Showing results by author "Carol Berkin" in All Categories

In these moving stories of Angelina Grimke Weld, wife of abolitionist Theodore Weld; Varina Howell Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis; and Julia Dent Grant, wife of Ulysses S. Grant, Carol Berkin reveals how women understood the cataclysmic events of their day. Their stories, taken together, help reconstruct the era of the Civil War with a greater depth and complexity by adding women's experiences and voices to their male counterparts.

The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American, and Carol Berkin shows us that women played a vital role throughout the struggle. Berkin takes us into the ordinary moments of extraordinary lives. We see women boycotting British goods in the years before independence, writing propaganda that radicalized their neighbors, raising funds for the army, and helping finance the fledgling government. We see how they managed farms, plantations, and businesses while their men went into battle.

From the award-winning historian: the remarkable life of "the most beautiful woman of 19th-century Baltimore", whose marriage in 1803 to Jérôme Bonaparte, the youngest brother of Napoleon, became inextricably bound to the diplomatic and political 19th-century histories of the United States, France, and England.

Revered today for articulating America's founding principles, the first 10 amendments - the Bill of Rights - were in fact a political stratagem executed by James Madison to preserve the Constitution, the federal government, and the latter's authority over the states.

We know - and love - the story of the American Revolution, from the Declaration of Independence to Cornwallis' defeat. But our first government was a disaster, and the country was in a terrible crisis. So when a group of men traveled to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to save a nation in danger of collapse, they had no great expectations for the meeting that would make history.

This talk puts to rest another of the remarkable myths of the American Revolution: that it was an all-male affair. An 8-year home front war and American women didn't notice it? In fact, the politicization of women in the 1760s and 1770s is one of the most striking consequences of the rebellion against British rule. Women made the boycotts of British imports work. They picketed merchants who dared to sell British cloth and tea. They produced homespun or Liberty cloth as they called it - willingly engaging in the single most boring task known to colonial America.

Most of us know that America's Founding Fathers attended the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia and drafted the Constitution of the United States. The delegates decided to replace the Articles of Confederation with a document that strengthened the federal government, with the most contentious issue being legislative representation. Eventually, a compromise established the bicameral Congress to ensure both equal and proportional representation. But a lot more happened as well - much of it underreported or misunderstood.

How George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams navigated the nation through four major crises and caused the first stirrings of American nationalism.