The pioneers epub

It will also be of interest to psychoanalytic psychotherapists, academics interested in the history and development of psychoanalytic ideas and psychoanalysis, and advanced students. James Fenimore Cooper September 15, — September 14, was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century.

His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. He lived most of his life in Cooperstown, New York, which was established by his father William. Cooper was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and in his later years contributed generously to it.

He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society, but was expelled for misbehavior. Before embarking on his career as a writer he served in the U. Navy as a Midshipman which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales.

Among naval historians Cooper's works on the early U. Navy have been well received, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece. Armor expert Zaloga enters the battle over the best tanks of World War II with this heavy-caliber blast of a book armed with more than forty years of research.

Radical technological changes so-called "technology shocks" frequently disrupt the competitive market structure. New entrants appear, industries need to be redefined, incumbents lose their positions or vanish completely.

Fast moving industries - like the often quoted example of the semiconductor industry - have preferably been analyzed for these phenomena. But do the findings hold for industries with longer development cycles like the global machine tool industry?

Here, multivariate analysis is used to find out what management needs to focus on in order to lead companies through the technology shocks. The research for this book builds on in-depth interviews with experts and decision makers from the machine tool industry involved in technology shocks and statistical analysis of detailed quantitative surveys collected from 58 companies. In several instances the results challenge classical teaching of technology management.

Adrian J. Slywotzky - US top selling business author and one of the most distinguished intellectual leaders in business - comments: "In Technology Shocks, Heinrich Arnold develops a very useful model for analyzing technology shocks, and for focusing on those factors that will enable a company to navigate through these shocks successfully, and repeatedly.

Although this work is focused on technology, its thinking has useful implications beyond technology shocks. It provides ideas that managers can use to protect their firms when they are faced with any type of discontinuity, technology-based or not". History remembers Wellington's defeat of Napoleon, but has forgotten the role of Field Marshal Radetzky in the battles which led to Napoleon's abdication and first exile in As Chief of Staff to the allied coalition of , Radetzky determined the shape of the most decisive campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars by creating the strategy that defeated the Corsican in Germany and then France.

Neither Russia nor Prussia had been able to overcome Napoleon in battle and it took the brilliant diplomacy of Metternich and the military genius of Radetzky to ensure victory over the Emperor.

In short, the Austrian contribution decisively tipped the balance against Napoleon - a fact which has always been overlooked by historians. It was Radetzky, too, at the age of eighty-two, who defeated the Italians in and and thus saved Europe once again from the prospect of international war and revolution. The wars Radetzky fought - and won - throughout his extensive military career were of the greatest possible significance in European history, yet today, he is almost forgotten - remembered only in the music of the Radetzky March, dedicated to him by Johann Strauss the elder.

In this, the first biography of Radetzky to be published in English, Alan Sked paints a vivid picture of an exceptional, yet neglected commander of genius in a book which will be fascinating reading for enthusiasts of military and modern European history. This edited collection explores how migrants played a major role in the creation and settlement of the British Empire, by focusing on a series of Australian case studies.

The Pioneers is the account not just of one Ohio settlement but of myriad such places across America, where innumerable immigrants as the settlers were known came to make a fresh start in a strange land. It is a story as resonant today as ever. He takes the history of the area and turns what could be dry and dull into vibrant and compelling tales. Lovers of history told well know that McCullough is one of the best writers of our past, and his latest will only add to his acclaim.

The book reads like a novel, with a cast of fascinating characters that the average reader isn't likely to know about. A worthy addition to McCullough's impressive body of work. He consistently produces engaging prose about a particular period of time, and makes history come alive.

Vintage McCullough and a book that students of American history will find captivating. With clarity and incisiveness, he details the experience of a brave and broad-minded band of people who crossed raging rivers, chopped down forests, plowed miles of land, suffered incalculable hardships and braved a lonely frontier to forge a new American ideal.

They were indeed the pioneers. Tell us what you like and we'll recommend books you'll love. Sign up and get a free ebook! Table of Contents Excerpt Rave and Reviews. About The Book. I consider therefore the settlement of the country watered by this great river as one of the greatest enterprises ever presented to man. Never before, as he knew, had any of his countrymen set off to accomplish anything like what he had agreed to undertake—a mission that, should he succeed, could change the course of history in innumerable ways and to the long-lasting benefit of countless Americans.

