The history of the meat packing industry of the Midwest offers an excellent illustration of the growth and development of the economy of that major industrial region. In the course of one generation, meat packing matured from a small-scale, part-time activity to a specialized manufacturing operation. Margaret Walsh's pioneering study traces the course of that development, shedding light on an unexamined aspect of America's economic history. As the Midwest emerged from the frontier period during the 1840s and 1850s, the growing urban demand for meat products led to the development of a seasonal industry conducted by general merchants during the winter months. In this early stage the activity was widely dispersed but centered mainly along rivers, which provided ready transportation to markets.The growth of the railroads in the 1850s, coupled with the westward expansion of population, created sharp changes in the shape and structure of the industry. The distinct advantages of good rail connections led to the concentration of the industry primarily in Chicago, but also in St. Louis and Milwaukee. The closing of the Mississippi River during the Civil War insured the final dominance of rail transport and spelled the relative decline of such formerly important packing points as Cincinnati and Louisville.By the 1870s large and efficient centralized stockyards were being developed in the major centers, and improved technology, particularly ice-packing, favored those who had the capital resources to invest in expansion and modernization. By 1880, the use of the refrigerated car made way for the chilled beef trade, and the foundations of the giant meat packing industry of today had been firmly established.Margaret Walsh has located an impressive array of primary materials to document the rise of this important early industry, the predecessor and in many ways the precursor of the great industrial complex that still dominates today's midwestern economy.

In classical mythology Astraea, the goddess of justice, chastity, and truth, was the last of the immortals to leave Earth with the decline of the ages. Her return was to signal the dawn of a new Golden Age. This myth not only survived the Christian Middle Ages but also became a commonplace in the Renaissance when courtly poets praised their patrons and princes by claiming that Astraea guided them. The literary cult of Astraea persisted in the sixteenth century as writers saw in Elizabeth I of England the imperial Astraea who would lead mankind to peace through universal rule.This and other late flowerings of the Astraea myth should not be taken as the final phases of her history. Frederick A. de Armas documents in this book what may well be the last great rebirth of Astraea, one that is probably of greater political, religious, and literary significance than others previously described by historians and literary critics. The Return of Astraea focuses on the seventeenth-century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and analyzes the deity's presence in thirteen of his plays, including his masterpiece, La Vida es Sueho.Her popularity in this period is partially attributed to political motives, reflecting the aspirations and fears of the Spanish monarch Philip IV. In this broad study, grounded on such diverse fields as astrology, iconography, history, mythology, and philosophy, de Armas explains that Astraea adopts many guises in Calderón's dramas. Ranging from the Kabbalah to Platonic thought and from satires on Olivares to cosmogonic myths, he analyzes and reinterprets Calderón's theater from a wide range of perspectives centered on the playwright's utilization of the myth of Astraea. The book thus represents a new view of Calderón's dramaturgy and also documents the popularity and significance of this astral-imperial myth during the Spanish Golden Age.

In 1981, a Right Wing Republican at long last resided in the White House, presiding over what may prove to be the most fundamental restructuring of American political life since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Fortunately, The Republican Right since 1945 now provides us with the necessary historical understanding of conservative Republicans. David Reinhard's dispassionate yet lively book recounts the Republican Right's political struggles from the death of FDR in 1945 to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.Younger readers will discover that Right Wing Republicans are older than Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater and that some conservative Republicans once feared the overextension of American power abroad and the rise of the "garrison state" at home. Those old enough to remember when the Republican Right was called the "Old Guard" will rediscover the events and personalities of those earlier years, thanks to Reinhard's use of more than thirty five manuscript collections and the most recent historical writing.Not content to let this history end where traditional manuscript sources run thin, Reinhard has brought the story of the Republican Right Wing forward to President Ronald Reagan's inauguration, placing Right Wing Republican reaction to the Johnson and the Nixon-Ford years within the context of the earlier period and chronicling the electoral triumph of Ronald Reagan and the Republican Right. Students of the past and observers of the present will appreciate Reinhard's treatment of the always-troubled Nixon-Republican Right association; challenger Ronald Reagan's battle against President Gerald Ford in 1976; the decline of GOP moderation; and the rise of the New Right-Moral Majority forces and their relationship to the now ascendant Republican Right.Reinhard illuminates the conservative Republican past and thereby makes the current political scene more understandable. Thoroughly researched and brilliantly written, The Republican Right since 1945 will fascinate scholars and general readers alike.

