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Cargando... Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedompor Robert C. Williams
   Ninguno Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.  JBD1 | Sep 5, 2006 |  sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
From his arrival in New York City in 1831 as a young printer from New Hampshire to his death in 1872 after losing the presidential election to General Ulysses S. Grant, Horace Greeley (b. 1811) was a quintessential New Yorker. He thrived on the city's ceaseless energy, with his New York Tribune at the forefront of a national revolution in reporting and transmitting news. Greeley devoured ideas, books, fads, and current events as quickly as he developed his own interests and causes, all of which revolved around the concept of freedom. While he adored his work as a New York editor, Greeley's lifelong quest for universal freedom took him to the edge of the American frontier and beyond to Europe. A major figure in nineteenth-century American politics and reform movements, Greeley was also a key actor in a worldwide debate about the meaning of freedom that involved progressive thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Karl Marx. Greeley was first and foremost an ardent nationalist who devoted his life to ensuring that America live up to its promises of liberty and freedom for all of its members. Robert C. Williams places Greeley's relentless political ambitions, bold reform agenda, and complex personal life into the broader context of freedom. Horace Greeley is as rigorous and vast as Greeley himself, and as America itself in the long nineteenth century. In the first comprehensive biography of Greeley to be published in nearly half a century, Williams captures Greeley from all sides: editor, reformer, political candidate, eccentric, and trans-Atlantic public intellectual; examining headlining news issues of the day, including slavery, westward expansion, European revolutions, the Civil War, the demise of the Whig and the birth of the Republican parties, transcendentalism, and other intellectual currents of the era. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)973.7History and Geography North America United States Administration of Abraham Lincoln, 1861-1865 Civil WarClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (3.75)
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An interesting character (comparisons could be drawn with that other famous 19th-century American whose biography I reviewed last month, Henry Ward Beecher), Greeley's opinions reached the kitchen tables and parlors of millions of Americans through his editorials and other writings in the New York Tribune, as well as his several books and speeches. A reformer, sometimes pragmatic and sometimes decidedly otherwise, Greeley believed (against all evidence) that if left alone, men would function for the good of themselves and of society.
Greeley's long-standing and petty grudge against William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed (for not paying enough attention to him and then refusing to offer him Seward's seat in the Senate in 1861) has always left a bitter taste in my mouth about Greeley, as have his inexplicable political contortions during the 1864 presidential campaign and his decision to accept the Democratic nomination for president in 1872 (he had already been nominated by the breakaway Liberal Republicans) even in the face of his strong opposition to Democratic policies. It is not to be regretted (Grant's second term notwithstanding) that Greeley failed to win the election that fall. As an editor, his words mattered - as a politician, his actions indicated that ambition overrode principle.
Williams' prose is at times clunky and repetitive (I maintain it is rarely necessary to say the same thing more than once or maybe twice), and it is impossible to get away from the near-constant reminders of his thesis. However, for anyone interested in the life of Mr. Greeley, this book will serve well.
http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2006/09/book-review-horace-greeley.html (