Podcast appearances and mentions of William J Cooper

About this episode:  There are some sixteen accounts about the life of the President of the Confederacy. Unlike his counterpart, Abraham Lincoln, this President, from the perspective of most historians, has not fared well.  Brittle, ill-tempered, one who held grudges, possessed poor political skills.  In short, a second-rate leader who loved bureaucracy and was unable to grow with responsibility.  When asked why the Confederacy lost the war, Southern-born David Potter, a professor of history at both Yale and Stanford Universities, commented that this Chief Executive should shoulder much of the blame.  Writing some two decades ago, another historian and biographer, William Cooper, Jr., wrote that we should look at a man from his time and not condemn him for not being a man of our time.  Though that seems to fly in the face of current sensitivities and agendas, that is what we, now, shall attempt to do. This is the story of a man, like Robert E. Lee, who is a marquee figurehead for a short-lived nation whose Constitution supported states' rights and slavery.  A man subjected to the bolts of lightning flung his way for being its elected leader.  This is the story of the first and only President of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson F. Davis.     ----more----   Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode: Joseph Davis Franklin Pierce Howell Cobb William L. Yancey Leonidas Polk Braxton Bragg   For Further Reading: Jefferson Davis, American by William J. Cooper, Jr.   Get The Guide: Want to learn more about the Civil War? A great place to start is Fred's guide, The Civil War: A History of the War between the States from Workman Publishing. The guide is in its 9th printing.   Producer: Dan Irving   Thank you to our sponsor Bob Graesser, Raleigh Civil War Round Table's editor of The Knapsack newsletter and the Round Table's webmaster at http://www.raleighcwrt.org  

Review of  The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics, by William J. Cooper Reviewed by Stan Prager, Regarp Book Blog

As the Director of Science, Research and Academic Partnerships for Plastic Ocean Project, Inc. as well as the Executive Director, Bonnie Monteleone is a researcher who has collected plastic marine samples globally including four of the five main ocean gyres, the Caribbean, and has extended this work to Pyramid Lake, outside of Reno, Nevada.  Monteleone completed her first field study exploration in the North Atlantic Gyre in July 2009 in collaboration with  Maureen Conte, PhD. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science (BIOS). In the fall of 2009, Monteleone accompanied Algalita Marine Research Foundation's 10-year resampling of the North Pacific Gyre, quantifying the rate of plastic marine debris growth to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, sampling a transect of 3,460 nautical miles (nm).In 2010, she continued her North Atlantic study resampling the same region in the North Atlantic. In fall of 2010, she joined 5 Gyres Institute in a first ever South Atlantic transect sampling for pelagic marine debris traveling 4,270 nm from Brazil to South Africa. In 2012, Monteleone collected samples from the South Pacific as part of the film project, A Plastic Ocean. To date, she has five years of data sets from the North Atlantic. A total of 217 surface samples were collected from all four oceans. Monteleone collaborates with Charles Moore, founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummings, co-founders of 5 Gyres Institute, Dr. William J. Cooper, University of California Irvine (UCI), and Dr. Maureen Conte, BIOS.  In 2012, Bonnie Monteleone and Paul Lorenzo co-founded the 501c3 Plastic Ocean Project, Inc.Monteleone also works in the Environmental Studies Department at UNC Wilmington as an Adjunct Instructor teaching a Plastic Marine Debris Field Studies course and manages a lab working with student Directed Independent Studies (DIS) research. Research projects vary from fieldwork collecting beach samples to lab analysis looking at plastic leachates, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) uptakes, and plastic ingestion by marine organisms. She collaborates with Drs. Pamela Seaton, Brooks Avery, Susanne Brander, and Alison Taylor at UNCW.Bonnie is also an accomplished artist, turning some of the plastic she collects on her voyages into modern artistic masterpieces. This work story boards her research and has become a traveling art exhibit  - What goes around comes around.  She received the Conservation Communicator of the Year 2017, Governor's Award, Cape Fear YWCA Woman of the Year - Environmental Award 2018, and nominated for the Cape Fear Woman of Achievement award 2018. She is a member of the Sierra Club Marine Team and on the NC Wildlife Federation's Board of Directors.Connect with Bonniehttps://www.plasticoceanproject.orgJournaling PromptsWhat are some ways that you can reduce/eliminate your use of plastics in everyday life? Make a list. Then, start. You CAN be the change you wish to see in the world. Thanks for listening. xo-Jackiewww.elixirpodcast.mewww.madreandthemuse.comSupport the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elixirpodcast)

