Sublime

Later John Locke, also a Scot, would secularize the covenant idea into a “contract,” the social contract, whereby individuals sacrifice their liberty only through consent. An insidiously effective example, the US economic system, was based on Locke’s theories.14

Historian Albert L. Hurtado describes the impact of Sutter on the region, in particular the bell he used to summon Indians to work: Sutter’s bell heralded the arrival of a modern sense of time in the Sacramento Valley… Now, for at least part of their lives, some Indians were wedded to a concept that proclaimed that time was limited and that it had

THE BLACK COMMUNITY ON BEALE STREET in Memphis dates back to the Civil War. By the first decade post-emancipation, twenty Black-owned businesses and a freedman’s bank graced the district. Black people were excluded from Main Street by law and custom. Beale Street was it. There they could buy food and clothes, as well see medical professionals. By

Just prior to the start of the Civil War, enslaved people accounted for 55 percent of the value of personal property in Middle Tennessee. The area held nearly 308,000 inhabitants, or 28 percent of the state’s total population, and about four in ten residents were enslaved. When the state lifted its ban on the import of enslaved people in 1855,

The Clotilda’s group of Africans lived on the margins of Mobile life during the first half of the 1860s. After the war ended, however, and they found they could not get back across the ocean to Benin, the Africans founded their own colony, Africatown, in a clearing in the middle of a pine forest just north of Mobile. Cudjo Lewis was one of the

For generations, historians argued whether the Civil War was primarily about slavery or was rather a showdown between competing economic systems. More recent historiography has shown how deeply Republican antislavery was intertwined with the Whig prodevelopment project. Republicans took economic independence as a prerequisite for political

Princeton University’s first graduate student, future president James Madison, brought one slave with him to campus and another to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The latter he had to free: all that talk of liberty had ruined him, a poison to the rest of the plantation. He took the former home with him.

In their eyes, reform was entirely enlightened policy, and in advocating it, they repeatedly invoked the rhetoric of "freedom," "modernity," and "liberty."

“achieving a better life