Robert E. May - Böcker

Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics challenges the way historians interpret the causes of the American Civil War. Using Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas's famed rivalry as a prism, Robert E. May shows that when Lincoln and fellow Republicans opposed slavery in the West, they did so partly from evidence that slaveholders, with Douglas's assistance, planned to follow up successes in Kansas by bringing Cuba, Mexico, and Central America into the Union as slave states. A skeptic about 'Manifest Destiny', Lincoln opposed the war with Mexico, condemned Americans invading Latin America, and warned that Douglas's 'popular sovereignty' doctrine would unleash US slaveholders throughout Latin America. This book internationalizes America's showdown over slavery, shedding new light on the Lincoln-Douglas rivalry and Lincoln's Civil War scheme to resettle freed slaves in the tropics.

Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics challenges the way historians interpret the causes of the American Civil War. Using Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas's famed rivalry as a prism, Robert E. May shows that when Lincoln and fellow Republicans opposed slavery in the West, they did so partly from evidence that slaveholders, with Douglas's assistance, planned to follow up successes in Kansas by bringing Cuba, Mexico, and Central America into the Union as slave states. A skeptic about 'Manifest Destiny', Lincoln opposed the war with Mexico, condemned Americans invading Latin America, and warned that Douglas's 'popular sovereignty' doctrine would unleash US slaveholders throughout Latin America. This book internationalizes America's showdown over slavery, shedding new light on the Lincoln-Douglas rivalry and Lincoln's Civil War scheme to resettle freed slaves in the tropics.

The premier secessionist of antebellum Mississippi, John A. Quitman was one of the half-dozen or so most prominent radicals in the entire South. In this full-length biography, Robert E. May takes issue with the recent tendency to portray secessionists as rabble-rousing, maladjusted outsiders bent on the glories of separate nationhood. May reveals Quitman to have been an ambitious but relatively stable insider who reluctantly advocated secession because of a despondency over slavery's long-range future in the Union and a related conviction that northerners no longer respected southern claims to equality as American citizens.A fervent disciple of South Carolina ""radical"" John C. Calhoun's nullification theories, Quitman also gained notoriety as his region's most strident slavery imperialist. He articulated the case for new slaver territory, participated in the Texas Revolution, won national acclaim as a volunteer general in the Mexican War, and organised a private military, or ""filibustering"", expedition with the intent of liberating Cuba from Spanish rule and making the island a new slave state. In 1850, while governor of Mississippi during the California crisis, Quitman wielded his influence in a vain attempt to induce Mississippi secession. Later, in Congress, he marked out an extreme southern position on Kansas. Mississippi's most vehement ""fire-eater,"" Quitman played a significant role in the North-South estrangement that led to the American Civil War.The first critical biography of this important figure, May's study sheds light on such current historical controversies as whether antebellum southerners were peculiarly militaristic or ""antibourgeois"" and helps illuminate the slave-master relations, mobility, intraregional class and geographic friction, partisan politics, and family customs of the Old South.

Robert May offers an imaginative new approach to antebellum America's notorious ""filibusters"" - the adventurers who organized or participated in private military attacks on nations with which the United States was formally at peace. Condemned abroad as pirates, the filibusters were often celebrated at home as heroes who epitomized the spirit of Manifest Destiny. Many explains the romantic, mercenary, ideological, and psychological desires that drove thousands of men to join filibustering expeditions; how they were financed; and why the U.S. government had little success in curtailing them. He also reveals the legacy of anti-Americanism that filibustering generated in Latin America, where people regarded the attackers much the way we look upon international terrorists today.

