Hasil Pencarian  ::  Simpan CSV :: Kembali

"Most Americans believe that the Ohio River was a clearly defined and static demographic and political boundary between freedom and slavery, indeed between North and South, an extension of the Mason-Dixon Line and a border that produced the war. None of this is true, except perhaps the outcome of war. But the centrality of the Civil War and its outcome in the making of these tropes is undeniable. This interpretation leaves no room for the third of the nations major nineteenth-century regions: the West. Ironically, the wars central figure, Abraham Lincoln, was a lifelong resident of this regions middle border-the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri and of the free states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas-lying astride not one but two fault lines of that war, east and west and north and south. The Rivers Ran Backward contests the assumption that regional identities throughout these states were stable in the era of the civil war. Across the middle border, the war left an indelible imprint on the way in which residents thought of themselves and other Americans, proving as much a shaper as a product of regional identities. The book explains how the Civil War and its aftermath transformed a regional political culture into the cultural politics of region, creating perhaps the wars greatest irony: that the victorious North created a larger, more enduring South than the defeated Confederacy could accomplish for itself, and that former western neighbors created a border between them after the fact."

"In the mid-1970s, a group of politically conservative lawyers formed a network of nonprofit, public-interest law firms and began to challenge liberal government in the courts. These attorneys tried to defend property rights, commercial use of public lands, federalism, and economic freedom by litigating cases in law. Then, during the 1980s, they worked on similar legal and policy issues within the administration of President Ronald Reagan. This book explains why conservatives expended so much political and financial capital battling the regulatory state, especially on questions of environmental protection and preservation. It explains the importance of the American West to the development of modern US conservatism. And it explains how some of the key accomplishments of the civil rights movement were reinterpreted and appropriated by the libertarian right."