Books by "James J. Gigantino II"
3 books found
Drawing on vivid contemporary accounts, this is a fascinating exploration of how and why the Revolutionary War descended into a brutal existential struggle.
Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person attained the status, and the particular privileges citizenship afforded. Indeed, as late as 1862, U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates observed that citizenship was "now as little understood in its details and elements, and the question as open to argument and speculative criticism as it was at the founding of the Government." Black people suffered under this ambiguity, but also seized on it in efforts to transform their nominal freedom. By claiming that they were citizens in their demands for specific rights, they were, Christopher James Bonner argues, at the center of creating the very meaning of American citizenship. In the decades before and after Bates's lament, free African Americans used newspapers, public gatherings, and conventions to make arguments about who could be a citizen, the protections citizenship entailed, and the obligations it imposed. They thus played a vital role in the long, fraught process of determining who belonged in the nation and the terms of that belonging. Remaking the Republic chronicles the various ways African Americans from a wide range of social positions throughout the North attempted to give meaning to American citizenship over the course of the nineteenth century. Examining newpsapers, state and national conventions, public protest meetings, legal cases, and fugitive slave rescues, Bonner uncovers a spirited debate about rights and belonging among African Americans, the stakes of which could determine their place in U.S. society and shape the terms of citizenship for all Americans.
1782---George Washington “I demand the guilty—Cap Lippicott” “that villain Moody” The American Revolution is America’s first Civil War. “Loyalists’—those in the American colonies loyal to the British Crown and the colonial governments—see the self-styled “Patriots” as traitorous Rebels. Communities, even families, are split into two hostile warring camps. “The Monmouth Manifesto” takes you into this seldom-seen Loyalist world in a novel based on true historical characters and events. Two New Jersey farmers—Richard Lippincott, a modest Quaker, and James Moody, an alpha Anglican—become unlikely friends in a Loyalist regiment in the British Army and see all kinds of action against the Rebels, from pitched battles and guerrilla warfare to highjackings and kidnappings. And there are Reprisals, like extrajudicial hangings of both Loyalists and, fatefully, Patriots. Their daring deeds in New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia draw the wrath of General George Washington, whose famous stoic calm is shattered by his explosive anger, which leads to one of his worst decisions and an international incident—the Asgill Affair—that embarrasses his ally, the King of France himself. Their loved ones suffer too, as Lippincott and Moody come to pay the price for their courage on the wrong side of historyˆ—loss of their farms, broken homes, brutal prison confinements, a murder trial and the prospect of refugeedom.