A path-breaking work when first published in 1973, The Southern Dream remains the standard work on attempts by the South to spread American slavery into the tropics - Cuba, Mexico, and Central America in particular - before the Civil War. Robert May shows that the South's expansionists had no more success than when they tried to extend slavery westward. As one after another of their plots failed, southern imperialists lost hope that their labor system might survive in the Union. Blaming northern Democrats and antislavery Republicans alike for their disappointed dreams, alienated southerners embraced secession as an alternative means to achieving a tropical slave empire. Had war not erupted at Fort Sumter, Confederates might have attempted to conquer the Caribbean basin. May's book serves as an important reminder that foreign policy cannot be divorced from the writing of American history, even in regard to seemingly domestic matters like the causes of the Civil War. Contending that America's Manifest Destiny became ""sectionalized"" in the 1850s, he explains why southerners considered Caribbean expansion so important and shows how southerners used their clout in Washington to initiate diplomatic schemes like the notorious Ostend Manifesto and presidential attempts to buy the slaveholding island of Cuba from Spain. He also relates how Caribbean plots affected American public opinion and ignited sectional friction in congressional debates. May argues that President-elect Abraham Lincoln might have saved the Union in the winter of 1860-61, had he agreed to last minute concessions facilitating slavery's future expansion towards the tropics.

How did enslaved African Americans in the Old South really experience Christmas? Did Christmastime provide slaves with a lengthy and jubilant respite from labor and the whip, as is generally assumed, or is the story far more complex and troubling? In this provocative, revisionist, and sometimes chilling account, Robert E. May chides the conventional wisdom for simplifying black perspectives, uncritically accepting southern white literary tropes about the holiday, and overlooking evidence not only that countless southern whites passed Christmases fearful that their slaves would revolt but also that slavery's most punitive features persisted at holiday time.In Yuletide in Dixie, May uncovers a dark reality that not only alters our understanding of that history but also sheds new light on the breakdown of slavery in the Civil War and how false assumptions about slave Christmases afterward became harnessed to myths undergirding white supremacy in the United States. By exposing the underside of slave Christmases, May helps us better understand the problematic stereotypes of modern southern historical tourism and why disputes over Confederate memory retain such staying power today. A major reinterpretation of human bondage, Yuletide in Dixie challenges disturbing myths embedded deeply in our culture.

Spearheading Environmental Change: The Legacy of Indiana Congressman Floyd J. Fithian describes the life of a four-term United States congressman, focusing on his role in the emerging environmental movement in late twentieth-century America. Spearheading Environmental Change highlights Fithian's legislative efforts regarding three water-related issues that profoundly concerned Hoosier and midwestern voters: creating a national park on the Indiana shoreline of Lake Michigan; canceling dam construction near Purdue University; and mitigating flooding in the Kankakee River Basin. The book also covers Fithian's positions on ecologically sensitive issues such as pesticides, noise pollution, fossil fuels, and nuclear power. Largely remembered for his participation in the Democratic reform wave that took over Congress in 1975 post-Watergate (the so-called Class of '74) and as an advocate for Hoosier farmers, Fithian has been overlooked for his role as a force to be reckoned with on the House floor when it came to the nation's environmental challenges. Fithian was a highly ethical, pragmatic reformer bent on preserving his country's natural resources. Spearheading Environmental Change gives Fithian the credit he deserves as an environmental warrior on the national stage.

Spearheading Environmental Change: The Legacy of Indiana Congressman Floyd J. Fithian describes the life of a four-term United States congressman, focusing on his role in the emerging environmental movement in late twentieth-century America. Spearheading Environmental Change highlights Fithian's legislative efforts regarding three water-related issues that profoundly concerned Hoosier and midwestern voters: creating a national park on the Indiana shoreline of Lake Michigan; canceling dam construction near Purdue University; and mitigating flooding in the Kankakee River Basin. The book also covers Fithian's positions on ecologically sensitive issues such as pesticides, noise pollution, fossil fuels, and nuclear power. Largely remembered for his participation in the Democratic reform wave that took over Congress in 1975 post-Watergate (the so-called Class of '74) and as an advocate for Hoosier farmers, Fithian has been overlooked for his role as a force to be reckoned with on the House floor when it came to the nation's environmental challenges. Fithian was a highly ethical, pragmatic reformer bent on preserving his country's natural resources. Spearheading Environmental Change gives Fithian the credit he deserves as an environmental warrior on the national stage.