Reginald Horsman

Reginald Horsman's powerful and comprehensive survey of the early years of the American Republic covers the dramatic years from the setting up of the US Constitution in 1789, the first US presidency under George Washington, and also the presidencies of Adams, Jeffersen and Madison. A major strength of the book is that the coverage of the traditional topics about the shaping of the new government and crisis in foreign policy is combined with chapters on race, slavery, the economy and westward expansion, revealing both the strengths and weaknesses of the government and society that came into being after the Revolution.Key features include:Combines extensive research with the best recent scholarship on the periodA balanced account of the contributions of the leading personalitiesImpressive coverage is given to questions of race and territorial expansionChapter One provides a concise and lucid account of the state of American politics and society in 1789Extensive chapter bibliographiesThe work will be welcomed by students studying the early republic as well as general readers interested in a stimulating and informative account of the early years of the American nation.

When settlers began advancing across North America, they endured great hardships but for the most part did not go hungry. With a seemingly inexhaustible supply of wildlife and an abundance of vegetation, even the poorest lived comfortably.""Feast or Famine"" is the first comprehensive account of food and drink in the winning of the West, describing the sustenance of successive generations of western pioneers. Drawing on journals of settlers and travelers - as well as a lifetime of research on the American West - Reginald Horsman examines more than one hundred years of history, from the first advance of explorers into the Mississippi valley to the movement of ranchers and farmers onto the Great Plains, recording not only the components of their diets but food preparation techniques as well.Most settlers were able to obtain food beyond the dreams of ordinary Europeans, for whom meat was a luxury. Not only were buffalo, deer, and wild turkey there for the taking, pioneers also gathered greens such as purslane, dandelion, and pigweed - as well as wild fruits, berries, and nuts. They replaced sugar with wild honey or maple syrup, and when they had no tea, they made drinks out of sage, sassafras, and mint. Horsman also reveals the willingness of Indians to convey their knowledge of food to newcomers, sharing salmon in the Pacific Northwest, agricultural crops in the arid Southwest.Horsman tells how agricultural expansion and transportation opened a veritable cornucopia and how the development of canning soon made it possible for meals to transcend simple frontier foods, with canned oysters and crystallized eggs in airtight cans on merchants' shelves. He covers food on different regional frontiers, as well as the cuisines of particular groups such as fur traders, soldiers, miners, and Mormons. He also discusses food shortages that resulted from poor preparation, temporary scarcity of game, marginal soil, or simply bad luck. At times, as with the ill-fated Donner Party, pioneers starved.Engagingly written and meticulously researched, ""Feast or Famine"" is a one-of-a-kind look at a subject too long ignored in histories of the West. By revealing the spectrum of frontier fare across years and regions, it shows us that the land of opportunity was often a land of plenty.

Reginald Horsman's powerful and comprehensive survey of the early years of the American Republic covers the dramatic years from the setting up of the US Constitution in 1789, the first US presidency under George Washington, and also the presidencies of Adams, Jeffersen and Madison. A major strength of the book is that the coverage of the traditional topics about the shaping of the new government and crisis in foreign policy is combined with chapters on race, slavery, the economy and westward expansion, revealing both the strengths and weaknesses of the government and society that came into being after the Revolution.Key features include:Combines extensive research with the best recent scholarship on the periodA balanced account of the contributions of the leading personalitiesImpressive coverage is given to questions of race and territorial expansionChapter One provides a concise and lucid account of the state of American politics and society in 1789Extensive chapter bibliographiesThe work will be welcomed by students studying the early republic as well as general readers interested in a stimulating and informative account of the early years of the American nation.

This is the biography of William Beaumont, a 19th century doctor whose pioneering research on human digestion gained him international renown as a physiologist. The book details his medical career in the army, his experiments and research, and his publications.

-Horsman has effectively analyzed American policy during a critical period. Throughout there are two themes: feuding between the national government and the states over who would formulate and execute Indian policy; and the contrast between the humanitarian instincts frequently moticating policy makers in the national capital and the injustice that the Indians experienced on the frontier....Much of his book deals with how the United States government tried to reconcile the 'Spirit of '76'with the land hunger of aggressive frontiersmen.----Journal of Southern History

American myths about national character tend to overshadow the historical realities. Reginald Horsman’s book is the first study to examine the origins of racialism in America and to show that the belief in white American superiority was firmly ensconced in the nation’s ideology by 1850.The author deftly chronicles the beginnings and growth of an ideology stressing race, basic stock, and attributes in the blood. He traces how this ideology shifted from the more benign views of the Founding Fathers, which embraced ideas of progress and the spread of republican institutions for all. He finds linkages between the new, racialist ideology in America and the rising European ideas of Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and scientific ideologies of the early nineteenth century. Most importantly, however, Horsman demonstrates that it was the merging of the Anglo-Saxon rhetoric with the experience of Americans conquering a continent that created a racialist philosophy. Two generations before the “new” immigrants began arriving in the late nineteenth century, Americans, in contact with blacks, Indians, and Mexicans, became vociferous racialists.In sum, even before the Civil War, Americans had decided that peoples of large parts of this continent were incapable of creating or sharing in efficient, prosperous, democratic governments, and that American Anglo-Saxons could achieve unprecedented prosperity and power by the outward thrust of their racialism and commercial penetration of other lands. The comparatively benevolent view of the Founders of the Republic had turned into the quite malevolent ideology that other peoples could not be “regenerated” through the spread of free institutions.

The origins of the War of 1812 have long been a source of confusion for historians, owing to the lack of attention that has been paid to England's part in precipitating the conflict and to the overemphasis placed on "western expansionist" factors. This volume offers the first analysis of the causes of the war from both the British and American points of view, showing clearly that, contrary to the popular misconception, the war's basic causes are to. be found not in America but in Europe. For unless one accepts the view that America committed an act of pure aggression in 1812, one must turn to the motives underlying British policy to deter­mine why America felt it had to fight. In the years immediately preceding the war (1803-1812), England was dominated by a faction that pledged itself not only to defeat Napoleon but also to maintain British commercial supremacy. The two main points of contention between England and America during this period-impress­ment and the restrictions imposed by the Orders in Council-were direct results of these commitments. America finally had no alternative but to oppose with force British maritime policy, which, although partly caused by jealousy of American commercial growth, stemmed in large measure from involvement in total war with France. In addition to tracing the gradual drift to war in America, Reginald Horsman shows that the Indian problem and American expansionist designs against Canada played small part in bringing about the struggle. He examines the efforts made by America to avoid conflict through means of economic coercion, efforts whose failure confronted the nation with two choices: war or submission to England. Since the latter alternative presented more terrors to the recent colonists, America went to war.