This powerful book reminds us of the enormous power the nation accords its political leaders and how in the significant period, 1897--1913, these leaders failed to meet their responsibilities. Their inadequacies, the authors feel, delayed the administration of justice for all citizens, neglected the Negro, and seriously impaired the future effectiveness of their own once viable, successful, and justly proud Republican Party.The authors follow the maneuvers of McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Senators Aldrich, Platt, Allison, and Spooner, and House Speaker "Uncle" Joe Cannon as they juggled pressing domestic questions, perpetuating themselves in power without really confronting the public need. From the outset, when the party came into power in 1897 under remarkably auspicious circumstances, until it met final defeat at the hands of Woodrow Wilson in 1912, the Republican leaders laid a foundation by default for the Democratic return to power. Their neglect of major national problems afforded the Democrats a golden opportunity to appropriate those issues as their own.

The correspondence of John Peale Bishop and Allen Tate, extending from 1929 to the time of Bishop's death in 1944, embraces the period of the Great Depression and the coming of World War II. In that richly eventful period in the development of American literature, these two men of letters were continually exchanging news and comment about the activities, opinions, successes, and misadventures of poets, novelists, critics, publishers, and editors; about expatriate Americans in Europe and the quickening intellectual life of New York; and about the Agrarian movement and what was later to be called the Southern Renascence. Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Katherine Anne Porter, Maxwell Perkins, Hart Crane, Malcolm Cowley, Scott Fitzgerald -- all are subjects of comment, both personal and artistic. The respect and affection of both writers for Edmund Wilson survived their vehement political differences with him, and their exchange of literary criticism, advice, and encouragement with Wilson continued unabated.The letters record a warm and steady friendship, as well as a literary relationship in which Tate -- though the younger man -- is clearly the mentor. The freedom with which Tate and Bishop discuss their work in progress, and the care and candor with which they comment on one another's poems and stories, offer the reader of this carefully edited correspondence revealing glimpses of the creative process and the reality of the American "republic of letters" in their time.

This perceptive, carefully documented study challenges the traditional assumption that the supernatural virtually disappeared from eighteenth-century poetry as a result of the growing rationalistic temper of the late seventeenth century. Mr. Morris shows that the religious poetry of eighteenth-century England, while not equaling the brilliant work of seventeenth-century and Romantic writers, does reveal a vital and serious effort to create a new kind of sacred poetry which would rival the sublimity of Milton and of the Bible itself. Tracing the major varieties of religious poetry written throughout the century -- by major figures and by their now vanished contemporaries -- the author explains how later poets and critics made significant departures from the established norms. These changes in religious poetry thus become a valuable means of understanding the shift from a neoclassical to a Romantic theory of literature.

Shakespeare's plays were not always the inviolable texts they are almost universally considered to be today. The Restoration and eighteenth century committed what many critics view as one of the most subversive acts in literary history -- the rewriting and restructuring of Shakespeare's plays.Many of us are familiar with Nahum Tate's "audacious" adaptation of King Lear with its resoundingly happy ending, but Tate was only one of a score of playwrights who adapted Shakespeare's plays. Between 1660 and 1777, more than fifty adaptations appeared in print and on the stage, works in which playwrights augmented, substantially cut, or completely rewrote the original plays. The plays were staged with new characters, new scenes, new endings, and, underlying all this novelty, new words.Why did this happen? And why, in the later eighteenth century, did it stop? These questions have serious implications regarding both the aesthetics of the literary text and its treatment, for the adaptations manifest the period's perceptions of Shakespeare. As such, they demonstrate an important evolution in the definition of poetic language, and in the idea of what constitutes a literary work.In The Re-Imagined Text, Jean I. Marsden examines both the adaptations and the network of literary theory that surrounds them, thereby exploring the problems of textual sanctity and of the author's relationship to the text. As she demonstrates, Shakespeare's works, and English literature in general, came to be defined by their words rather than by the plots and morality on which the older aesthetic theory focused -- a clear step toward our modern concern for the word and its varying levels of signification.

