Michael Bellesiles – författare

Through contemporary voices, Documenting American Violence tracks the changes in the nature of American violence. This anthology looks at violence as an integral part of American history and includes excerpts from a wide range of primary sources, including court records. newspaper accounts, and political documents. Topics include violence and the conquest of America, Revolutionary violence, slavery, the Civil War, lynching, the West, industrial violence, civil rights, domestic violence, and crime as social drama. Taken together, they open a new window on American history, covering the colonial period, the American Revolution, the Age of Jackson, the Civil War, the industrial revolution, World War II, the Sixties, and contemporary America.

On July 4, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in front of a crowd in Rochester, New York, and asked, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” The audience had invited him to speak on the day celebrating freedom, and had expected him to offer a hopeful message about America; instead, he’d offered back to them their own hypocrisy. How could the Constitution defend both freedom and slavery? How could it celebrate liberty with one hand while withdrawing it with another? Theirs was a country which promoted and even celebrated inequality.From the very beginning, American history can be seen as a battle to reconcile the large gap between America’s stated ideals and the reality of its republic. Its struggle is not one of steady progress toward greater freedom and equality, but rather for every step forward there is a step taken in a different direction. In Inventing Equality, Michael Bellesiles traces the evolution of the battle for true equality - the stories of those fighting forward, to expand the working definition of what it means to be an American citizen -from the Revolution through the late nineteenth century. He identifies the systemic flaws in the Constitution, and explores through the role of the Supreme Court and three Constitutional amendments - the 13th, 14th, and 15th - the ways in which equality and inequality waxed and waned over the decades.

In 1877, a decade after the Civil War, not only was the US gripped by a deep depression, but the country was also in the throes of nearly unimaginable violence and upheaval marking the end of the brief period known as Reconstruction and a return to white rule across the South. Celebrated historian Michael A. Bellesiles reveals how the fires of that fated year also fuelled a hothouse of cultural and intellectual innovation. The story of 1877 is also related through the the lives of famous historical icons such as Billy the Kid and John D. Rockefeller.