Antebellum

In response to South Carolina’s ordinance nullifying federal tariff laws, President Andrew Jackson issued this proclamation defending the supremacy of the U.S. Constitution and federal law. He declared nullification unconstitutional and warned that disunion was tantamount to treason. Jackson…

<p><span class="deck"> For a provincial belle from Natchez, the Grand Tour was a priceless introduction to Europe’s art, its feudal pomp, and its tourist trade</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">Was the old South solidly for slavery and secession? An eminent historian disputes a long-cherished view of that region’s history</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">A gracious antebellum city of stern-wheelers and cotton money; a restless, violent city with a hot grain of genius at its heart; a city of calamity, desolation, and rebirth; a city that changed the way the whole world hears music. It’s all the same city, and it is this year’s Great American Place. Thomas Childers answers a summons to Memphis, Tennessee.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Without the material support of a half-dozen prominent northerners known as the Secret Six, John Brown’s attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry 150 years ago may well have never occurred.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Over the question of whether Missouri should be admitted to the Union as a free or slave state in 1820, creative moderates brokered an ingenious compromise that averted civil war.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Fistfights broke out in Congress in 1850 over whether the territories just won in the Mexican War should be slave or free—and only a last-minute series of compromises prevented catastrophe.</span></p>