That he had had no prior experience in such a venture and was heading off alone in his own one-horse shay appears to have been of little concern. If he was as yet unknown to those with whom he would be dealing, he carried with him letters of introduction from the governor of Massachusetts, the president of Harvard College, and some forty others.

The day of his departure was Sunday, June 24, Manasseh Cutler was forty-five years old and pastor of the First Congregational Church of Ipswich Hamlet, a tiny Massachusetts village not far from the sea, thirty miles north of Boston. He had been born and raised on a hilltop farm in Killingly, Connecticut, and given the biblical name of Manasseh after the oldest son of Joseph. Like most New Englanders, he was a descendant of those strong-minded English Puritans who had landed in America in the seventeenth century and proliferated ever since.

James Cutler, the first of the family to arrive, had fathered twelve children. The Reverend Cutler himself was one of five and the father of eight. He had attended Yale College, with classmates mainly from New England among whom a biblical name such as he had was by no means uncommon.

In less than a year he married Mary Balch of Dedham, Massachusetts, a small trim blonde said to have had a no less amiable disposition than he. Her father, the Reverend Thomas Balch, performed the wedding ceremony. He resolved to enter the ministry under the tutelage of his father-in-law back in Dedham.

His studies continued for nearly two years, during which he started preaching in one town or another. May God grant me his blessing and assistance in so important an undertaking, and make me serviceable to the cause of religion, and the souls of my fellow men.

A bit above average in height, stout but well-proportioned, the Reverend Cutler had a ruddy, healthy look, and dressed always in ministerial black—black velvet coat and breeches, black silk stockings. Puritans were as capable as any mortals of exuding an affable enjoyment of life, as was he.

Like many a Puritan he loved good food, good wine, a good story, and good cheer. His black clerical attire, a professional requirement, by no means represented disapproval of bright colors in clothing or furniture or decoration. It was said he could out-talk anyone, and from numerous of his diary entries, it is obvious, too, that he had an eye for attractive women. But here again that was no violation of Puritan rules. He had as well great love for his large family, his wife and children, and was ever attentive to their needs for as long as he lived.

In addition to all this, and importantly, Manasseh Cutler was endowed with boundless intellectual curiosity. He had succeeded in becoming three doctors in one, having qualified for both a doctor of law and doctor of medicine, in addition to doctor of divinity, and having, from time to time, practiced both law and medicine. At one point he looked after some forty smallpox patients and seems to have gained a local reputation for his particular skill at coping with rattlesnake poisoning.

He became an honorary member of the Massachusetts Medical Society, received a degree of Master of the Arts from Harvard, and was elected a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was at once an avid astronomer, meteorologist, and naturalist. Over the years, his modest income notwithstanding, he had acquired his own barometer, thermometer, telescope, spyglasses, and celestial globe, and was particularly esteemed among fellow scientists for his work in botany, and for having written the first-ever treatise on the classification of the flora of New England—a study of some separate species.

His knowledge of botany was probably surpassed by few if any Americans of his generation. Year after year he carried on extensive correspondence with leading figures in all the sciences on both sides of the Atlantic.

One letter concerning his studies of the aurora borealis, written in to Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale, went on for twenty-four pages. Between times he studied French.

Indeed, he seems to have been studying something nearly every waking hour. Once, with a half dozen others, he climbed the highest peak in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, carrying a heavy barometer on his back in the spirit of wanting to bring back new knowledge—to compute the elevation at the summit, which he recorded to be 9, feet. That either he or the barometer had overestimated the height by some 2, feet did not in the least deter his zest for learning.

On the day of his departure on his unprecedented new mission, he brought with him the cabinet necessary for saving botanical specimens collected along the way. Their purpose was to launch a highly ambitious plan involving the immense reach of unsettled wilderness known as the Northwest Territory. They were a group of veteran officers in the Continental Army, as Cutler was considered also, having served six months during the Revolutionary War as an army chaplain.

At the peace treaty ending the war, signed in Paris in , the American diplomats John Adams and John Jay had insisted that all the lands controlled by the British west of the Allegheny Mountains and northwest of the Ohio River east of the Mississippi, be ceded to the new United States.

Rather than relinquish our claim to the western territory, I will go home and urge my countrymen to take up arms again and fight till they secure their rights, or shed the last drop of blood.

The land on the southern side of the Ohio was part of Virginia and already being rapidly settled according to the Virginia system, which allowed a man to take and mark for himself any unappropriated lands. By the New England system, so-called, the land lying north of the river was to be properly surveyed and sold, the establishment of settlements done by legal process, and lands of the natives to remain theirs until purchased from them.