During the 1960s, a number of Kentuckians recognized the need to collect and disseminate the official record of the governors of the Commonwealth. Their efforts culminated in the creation of the Kentucky Advisory Commission on Public Documents, which recommended the publication of this series.This volume is designed to provide a convenient record of the Nunn administration. It is a selective collection of documents emanating from Governor Nunn's office, consisting mainly of public addresses which best reflect the concerns of that administration. Included in this volume is an appendix that provides a complete listing of speeches delivered by Governor Nunn during his four-year term of office.

This volume presents the most important public papers of Bert T. Combs during the four years he served as governor of Kentucky. Arranged chronologically, the papers reveal the policy of the Combs administration as it evolved in the early years of the 1960s and show how the governor dealt with varying concurrent problems. Although this collection is not intended as a definitive statement of the Combs administration, it provides important source material that will enable historians to study the broad spectrum of issues faced by the people of the Commonwealth at a time when considerable government-inspired change was occurring.John Ed Pearce has provided a perceptive introductory essay to the volume. The appendix offers a complete listing of speeches delivered by Governor Combs during his term of office.

A stereotypical image of manumission is that of a benign plantation owner freeing his slaves on his deathbed. But as Stephen Whitman demonstrates, the truth was far more complex, especially in border states where manumission was much more common.Whitman analyzes the economic and social history of Baltimore to show how the vigorous growth of the city required the exploitation of rural slaves. To prevent them from escaping and to spur higher production, owners entered into arrangements with their slaves, promising eventual freedom in return for many years' hard work. The Price of Freedom reveals how blacks played a critical role in freeing themselves from slavery. Yet it was an imperfect victory. Once Baltimore's economic growth began to slow, freed blacks were virtually excluded from craft apprenticeships, and European immigrants supplanted them as a trained labor force.

The first appearance of parties on the American political scene has been a subject of debate in both history and political science; most scholars have argued that parties did not develop until the nineteenth century. John F. Hoadley challenges that conclusion, arguing convincingly that substantial parties emerged within the first decade after creation of the new government. Examining patterns of roll-call voting in the early congresses, he finds that discernible coalitions existed between 1789 and 1803. These coalitions began to assume the form of parties as early as the Second Congress, and the evidence for their functioning as parties becomes overwhelming by the time of the Jay Treaty debate in 1796.The distinctive contribution of this study lies in its quantitative analysis of congressional voting. From this analysis emerges a picture, derived from multidimensional scaling, of the rise of voting coalitions. Thus one can clearly see evidence of party formation in Congress as well as the impact of issues and external alliances on these voting coalitions.Origins of American Political Parties makes a valuable contribution to political science and to history. Political scientists will find that insights into the emergence of the first parties in the United States shed light on the shifts in party alignments in later years and will help them to understand the forces that shaped a nation's first use of this key political institution. Historians will find here new evidence on the development of a fundamental element in America's early political history.

Kentucky's counties though theoretically provinces of the state were in reality powerful semi-sovereign entities during the latter half of the 19th century. Their positive accomplishments were many. Government funds were wisely invested in internal improvements, road construction, law enforcement, tax collection, and relief of the poor. Keen competition for county offices, placed on an electoral basis by the Constitution of 1850, brought added vitality to Kentucky's uniquely intense political life, and the official day on which the county courts met continued to be the foremost social and economic day of the month.Despite these positive facets and the good intentions of the reformers of 1849-1850, however, Kentucky's counties retained a tradition of parochialism, corruption, and inefficiency. The establishment of elective offices eliminated few of the deficiencies of the county system. The railroads were the focus of rivalry and scandal. Prevailing lawlessness compounded the semi-anarchical condition of many of the counties. Rising crime rates rendered insecure the lives of many Kentuckians. Nineteenth-century Kentucky left no legacy of law and order. A grasp of this paradoxical situation is essential to an understanding of late 19th-century Kentucky history. In this probing study, Robert M. Ireland offers the first thorough examination of the impact of Kentucky's counties on the state's constitutional, political, social, and economic development during this period.