Chris Leahy was a fellow traveler with Colin in his days at LSU. Since 2007, he's been a professor a Keuka College in upstate New York. He has a new book out, President without a Party: A Life of John Tyler (LSU Press, 2020). His biography began as a dissertation in Baton Rouge, where Chris studied under the imposing William J. Cooper (a previous podcast guest on American Rambler). Chris talks with Colin about his days at LSU as well as growing up in Baltimore and his time at Virginia Tech. Chris has been working on his biography for more than 20 years. Born in the first years of the American republic into a Tidewater planter family, Virginia's John Tyler isn't one of the better known presidents. But his career in politics serves as an example of how a man can find himself accidentally put into a position of power and then find he doesn't really belong in any political camp. Tyler might have been U.S. president, but he ended his life loyal to the Confederacy. He died in early 1862, just before taking his place in the Rebel Congress. Ultimately, what kind of a man was Tyler? And what can he tell us about the time in which he lived?  

John Sacher is the head of the history department at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He is also the author of A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824-1861. John has been on a steady career path, but as he tells Colin, he had his doubts about staying in the history game while he was in grad school. John attended Notre Dame as an undergraduate. As much as he loved it there, he went to LSU for grad school. In Baton Rouge, he studied with William J. Cooper (a previous podcast guest). John completed a master's thesis and dissertation on Louisiana politics, which became the basis of his first book. After spending some years in Kansas, he is back in his home state of Florida. Now, he is finishing a book on conscription in the Confederacy, the first full-length scholarly book on the subject in many decades. As John and Colin discuss, even for the most committed students, graduate school can be daunting. Also challenging is the move from scholar to administrator later in one's career--a path that might be as inevitable for some as it is practical.      

Bill Cooper worked at Louisiana State University for nearly 50 years as a professor of southern history and as an administrator. A native of rural South Carolina, he studied with the imposing David Donald at Princeton and Johns Hopkins University before moving to Baton Rouge in 1968. Bill has published widely on southern politics, which has included the definitive and prize-winning biography Jefferson Davis, American. His latest book is Approaching Civil War and Southern History (LSU Press), a collection of essays spanning his entire accomplished career.         

Long relegated to the sidelines of history as the hyperintellectual son of John and Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), has never basked in the historical spotlight. Remembered, if at all, as an ineffective president during an especially rancorous time, Adams was humiliated in office after the contested election of 1824, viciously assailed by populist opponents for being both slippery and effete, and then resoundingly defeated by the western war hero Andrew Jackson, whose 1828 election ushered in an era of unparalleled expansion.Aware of this reputation yet convinced that Adams deserves a reconsideration, award-winning historian William J. Cooper has reframed the sixth president's life in an entirely original way, demonstrating that Adams should be considered our lost Founding Father, his morality and political philosophy the final link to the great visionaries who created our nation. As Cooper demonstrates, no one else in his generation―not Clay, Webster, Calhoun, or Jackson―ever experienced Europe as young Adams did, who at fourteen translated from French at the court of Catherine the Great. In fact, Adams's very exposure to the ideas of the European Enlightenment that had so influenced the Founding Fathers, including their embrace of reason, were hardly shared by his contemporaries, particularly those who could not countenance slaves as equal human beings.Such differences, as Cooper narrates, became particularly significant after Adams's failed presidency, when he, along with his increasingly reclusive wife, Louisa Catherine Adams, returned to Washington as a Massachusetts congressman in 1831. With his implacable foe Andrew Jackson in the White House, Adams passionately took up the antislavery cause. Despite raucous opposition from southern and northern politicians, Adams refused to relent, his protests so vehement that Congress enacted the gag rule in the 1830s specifically to silence him. With his impassioned public pronouncements and his heroic arguments in the Amistad trial, a defiant Adams was no longer viewed as a failed president but a national, albeit curmudgeonly, hero, who finally collapsed on the floor of the House chamber in 1848 and died in the capital three days later. Ironically, Adams's death and the extraordinary obsequies produced an outpouring of national, and bipartisan, grief never before seen in the nineteenth century, as if the country had truly lost its last Founding Father.William J. Cooper is a Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University and a past president of the Southern Historical Association. He was born in Kingstree, South Carolina, and received his A.B. from Princeton and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He has been a member of the LSU faculty since 1968 and is the author of The Conservative Regime: South Carolina, 1877–1890; The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828–1856; Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860; Jefferson Davis, American; Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era; and The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics.