Until that point the United States government did not own a single acre of land. Now, all at once, almost unimaginably, it had acquired some , square miles of unbroken wilderness, thus doubling the size of the United States.

It was an unsettled empire north and west of the Ohio River, bigger than all of France, with room enough for as many as five more states and included access to four of the five Great Lakes, one of which, Lake Michigan, reached to its very center. In New England there were more than a thousand towns, one about every five miles. But in all the immense territory to the northwest of the Ohio River, the territory from which five states were to emerge—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin—there was as yet not one permanent legal settlement.

Much, too, was reported of forests teeming with wolves, bears, wild boars, panthers, rattlesnakes, and the even more deadly copperheads. Much blood had already been shed in wilderness battles and atrocities committed by both natives and white men.

These were realities well-known throughout the east and particularly on the minds of those gathered at the Bunch of Grapes. Worst of all had been the infamous massacre by American militia of ninety-six peaceable Delaware Indians in central Ohio in —Christian men, women, and children who knelt singing hymns as they were systematically clubbed to death, all because they were mistakenly thought to have had a part in the murder of a family of settlers.

Delaware justice demanded a life for a life be taken, but they would give an enemy an opportunity to die well and honor his family during ritual torture. Only the year before the Bunch of Grapes meeting, one of the group, General Benjamin Tupper, as part of a government surveying party, had been turned back from entering the Ohio country so severe was Indian resistance to the encroaching settlers.

Then, too, there was also the immediate reality of serious, mounting troubles right at home. Unprecedented financial panic had gripped the new nation since the end of the Revolutionary War.

The resources and credit of the government were exhausted. Money, in the form of scrip issued by the government, was nearly worthless.

The scrip the veterans received as compensation for their service was worth no more than ten cents on the dollar. Trade was at a standstill. In Massachusetts the situation was worst of all. Farmers were being imprisoned for debt. Only a few months earlier an armed rebellion led by a poor Massachusetts farmer and war veteran named Daniel Shays had to be put down by a force of loyal militia commanded by General Tupper.

As it was, the severe economic depression that followed the war would last longer even than the war. West was opportunity. West was the future. They were poorer than their neighbors who had not been in the field; and if they had more of pride, that was only natural from the lives they had led, and surely they had a right to feel proud of the services they had rendered.

One who was among them, and a close observer, says that they had a better and more dignified bearing than before the war, dressed more handsomely, and were improved in manners and conversation. These men it must be remembered did not receive money in pay for their fatigue, exposure and suffering, but final certificates in settlement.

The leading figure—the driving force—at the Bunch of Grapes gathering was a widely known hero of the Revolution and, in normal times, a farmer and surveyor, General Rufus Putnam.

It was he who had called the meeting. A commanding presence, he stood nearly six feet tall and spoke in a manner described as straightforward and impressive. As would be said: He was not brilliant, he was not quick, but he was richly endowed with that best of gifts—good, sound, common sense, and he had, in unusual degree, that prescience that enabled him to skillfully adapt means to ends, so as thereby to accomplish what he wished.

His judgment was sound, he was patient and had great power of endurance. His integrity was never questioned. He was also known to be full of jokes and loved to sing. Most important to matters at hand, Rufus Putnam, before the end of the Revolution, had led officers in signing what was known as the Newburgh Petition, whereby land bounties promised to veterans would be provided in the Ohio country in payment for their military services.

He was already an Ohio land speculator. I am, sir [Putnam wrote], among those who consider the cession of so great a tract of territory to the United States. Washington, though a Virginian to the core, had particularly high regard for the New Englanders who had served under his command. A great part of his military history had been made north of the Potomac, beginning in Boston.

Further, by this time he had resigned his seat in Congress and departed for France to serve as the new American ambassador. The plan set forth now at the Bunch of Grapes was to form an association or company to purchase from the government lands in Ohio and establish a first settlement there. Manasseh Cutler, too, took an active part in the discussions. He had read nearly all that had been published of the writings of early French explorers and like others had been moved especially by descriptions of the land and the river by St.

It is, without doubt, the most fertile country, with the most varied soil, the best watered, and that which offers to agriculture and commerce, the most abundant and easy resources, of all those which the Europeans have ever discovered. Full agreement at the Bunch of Grapes gathering was reached with no difficulty and in the days that followed further details were seen to. A fund of a million dollars would be raised. No one could purchase less than one share, or more than five.

