audiobook Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (Polemics) by Frances Fox Piven in History

Description

A gripping and sensational tale of violence; alcohol; and taxes; The Whiskey Rebellion uncovers the radical eighteenth-century people’s movement; long ignored by historians; that contributed decisively to the establishment of federal authority. In 1791; on the frontier of western Pennsylvania; local gangs of insurgents with blackened faces began to attack federal officials; beating and torturing the tax collectors who attempted to collect the first federal tax ever laid on an American product—whiskey. To the hard-bitten people of the depressed and violent West; the whiskey tax paralyzed their rural economies; putting money in the coffers of already wealthy creditors and industrialists. To Alexander Hamilton; the tax was the key to industrial growth. To President Washington; it was the catalyst for the first-ever deployment of a federal army; a military action that would suppress an insurgency against the American government. With an unsparing look at both Hamilton and Washington; journalist and historian William Hogeland offers a provocative; in-depth analysis of this forgotten revolution and suppression. Focusing on the battle between government and the early-American evangelical movement that advocated western secession; The Whiskey Rebellion is an intense and insightful examination of the roots of federal power and the most fundamental conflicts that ignited—and continue to smolder—in the United States.