The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism

by George McKenna

2008 · Yale University Press

In this absorbing book, George McKenna ranges across the entire panorama of American history to track the development of American patriotism. That patriotism—shaped by Reformation Protestantism and imbued with the American Puritan belief in a providential “errand”—has evolved over 350 years and influenced American political culture in both positive and negative ways, McKenna shows. The germ of the patriotism, an activist theology that stressed collective rather than individual salvation, began in the late 1630s in New England and traveled across the continent, eventually becoming a national phenomenon. Today, American patriotism still reflects its origins in the seventeenth century. By encouraging cohesion in a nation of diverse peoples and inspiring social reform, American patriotism has sometimes been a force for good. But the book also uncovers a darker side of the nation’s patriotism—a prejudice against the South in the nineteenth century, for example, and a tendency toward nativism and anti-Catholicism. Ironically, a great reversal has occurred, and today the most fervent believers in the Puritan narrative are the former “outsiders”—Catholics and Southerners. McKenna offers an interesting new perspective on patriotism’s role throughout American history, and he concludes with trenchant thoughts on its role in the post-9/11 era.

The Ipswich Emersons. A.D. 1636-1900

by Benjamin Kendall Emerson, George Augustus Gordon

1900

Thomas Emerson was probably born at Sedgefield parish, Durham County, England and immigrated in 1635 to Ipswich, Massachusetts. He died in 1666. Includes Adams, Montgomery and related families.

Abraham Lincoln

by John M. Hay, John George Nicolay

2009 · Cosimo, Inc.

Considered one of the best treatments of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln of its time, this portrait of the man and his administration of the United States at the moment of its greatest upheaval is both intimate and scholarly. Written by two private secretaries to the president and first published in 1890, this astonishingly in-depth work is still praised today for its clear, easy-to-read style and vitality. This new replica edition features all the original illustrations. Volume Two covers: [ the conventions of 1856 [ "Congressional ruffianism" [ Dred Scott [ the Lincoln-Douglas debates [ Lincoln's Ohio speeches [ the Cooper Institute speech [ the presidential election [ beginnings of rebellion [ the "Forty Muskets" [ and much more. American journalist and statesman JOHN MILTON HAY (1838-1905) was only 22 when he became a private secretary to Lincoln. A former member of the Providence literary circle when he attended Brown University in the late 1850s, he may have been the real author of Lincoln's famous "Letter to Mrs. Bixby." After Lincoln's death, Hay later served as editor of the *New York Tribune* and as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom under President William McKinley. American author JOHN GEORGE NICOLAY (1832-1901) was born in Germany and emigrated to the U.S. as a child. Before serving as Lincoln's private secretary, he worked as a newspaper editor and later as assistant to the secretary of state of Illinois. He also wrote *Campaigns of the Civil War* (1881).