Taylor, Alan. William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early Republic. New York: Random House, Inc., 1995.
A book review by Jonesia Wilkins
When writing William Cooper's Town, Alan Taylor connects local history with widespread political, economic, and cultural patterns in the early republic, appraises the balance of the American Revolution as demonstrated by a protrusive family's background, and merge the history of the frontier settlement with the visualizing and reconstituting of that experience in literature. Taylor achieves these goals through a vivid and dramatic coalescing of narrative and analytical history. His book will authoritatively mandate and regale readers in many ways, especially for its convincing and memorable representation of two principles subjects- William Cooper, the frontier entrepreneur and town builder, and his youngest son, the theoretical James Fenimore Cooper, who molded his own novelistic portrayal of family history through accounts such as The Pioneers (1823).
While William Cooper's Town is ready in approach, its fluid and expeditious-paced narrative is virtually relentless in fixating on one major theme: the pursuit of ostentatious status in a republic that subscribed to democratic values but remained bound by hierarchical conceptions of gregarious worth from the colonial history. Building the story around the terms "ascent," "potency," and "legacies," Taylor reflects William Cooper's elevate from penuriousness and ambiguity to great wealth an influence and conclusively his frivoling away of the family fortune through a accumulation of restless overreaching, transgression, and transmuting economic circumstances beyond his control. Cooper's goal of perpetuating his estat...
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...ved sister Hannah in a horse-riding contingency and how her recollection influenced the depiction of the female character in The Pioneers Taylor disputes Cooper's assertion in the 1830s that his novel ha to with his family, attributing this denial to the novelist's discomfort with the authenticity of a boisterous, democratic Cooperstown at odds with the harmonious and deferential Templeton of fiction.
Alan Taylor has written the book, William Cooper's Town so affluent in texture and implicative insinuation that it is arduous to do it justice in any brief review. His work defies simple categorization as it moves in a seamless manner between William Cooper's world and that of his novelist son. Taylor deserves the highest accolade for availing us to rethink the nature of the historians art while conveying us to a particular frontier of the early American republic.
A review of his methodology shows the time and energy that entering this book. He uses a variety of sources for his research and evidence of good sources such as newspapers; memoirs; diaries; census figures; real estate listings; private letters and documents; journals and memoirs; public records and statements; the federal and local
The Frontier Thesis has been very influential in people’s understanding of American values, government and culture until fairly recently. Frederick Jackson Turner outlines the frontier thesis in his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”. He argues that expansion of society at the frontier is what explains America’s individuality and ruggedness. Furthermore, he argues that the communitarian values experienced on the frontier carry over to America’s unique perspective on democracy. This idea has been pervasive in studies of American History until fairly recently when it has come under scrutiny for numerous reasons. In his essay “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”, William Cronon argues that many scholars, Turner included, fall victim to the false notion that a pristine, untouched wilderness existed before European intervention. Turner’s argument does indeed rely on the idea of pristine wilderness, especially because he fails to notice the serious impact that Native Americans had on the landscape of the Americas before Europeans set foot in America.
West, Elliott, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, (University Press of Kansas,
The Jamestown Project discusses the monumental landmark, the colony of Jamestown, was in Atlantic History. The story of Jamestown is told in a much more authentic, elaborate style than our textbooks has presented. As Kupperman points out, Jamestown was not only important to United State’s history but also to British history. From the motivations to the lasting effects, she gives an accurate account of all components involved in Jamestown. Also, there is a chapter devoted to the Native American experience, which shows a non-Western view of events. The book is written in a format that is easily read but also compacted with information. More importantly she puts Jamestown in its right place in United State’s and British history, as the foundation of colonial United States and the British Empire.
The book starts out with a chapter called “Over the Mountains”, which in my opinion for this chapter the author wanted the reader to understand what it was like to live on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains. This is where he brings out one of the main characters in this book, which is Henry Brackenridge. Mr. Brackenridge is a cultivated man in Pittsburgh. He was wealthy and he was there to ratify the Constitution. He was a Realist. He was a college friend of James Madison at College of New Jersey. He was also in George Washington’s post as a chaplain for the Revolutionary War. He believed that Indians needed to be assimilated into the American culture. “… ever to be converted into civilized ways, their legal rights were to be protected” (Hogeland 19). He will become one of the leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion.
Edward, Rebecca and Henretta, James and Self, Robert. America A Concise History. 5th ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2012.
Frontier in American History is divided in two major parts each with an introduction. The first part claims that the gradual settlement of the west is what forms American History. In the following four paragraphs the frontier is explained in details. The frontier is viewed as a moving belts
Erik Larson’s novel is to be considered “new” because he offers the public two completely different stories of events that each occurred during the years 1891-1894 in the White City; Chicago, Illinois.
William Bradford and John Smith’s two pieces both convey America as a place to escape the European world but completely fail to contain congruency on what early America was like in this time period.
While literary critics and historians alike have thoroughly examined the influence of Samuel Langhorne Clemens’ Missouri boyhood and foreign travels on his writing, scholars outside of Western New York consistently overlook the importance of the eighteen months he spent in Buffalo from August 1869 to March 1871. Though a Buffalo resident for the past twenty years, I was also only vaguely aware that Clemens passed through until Dr. Walter Sharrow of the Canisius College History Department mentioned his local stay.
Roark, James L. et al., eds. The American Promise: A Compact, Vol. I: To 1877. 3rd edition. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.
To understand Jackson’s book and why it was written, however, one must first fully comprehend the context of the time period it was published in and understand what was being done to and about Native Americans in the 19th century. From the Native American point of view, the frontier, which settlers viewed as an economic opportunity, was nothin...
The works of Bradstreet, Adams and Wheatley in a sense distill the hardness of colonial life, though each having come from various degrees of perceived privilege at the time. Each had a unique existence in the life of the prevailing culture, though the subject and intended audience of the writing of each tends to put into focus the narrative of the times but addressed to an intimate. In reading all three, it was quite evident that the personal struggles for first survival, followed by recognition from their inner circle, combining these two into a commentary on the larger world. Wheatley speaking of her experience as a house slave, herself a revolutionary and first lady, and Bradstreet speaking to being a new immigrant settler. Out of these three writers Adams is the only one who had been born in the colonies, the other two were brought.
"Chapter 2 Western Settlement and the Frontier." Major Problems in American History: Documents and Essays. Ed. Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, Edward J. Blum, and Jon Gjerde. 3rd ed. Vol. II: Since 1865. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2012. 37-68. Print.
In “ A Description of New England ”, Smith starts by describing the pleasure and content that risking your life for getting your own piece of land brings to men. On the other hand, Bradford reminds us how harsh and difficult the trip to the New World was for the p...