Over the course of a public career that stretched from the Washington administration to the Mexican-American War, John Quincy Adams became a living link to America's revolutionary generation. In The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics (Liveright, 2017), William J. Cooper describes how Adams held fast to the values of that generation during a time of dramatic political change. Though aspiring to a career in politics from an early age, Adams sought to win office mainly through merit. Thanks to his ability and experience he served in a series of diplomatic and political postings, culminating in his selection by President James Monroe as Secretary of State in 1817. While Adams succeeded Monroe as president in 1825, the controversy surrounding his election thwarted his ambitious agenda and crystalized the development of a new party alignment that contributed to his defeat four years later. Yet Adams's return to public office with his election to the House gave him an opportunity to play a continuing role on the national scene, particularly as the country's leaders grappled with the increasingly problematic issues of slavery and territorial expansion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the course of a public career that stretched from the Washington administration to the Mexican-American War, John Quincy Adams became a living link to America’s revolutionary generation. In The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics (Liveright, 2017), William J. Cooper describes how Adams held fast to the values of that generation during a time of dramatic political change. Though aspiring to a career in politics from an early age, Adams sought to win office mainly through merit. Thanks to his ability and experience he served in a series of diplomatic and political postings, culminating in his selection by President James Monroe as Secretary of State in 1817. While Adams succeeded Monroe as president in 1825, the controversy surrounding his election thwarted his ambitious agenda and crystalized the development of a new party alignment that contributed to his defeat four years later. Yet Adams’s return to public office with his election to the House gave him an opportunity to play a continuing role on the national scene, particularly as the country’s leaders grappled with the increasingly problematic issues of slavery and territorial expansion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the course of a public career that stretched from the Washington administration to the Mexican-American War, John Quincy Adams became a living link to America’s revolutionary generation. In The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics (Liveright, 2017), William J. Cooper describes how Adams... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the course of a public career that stretched from the Washington administration to the Mexican-American War, John Quincy Adams became a living link to America’s revolutionary generation. In The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics (Liveright, 2017), William J. Cooper describes how Adams held fast to the values of that generation during a time of dramatic political change. Though aspiring to a career in politics from an early age, Adams sought to win office mainly through merit. Thanks to his ability and experience he served in a series of diplomatic and political postings, culminating in his selection by President James Monroe as Secretary of State in 1817. While Adams succeeded Monroe as president in 1825, the controversy surrounding his election thwarted his ambitious agenda and crystalized the development of a new party alignment that contributed to his defeat four years later. Yet Adams’s return to public office with his election to the House gave him an opportunity to play a continuing role on the national scene, particularly as the country’s leaders grappled with the increasingly problematic issues of slavery and territorial expansion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the course of a public career that stretched from the Washington administration to the Mexican-American War, John Quincy Adams became a living link to America’s revolutionary generation. In The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics (Liveright, 2017), William J. Cooper describes how Adams held fast to the values of that generation during a time of dramatic political change. Though aspiring to a career in politics from an early age, Adams sought to win office mainly through merit. Thanks to his ability and experience he served in a series of diplomatic and political postings, culminating in his selection by President James Monroe as Secretary of State in 1817. While Adams succeeded Monroe as president in 1825, the controversy surrounding his election thwarted his ambitious agenda and crystalized the development of a new party alignment that contributed to his defeat four years later. Yet Adams’s return to public office with his election to the House gave him an opportunity to play a continuing role on the national scene, particularly as the country’s leaders grappled with the increasingly problematic issues of slavery and territorial expansion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the course of a public career that stretched from the Washington administration to the Mexican-American War, John Quincy Adams became a living link to America’s revolutionary generation. In The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics (Liveright, 2017), William J. Cooper describes how Adams held fast to the values of that generation during a time of dramatic political change. Though aspiring to a career in politics from an early age, Adams sought to win office mainly through merit. Thanks to his ability and experience he served in a series of diplomatic and political postings, culminating in his selection by President James Monroe as Secretary of State in 1817. While Adams succeeded Monroe as president in 1825, the controversy surrounding his election thwarted his ambitious agenda and crystalized the development of a new party alignment that contributed to his defeat four years later. Yet Adams’s return to public office with his election to the House gave him an opportunity to play a continuing role on the national scene, particularly as the country’s leaders grappled with the increasingly problematic issues of slavery and territorial expansion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the course of a public career that stretched from the Washington administration to the Mexican-American War, John Quincy Adams became a living link to America’s revolutionary generation. In The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics (Liveright, 2017), William J. Cooper describes how Adams held fast to the values of that generation during a time of dramatic political change. Though aspiring to a career in politics from an early age, Adams sought to win office mainly through merit. Thanks to his ability and experience he served in a series of diplomatic and political postings, culminating in his selection by President James Monroe as Secretary of State in 1817. While Adams succeeded Monroe as president in 1825, the controversy surrounding his election thwarted his ambitious agenda and crystalized the development of a new party alignment that contributed to his defeat four years later. Yet Adams’s return to public office with his election to the House gave him an opportunity to play a continuing role on the national scene, particularly as the country’s leaders grappled with the increasingly problematic issues