That the Ohio Company was also, apart from its noble intentions, a venture in land speculation went without saying. Those founders taking part at the Bunch of Grapes were to receive generous compensation.

Rufus Putnam and Manasseh Cutler, for example, were each to receive four shares, or 4, acres of land. Major Winthrop Sargent, another surveyor who had been to Ohio, was named secretary of the company, and Manasseh Cutler was chosen to negotiate with the Continental Congress in the purchase of the land.

He was also to have a say in the enactment of a new Ordinance, whereby Congress would establish how the new states were to be laid out, and, importantly, the conditions under which they were to enter the Union.

Such an ordinance was essential, for without it no purchase could be arranged. It was intended that this ordinance, now called the Northwest Ordinance, should stipulate that in the whole of the territory there would be absolute freedom of religion and particular emphasis on education, matters New Englanders considered fundamental to a just and admirable society. Most importantly, there was to be no slavery. In the plan for the creation of a new state northwest of the Ohio River, the proposition put forth by Rufus Putnam and others at the time of the Newburgh Resolution, the total exclusion of slavery was an essential.

As would be observed by historians long afterward, the Northwest Ordinance was designed to guarantee what would one day be known as the American way of life. His enthusiasm for the whole undertaking seemed to compound by the week.

He was bound first for New York, where the Congress sat, then Philadelphia, where for the past month the Constitutional Convention had been meeting in secret sessions. Crossing into Connecticut, he made a brief stop at the family farm in Killingly to see his father and found all well, his father, at age eighty, in better health than he expected, still able to help bring in the hay.

A Harvard graduate, attorney, and noted officer in the Revolution, Parsons had traveled to the Ohio country only the year before as one of the commissioners appointed by Congress sent to the Northwest to negotiate a treaty with the Indians. He could speak from experience about the Ohio River, the great reach of the wilderness, the fertility of the soil.

He and Cutler talked for the better part of a day. In addition, Parsons provided Cutler with still more letters of introduction. At New Haven, he stopped again, this time to call on the president of Yale, the Reverend Ezra Stiles, a tiny sparrow of a man who, like Cutler, had enormous interest in practically everything.

It had been years since Cutler had been back to his alma mater and Stiles, happy to show him about, led a campus tour, introducing him to faculty and students, showing him the library and a collection of apparatus for the study of science. When Stiles insisted Cutler stay for a midday dinner with his wife and four daughters, Cutler could not resist.

With these in hand, he proceeded to deliver a short lecture on fructification, separating the parts at the same time, all to the delight of his audience.

Only a call to dinner ended the performance. Cutler could not have enjoyed the day more, but when urged to spend the night, he declined. He was on a mission and must keep on his way. By mid-afternoon Thursday, July 5, having covered miles in twelve days, he arrived at the Plow and Harrow in New York and from there, wasting no time, he set off to deliver his letters of introduction. From that point on things moved rapidly. The days that followed were as full as any he had known.

He was everywhere, busy every hour, meeting or conferring with, or being hosted by one figure of importance or influence after another.

At the time only eight of the thirteen states were represented by delegates. A committee of five was then appointed to agree on the terms and report to Congress. He had made a good start, as no doubt he sensed.

His manners in particular impressed three of the five members who were southerners. Never before, they said, had they seen such qualities in a northern man. That the one who had come to persuade the members of Congress to accept a proposal of such monumental scale was neither a commercial proponent nor politician, but a well-mannered figure of high learning and culture, as well as a man of the cloth, was in itself a matter of considerable interest and importance.

Clearly he was to be taken seriously. In the days that followed, he dined in style several times, starting at the home of General Henry Knox, once a Boston bookseller, now secretary of war. Already an investor in the Ohio Company, Knox had great influence among veterans and was fervently urging Congress to act.

Both the general and Madam Knox, as she liked to be called, with their love of lavish hospitality, had become quite large. Secretary Knox weighed approximately pounds. Such effort as he devoted to the diary alone would have been enough in itself to tire most people.

Yet he was also faithfully writing home to his wife, Mary, and depending greatly on repeated word from her, as he would continually during times away from her for years to come. On the afternoon of July 9 he went again to climb the stairs to the Congress Chamber and in the course of much discussion made his case. This time, however, the session did not go well. Earlier that same day he had made a most important call on the geographer of the United States, a military engineer and surveyor of long experience on the western frontier, Thomas Hutchins, to discuss the best possible site for settlement on the Ohio River.

That afternoon they met again.