The Federalist and the Constitution, whose cause it defended, were created amid the turmoil of political controversy. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, authors of The Federalist, were not theorists but fervent partisans in a campaign to gain acceptance -- by no means a sure thing at that time -- for the new plan of national government which they themselves had largely shaped. Their essays were immediately popular, were quickly collected and reissued in book form, and soon came to be recognized in America and Europe as a landmark in political theory -- the basic blueprint for the American system of government. In this new, provocative study, Edward Millican argues persuasively that the authors of The Federalist were not merely laying the groundwork for the American system but were setting forth the principles for the creation of a modern nation-state. He defends this thesis through a systematic analysis of the entire body of The Federalist, taking up each essay and showing how its contents relate to the idea of nationalism. Millican is one of few critics to examine the essays in this thoroughgoing fashion. He concludes that they do not constitute an apologia for states' rights, nor do they establish a passive government that would protect the rich and the privileged. In advancing these ideas, he takes decided issue with many scholars and commentators, including Ronald Reagan and the New Federalists.In One United People, Edward Millican puts forth one of the clearest and ablest expositions of The Federalist now in print. His vigorous advocacy of the theme of nationalism is bound to be controversial. But his reading of this classic of political theory will be one that future commentators must account for.

When Spain exploded into civil war in July 1936, a conflict whose roots were deep in the Spanish past became the arena for the violent political passions that divided Europe north of the Pyrenees. Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union intervened actively in the war, using Spain as a testing ground for their military equipment and techniques and their political ideologies.In this first in-depth study of the politics of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, R. Dan Richardson views the Brigades in the wider context of both the complex political-military alignments of Loyalist Spain and the broader Soviet-Comintern strategy during the Popular Front era. While not denying the generous impulse that led many young men the world over to enlist in the cause of the Spanish Republic, he sees the Brigades primarily as instruments of communist policy. He argues that the directing force behind the enlistment, training, and deployment of the Brigades was the international communist organization -- a compelling example of how the ends of propaganda and politics took precedence over military objectives.Using a wide array of sources in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German, and a thorough analysis of the Brigades' own voluminous literary output, Richardson clearly shows that the Brigades were a significant political, ideological, and propaganda instrument, which was used effectively by the Comintern for its own purposes, not only in Spain but on the larger world stage.

Irish historians have minimized Daniel O'Connell's role in the Irish liberty movement in favor of later nationalist leaders, largely because of his failure in the 1843 movement for repeal of the Act of Union. In this first detailed study of the final, crucial episode in O'Connell's career, Lawrence J. McCaffrey reassesses his place in Ireland's struggle for independence. The Repeal agitation is viewed as marking a watershed in the course of Irish nationalism.The significance of this study, however, extends beyond the affairs of England and Ireland. It shows Daniel O'Connell to be among the first to develop the now familiar tactics of constitutional democratic political agitation and it also demonstrates the limitations inherent in these tactics.

In this book, Paula Backscheider considers Daniel Defoe's entire canon as related, developing, and in close dynamic relationship to the literature of its time. In so doing, she revises our conception of the contexts of Defoe's work and reassesses his achievement and contribution as a writer.By restoring a literary context for modern criticism, Backscheider argues the intensity and integrity of Defoe's artistic ambitions, demonstrating that everything he wrote rests solidly upon extensive reading of books published in England, his understanding of the reading tastes of his contemporaries, and his engagement with the issues and events of his time. Defoe, the dedicated professional writer and innovator, emerges with a new wholeness, and certain of his novels assume new significance.Defoe's literary status continues to be debated and misunderstood. Even critical studies of the novel often begin with Richardson rather than Defoe. By moving from Defoe's poetry, pamphlets, and histories to the novels, Backscheider offers an argument for the thematic and stylistic coherency of his oeuvre and for a recognition of the dominant place he held in shaping the English novel. For example, Defoe deserves to be recognized as the true originator of the historical novel, for three of his fictions are deeply engaged with just those conceptual and technical issues common to all later historical fiction. And Roxana now appears as Defoe's deliberate attempt to enter the fastest growing market for fiction -- that for women readers.What have been powerfully significant for the history of the novel, then, are the very characteristics of his writing that have been held against his literary stature: its contemporaneity, its mixed and untidy form, its formal realism, its concentration on the life of an individual, and its probing of the individual's psychological interaction with the empirical world, making that world representative even as it is referential. It is exactly these characteristics most original, prominent, and subsequently imitated in Defoe's fiction that define the form we call "novel."