Maass argues that US ambitions were selective from the start. By presenting twenty-three case studies, Maass examines the decision-making of US leaders facing opportunities to pursue annexation between 1775 and 1898. US presidents, secretaries, and congressmen consistently worried about how absorbing new territories would affect their domestic political influence and their goals for their country. These leaders were particularly sensitive to annexation's domestic costs where xenophobia interacted with their commitment to democracy: rather than grant political representation to a large alien population or subject it to a long-term imperial regime, they regularly avoided both of these perceived bad options by rejecting annexation. As a result, US leaders often declined even profitable opportunities for territorial expansion, and they renounced the practice entirely once no desirable targets remained. In addition to offering an updated history of the foundations of US territorial expansion, The Picky Eagle adds important nuance to previous theories of great-power expansion, with implications for our understanding of US foreign policy and international relations.

Download or read book Four Generations written by Philip Greven and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking study in colonial history, this book gives a remarkably detailed picture of life in an early American community. It focuses on three basic and interrelated subjects largely neglected by historians—population, land, and the family—as they affected the lives of four successive generations. Applying demographic methods to historical research, Professor Greven presents new and unexpected evidence about the most basic aspects of family life in colonial America, and shows how these characteristics changed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Download or read book How Early America Sounded written by Richard Cullen Rath and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early America, every sound had a living, wilful force at its source - sometimes these forces were not human or even visible. The author recreates in detail a world remote from our own, one in which sounds were charged with meaning and power.

Download or read book The United States and International Law written by Lucrecia García Iommi and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2022-07-26 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why U.S. support for international law is so inconsistent

Download or read book Killed Strangely written by Elaine Forman Crane and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It was Rebecca's son, Thomas, who first realized the victim's identity. His eyes were drawn to the victim's head, and aided by the flickering light of a candle, he 'clapt his hands and cryed out, Oh Lord, it is my mother.' James Moills, a servant of Cornell . . . described Rebecca 'lying on the floore, with fire about Her, from her Lower parts neare to the Armepits.' He recognized her only 'by her shoes.'"—from Killed Strangely On a winter's evening in 1673, tragedy descended on the respectable Rhode Island household of Thomas Cornell. His 73-year-old mother, Rebecca, was found close to her bedroom's large fireplace, dead and badly burned. The legal owner of the Cornells' hundred acres along Narragansett Bay, Rebecca shared her home with Thomas and his family, a servant, and a lodger. A coroner's panel initially declared her death "an Unhappie Accident," but before summer arrived, a dark web of events—rumors of domestic abuse, allusions to witchcraft, even the testimony of Rebecca's ghost through her brother—resulted in Thomas's trial for matricide. Such were the ambiguities of the case that others would be tried for the murder as well. Rebecca is a direct ancestor of Cornell University's founder, Ezra Cornell. Elaine Forman Crane tells the compelling story of Rebecca's death and its aftermath, vividly depicting the world in which she lived. That world included a legal system where jurors were expected to be familiar with the defendant and case before the trial even began. Rebecca's strange death was an event of cataclysmic proportions, affecting not only her own community, but neighboring towns as well. The documents from Thomas's trial provide a rare glimpse into seventeenth-century life. Crane writes, "Instead of the harmony and respect that sermon literature, laws, and a hierarchical/patriarchal society attempted to impose, evidence illustrates filial insolence, generational conflict, disrespect toward the elderly, power plays between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, [and] adult dependence on (and resentment of) aging parents who clung to purse strings." Yet even at a distance of more than three hundred years, Rebecca Cornell's story is poignantly familiar. Her complaints of domestic abuse, Crane says, went largely unheeded by friends and neighbors until, at last, their complacency was shattered by her terrible death.

Download or read book Colonial Intimacies written by Ann Marie Plane and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1668 Sarah Ahhaton, a married Native American woman of the Massachusetts Bay town of Punkapoag, confessed in an English court to having committed adultery. For this crime she was tried, found guilty, and publicly whipped and shamed; she contritely promised that if her life were spared, she would return to her husband and "continue faithfull to him during her life yea although hee should beat her againe...."These events, recorded in the court documents of colonial Massachusetts, may appear unexceptional; in fact, they reflect a rapidly changing world. Native American marital relations and domestic lives were anathema to English Christians: elite men frequently took more than one wife, while ordinary people could dissolve their marriages and take new partners with relative ease. Native marriage did not necessarily involve cohabitation, the formation of a new household, or mutual dependence for subsistence. Couples who wished to separate did so without social opprobrium, and when adultery occurred, the blame centered not on the "fallen" woman but on the interloping man. Over time, such practices changed, but the emergence of new types of "Indian marriage" enabled the legal, social, and cultural survival of New England's native peoples. The complex interplay between colonial power and native practice is treated with subtlety and wisdom in Colonial Intimacies. Ann Marie Plane uses travel narratives, missionary tracts, and legal records to reconstruct a previously neglected history. Plane's careful reading of fragmentary sources yields both conclusive and fittingly speculative findings, and her interpretations form an intimate picture, moving and often tragic, of the familial bonds of Native Americans in the first century and a half of European contact.

Download or read book Hot Cheese written by Polina Chesnakova and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turn up the heat, it's time to get cheesy! The cookbook Hot Cheese celebrates the magical combination of heat and cheese in over 50 recipes. Whether melted between crusty bread, baked until browned and bubbly, or fried for the perfect crunch-to-ooze factor, there are limitless ways to enjoy the thrill of hot cheese. • Includes no-fuss snacks, hearty and healthy-ish meals, and party favorites • Features twists on beloved classics and inventive, cheesy combinations • Filled with bright and stylish photography to satisfy any cheese lover Melt over delectable recipes like Easy Poutine, Smoked Gouda Chicken Cordon Bleu, and The Best Nachos in the World. This cheesy cookbook also features handy guides to throwing your own fondue or raclette party. • Filled with plenty of guilty pleasures, kid-friendly recipes, and crowd-pleasers, this is the perfect book for anyone who loves cheese and comfort food. • Good for newbie chefs, parents who cook for picky kids, and hosts who want to serve something they know everyone will enjoy. • You'll love this book if you love books like The Mac + Cheese Cookbook: 50 Simple Recipes from Home by Allison Arevalo and Erin Wade, QUESO! Regional Recipes for the World's Favorite Chile-Cheese Dip by Lisa Fain, and World Cheese Book by Juliet Harbutt.