of slavery and territorial expansion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the third podcast of Arguing History, historians William J. Cooper and Richard Carwardine address the question of the role presidential leadership played in determining the outcome of the American Civil War. Considering the respective positions of both Abraham Lincoln and his Confederate counterpart Jefferson Davis, they discuss the respective backgrounds of the two men, the political environment in which each of them operated, their relationship to their military commanders, and their contributions to the questions of slavery and emancipation as they pertained to the war. In discussing their abilities and actions, Carwardine and Cooper describe some of the important ways in which the two men shaped the conflict and its legacy for us today, in ways both intended and unexpected. William J. Cooper is Boyd Professor of History emeritus at Louisiana State University and the author of several books about American history, including Jefferson Davis, American; We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861; and, most recently, The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics. Richard Carwardine is Rhodes Professor of American History emeritus and the former President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. Among his works are Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power and his newest book, Lincoln’s Sense of Humor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the third podcast of Arguing History, historians William J. Cooper and Richard Carwardine address the question of the role presidential leadership played in determining the outcome of the American Civil War. Considering the respective positions of both Abraham Lincoln and his Confederate counterpart Jefferson Davis, they discuss the respective backgrounds of the two men, the political environment in which each of them operated, their relationship to their military commanders, and their contributions to the questions of slavery and emancipation as they pertained to the war. In discussing their abilities and actions, Carwardine and Cooper describe some of the important ways in which the two men shaped the conflict and its legacy for us today, in ways both intended and unexpected. William J. Cooper is Boyd Professor of History emeritus at Louisiana State University and the author of several books about American history, including Jefferson Davis, American; We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861; and, most recently, The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics. Richard Carwardine is Rhodes Professor of American History emeritus and the former President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. Among his works are Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power and his newest book, Lincoln’s Sense of Humor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the third podcast of Arguing History, historians William J. Cooper and Richard Carwardine address the question of the role presidential leadership played in determining the outcome of the American Civil War. Considering the respective positions of both Abraham Lincoln and his Confederate counterpart Jefferson Davis, they discuss the respective... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the third podcast of Arguing History, historians William J. Cooper and Richard Carwardine address the question of the role presidential leadership played in determining the outcome of the American Civil War. Considering the respective positions of both Abraham Lincoln and his Confederate counterpart Jefferson Davis, they discuss the respective backgrounds of the two men, the political environment in which each of them operated, their relationship to their military commanders, and their contributions to the questions of slavery and emancipation as they pertained to the war. In discussing their abilities and actions, Carwardine and Cooper describe some of the important ways in which the two men shaped the conflict and its legacy for us today, in ways both intended and unexpected. William J. Cooper is Boyd Professor of History emeritus at Louisiana State University and the author of several books about American history, including Jefferson Davis, American; We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861; and, most recently, The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics. Richard Carwardine is Rhodes Professor of American History emeritus and the former President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. Among his works are Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power and his newest book, Lincoln’s Sense of Humor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the third podcast of Arguing History, historians William J. Cooper and Richard Carwardine address the question of the role presidential leadership played in determining the outcome of the American Civil War. Considering the respective positions of both Abraham Lincoln and his Confederate counterpart Jefferson Davis, they discuss the respective backgrounds of the two men, the political environment in which each of them operated, their relationship to their military commanders, and their contributions to the questions of slavery and emancipation as they pertained to the war. In discussing their abilities and actions, Carwardine and Cooper describe some of the important ways in which the two men shaped the conflict and its legacy for us today, in ways both intended and unexpected. William J. Cooper is Boyd Professor of History emeritus at Louisiana State University and the author of several books about American history, including Jefferson Davis, American; We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861; and, most recently, The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics. Richard Carwardine is Rhodes Professor of American History emeritus and the former President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. Among his works are Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power and his newest book, Lincoln’s Sense of Humor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the third podcast of Arguing History, historians William J. Cooper and Richard Carwardine address the question of the role presidential leadership played in determining the outcome of the American Civil War. Considering the respective positions of both Abraham Lincoln and his Confederate counterpart Jefferson Davis, they discuss the respective backgrounds of the two men, the political environment in which each of them operated, their relationship to their military commanders, and their contributions to the questions of slavery and emancipation as they pertained to the war. In discussing their abilities and actions, Carwardine and Cooper describe some of the important ways in which the two men shaped the conflict and its legacy for us today, in ways both intended and unexpected. William J. Cooper is Boyd Professor of History emeritus at Louisiana State University and the author of several books about American history, including Jefferson Davis, American; We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861; and, most recently, The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics. Richard Carwardine is Rhodes Professor of American History emeritus and the former President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. Among his works are Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power and his newest book, Lincoln’s Sense of Humor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices