Ebook Free Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, by Michael F. Holt
When some individuals looking at you while reviewing Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt, you might really feel so proud. Yet, instead of other individuals feels you must instil in yourself that you are reading Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt not because of that factors. Reading this Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt will offer you greater than individuals appreciate. It will certainly overview of recognize more than the people looking at you. Even now, there are numerous resources to understanding, checking out a book Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt still comes to be the first choice as a great means.
Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, by Michael F. Holt
Ebook Free Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, by Michael F. Holt
Think of that you get such particular remarkable experience as well as understanding by only reading a book Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt. Just how can? It seems to be higher when a book could be the very best point to discover. Books now will certainly appear in printed and soft file collection. One of them is this e-book Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt It is so normal with the printed publications. Nevertheless, numerous people occasionally have no room to bring guide for them; this is why they can't check out the book any place they really want.
It is not secret when hooking up the creating skills to reading. Reading Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt will make you get even more resources and also resources. It is a manner in which can improve exactly how you forget and also understand the life. By reading this Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt, you could more than just what you receive from various other book Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt This is a prominent publication that is published from popular publisher. Seen form the writer, it can be relied on that this publication Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt will certainly provide lots of inspirations, concerning the life and encounter and also every little thing inside.
You could not should be doubt regarding this Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt It is not difficult way to obtain this publication Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt You can just go to the established with the web link that we provide. Below, you can purchase the book Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt by on-line. By downloading Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt, you could find the soft data of this book. This is the exact time for you to begin reading. Even this is not printed book Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt; it will specifically offer more advantages. Why? You might not bring the printed book Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt or only pile the book in your property or the office.
You could finely add the soft documents Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt to the gadget or every computer unit in your workplace or home. It will certainly assist you to consistently proceed reviewing Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt each time you have extra time. This is why, reading this Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt doesn't provide you problems. It will give you important resources for you who want to begin creating, writing about the comparable publication Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, By Michael F. Holt are different book area.
The genial but troubled New Englander whose single-minded partisan loyalties inflamed the nation's simmering battle over slavery
Charming and handsome, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire was drafted to break the deadlock of the 1852 Democratic convention. Though he seized the White House in a landslide against the imploding Whig Party, he proved a dismal failure in office.
Michael F. Holt, a leading historian of nineteenth-century partisan politics, argues that in the wake of the Whig collapse, Pierce was consumed by an obsessive drive to unify his splintering party rather than the roiling country. He soon began to overreach. Word leaked that Pierce wanted Spain to sell the slave-owning island of Cuba to the United States, rousing sectional divisions. Then he supported repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which limited the expansion of slavery in the west. Violence broke out, and "Bleeding Kansas" spurred the formation of the Republican Party. By the end of his term, Pierce's beloved party had ruptured, and he lost the nomination to James Buchanan.
In this incisive account, Holt shows how a flawed leader, so dedicated to his party and ill-suited for the presidency, hastened the approach of the Civil War.
- Sales Rank: #112558 in Books
- Brand: Holt, Michael F./ Schlesinger, Arthur Meier (EDT)/ Wilentz, Sean (EDT)
- Published on: 2010-03-30
- Released on: 2010-03-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .56" w x 5.50" l, .63 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 176 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Like many historians, Holt considers Franklin Pierce's administration (1853-1857) to be so inept that perhaps the greatest praise is that the succeeding administration, James Buchanan's, was worse. Son of a prominent New Hampshire governor, Pierce (1804-1869) served in the Houseand Senate, resigning in 1842 but remaining leader of the Democrats in New Hampshire, where he remained extremely popular. This stood him in good stead when he was chosen in 1852 as a dark-horse presidential candidate by a deadlocked Democratic convention. He drubbed Winfield Scott in the presidential election to become the country's 14th president. However, Pierce saw abolitionism as a threat to the Union, and his sympathy with Southern views helped lead the nation to civil war. Holt (The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party) argues that Pierce's support of 1854's Kansas-Nebraska Act helped trigger the expansion of slavery into the territories. This bitterly divided the party in the North, which denied Pierce renomination in 1856. Holt writes well, delivering a lively, opinionated account of a president who served in turbulent times and did not improve matters. This is an admirable addition to the already admirable American Presidents series.(Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Pierce deserves his low ranking by historians, but not, Holt argues, because he was a bad man or politician. Handsome and athletic, he’d been a state representative at 24, a congressman at 29, a one-term U.S. senator at 34, and was New Hampshire’s leading Democrat when he became the first dark-horse candidate to secure the presidency in 1852. With congressional, state-legislative, and governorship majorities, the Democrats were riding high, and Pierce aimed to keep it that way. He chose cabinet members to represent the party’s factions and crafted his domestic policy to quash divisive squabbles. But his era’s big issue was slavery. He backed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, arguing that it nullified all previous limitations on the extension of slavery, and stood by during subsequent terrorism in Kansas on the grounds that the Constitution barred the president from intervening. Despite foreign-policy successes and a squeaky-clean administration, he wasn’t nominated for a second term because Kansas-Nebraska, foreboding all too well what lay ahead, fractured his beloved party. Another excellent American Presidents series volume. --Ray Olson
Review
“Thought-provoking… Holt gives Pierce his due as a politician serving in fractious times and as a man pulling against the swells of a difficult life… a valuable book.” ―Concord Monitor
“Professor Holt brings to his task his considerable knowledge of the ins and outs of party politics in the 1850's. This is the book's greatest strength… Holt's book presents a more incisive and more realistic understanding of [Pierce's] fateful presidency.” ―Civil War Book Review, Louisiana State University Library's Special Collections
“Holt writes well, delivering a lively, opinionated account of a president who served in turbulent times and did not improve matters. This is an admirable addition to the already admirable American Presidents series.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Pierce deserves his low ranking by historians, but not, Holt argues, because he was a bad man or politician... Another excellent American Presidents series volume.” ―Booklist
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Pierce's troubled times
By Jon Hunt
The American Presidents series, conceived in part by the late Arthur Schlesinger, is a series (now mostly complete) of short biographies of the U.S. Presidents. Michael Holt has given us the latest in that series...a biography of our fourteenth president, Franklin Pierce.
