Champagne Charlie tells the story of a dashing young Frenchman, Charles Heidsieck, who introduced hard-drinking Americans to champagne in the mid-nineteenth century and became famously known as Champagne Charlie. Ignoring critics who warned that America was a dangerous place to do business, Heidsieck plunged right in, considering it “the land of opportunity” and succeeding there beyond his wildest dreams. Those dreams, however, became a nightmare when the Civil War erupted and he was imprisoned and nearly executed after being charged with spying for the Confederacy. Only after the Lincoln administration intervened was Heidsieck’s life saved, but his champagne business had gone bankrupt and was virtually dead. Then, miraculously, Heidsieck became owner of nearly half the city of Denver, the fastest-growing city in the West. By selling the land, Heidsieck was eventually able to resurrect his business to its former glory. For all its current-day glamour, effervescence, and association with the high life, champagne had a lackluster start. It was pale red in color, insipid in taste, and completely flat. In fact, champagne-makers, including the legendary Dom Pérignon, fought strenuously to eliminate bubbles. Champagne’s success can be traced back to King Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour, Napoleon Bonaparte, countless wars and prohibitions, and, most important to the United States, Charles Heidsieck. Champagne Charlie tells the history of champagne and the thrilling tale of how the go-to celebratory drink of our time made its way to the United States, thanks to the controversial figure of Heidsieck.

Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Delany--these figures stand out in the annals of black protest for their vital antislavery efforts. But what of the rest of their generation, the thousands of other free blacks in the North? Patrick Rael explores the tradition of protest and sense of racial identity forged by both famous and lesser-known black leaders in antebellum America and illuminates the ideas that united these activists across a wide array of divisions. In so doing, he reveals the roots of the arguments that still resound in the struggle for justice today. Mining sources that include newspapers and pamphlets of the black national press, speeches and sermons, slave narratives and personal memoirs, Rael recovers the voices of an extraordinary range of black leaders in the first half of the nineteenth century. He traces how these activists constructed a black American identity through their participation in the discourse of the public sphere and how this identity in turn informed their critiques of a nation predicated on freedom but devoted to white supremacy. His analysis explains how their place in the industrializing, urbanizing antebellum North offered black leaders a unique opportunity to smooth over class and other tensions among themselves and successfully galvanize the race against slavery.

American national trade bibliography.