Pierce's life and career seemed to have been beset by tragedy and ill fortune. Little known outside New England, Pierce, nonetheless, became the famous dark horse candidate in 1852, much like James K. Polk had been eight years earlier. Holt is particularly good at describing the politics of Pierce's ascendancy to the presidency (one of Pierce's few strokes of "luck") and he's equally good at setting up the president's downfall. Since there is little of an actual written nature of the Pierce years in the White House (he never wrote an autobiography) much has to be sewn together by others' accounts.
The author spends a fair amount of time on the Kansas-Nebraska Act... the downhill turning point of the Pierce presidency... but offers as much that while Pierce made major mistakes during his time in office it seems unlikely that any person who ran the country in the 1850s could have done much to calm the seething factions before the outbreak of the Civil War. I enjoyed Holt's offering up Pierce's feelings about future presidents. It seems he despised his successor, James Buchanan, and hadn't much use for Abraham Lincoln. Pierce was content when Andrew Johnson was acquitted during the latter's impeachment trial of 1868.
President Pierce's unhappy and unsuccessful administration might only have been matched by the unhappiness of his personal life....three children dying very young, a sickly wife and his own heavy drinking. One wonders what Franklin Pierce might have been remembered for had he remained in other branches of government or lived at another time. Michael Holt has written a good basic "introductory" biography to those who haven't known much about Franklin Pierce and I recommend it.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Does Exactly What It Intends
By Chris
I have read a handful of the books from this American Presidents Series, and three of the four have been exactly what I was looking for -- a clear, concise biography that covers the major aspects of the subject's life, particularly his presidency. None is better than this one, though.
While I've read a fair amount about the antebellum period in general, I didn't know much about Franklin Pierce, other than that he signed into law the Kansas-Nebraska Act and that he's widely considered to be one of the worst presidents we've ever had. But I was interested to find out that along with his negative qualities -- a destructive loyalty to the Democratic Party being the most significant, according to Holt -- he was also a superb public speaker, a loyal and extremely well-liked individual, and a prominent and influential Democrat in one of the rare northern states that consistently voted Democrat.
This book provides a broad overview of Pierce's early life and career, three strong chapters on his presidency, and a wrap-up chapter on his retirement, which, to my surprise, included several attempts by some Democrats to convince him to run for president again, even though he was very unpopular at the close of his term and wasn't even renominated by his party. When I was done reading, I retained my disapproval of Pierce's endorsement of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and his unwillingness to take a stand against slavery or the South's determination to compile slave states. However, I felt that Pierce was a likable person; he made some costly miscalculations, but he was inherently a decent and honest man.
If there is a criticism of this book -- and the fact that it's too short is an unfair criticism since that's what was intended -- it's that Holt spends large chunks providing historical context in place of more details about Pierce himself, but I'd quickly counter that the context was necessary, in such a turbulent time, to explain what Pierce was dealing with. This book is a great addition to the series.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Solid brief biography of Franklin Pierce
By Steven Peterson
This is one more addition to the series of brief presidential biographies, "The American Presidents." Original series editor, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. said of the purpose of this series (Page xviii): "It is the aim of the American Presidents series to present the grand panorama of our chief executives in volumes compact enough for the busy reader, lucid enough for the student, authoritative enough for the scholar." These are ambitious standards, but these books, overall, do pretty well in meeting them. As does the work on Franklin Pierce.
This is a solid biography of Franklin Pierce, often rated as in the bottom tier of American presidents. The book does a nice job of describing Pierce's ascent to political power, from his base in New Hampshire. His father had been a political figure and James followed in his footsteps.
He became president because of a deadlock in the 1852 convention. He emerged as an acceptable candidate to other factions and won. However, his presidency was not successful. In his zeal to hold the fractious Democratic Party together, he ended up presiding over a slow disintegration as the country moved toward the 1856 election. He was denied renomination and led his life out fairly quietly.
A good, solid, brief biography for those who don't want to delve deeply into the subject matter. That brevity is both a strength and a weakness, since various themes cannot be fully developed.
Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, by Michael F. Holt PDF
Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, by Michael F. Holt EPub
Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, by Michael F. Holt Doc
Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, by Michael F. Holt iBooks
Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, by Michael F. Holt rtf
Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, by Michael F. Holt Mobipocket
Franklin Pierce: The American Presidents Series: The 14th President, 1853-1857, by Michael F. Holt Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar