Books in the American Beginnings, 1500-1900 series

Two and a half centuries after the American Revolution the US stands as one of the greatest powers on earth and the undoubted leader of the western hemisphere. The author maintains that the Founding Fathers clearly understood the connection between public finance and power: a well-managed public debt was a key part of every modern state.

The English settlers who staked their claims in the Chesapeake Bay were drawn to it for a variety of reasons. Some sought wealth from the land, while others saw it as a place of trade, a political experiment, or a potential spiritual sanctuary. But like other European colonizers in the Americas, they all aspired to found, organize, and maintain functioning towns--an aspiration that met with varying degrees of success, but mostly failure. Yet this failure became critical to the economy and society that did arise there. As Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth reveals, the agrarian plantation society that eventually sprang up around the Chesapeake Bay was not preordained--rather, it was the necessary product of failed attempts to build cities. Paul Musselwhite details the unsuccessful urban development that defined the region from the seventeenth century through the Civil War, showing how places like Jamestown and Annapolis--despite their small size--were the products of ambitious and cutting-edge experiments in urbanization comparable to those in the largest port cities of the Atlantic world. These experiments, though, stoked ongoing debate about commerce, taxation, and self-government. Chesapeake planters responded to this debate by reinforcing the political, economic, and cultural authority of their private plantation estates, with profound consequences for the region's laborers and the political ideology of the southern United States. As Musselwhite makes clear, the antebellum economy around this well-known waterway was built not in the absence of cities, but upon their aspirational wreckage.

What should serve as money, who should control its creation and circulation, and according to what rules? For more than two hundred years, the "money question" shaped American social thought, becoming a central subject of political debate and class conflict. Sovereign of the Market reveals how and why this happened. Jeffrey Sklansky's wide-ranging study comprises three chronological parts devoted to major episodes in the career of the money question. First, the fight over the innovation of paper money in colonial New England. Second, the battle over the development of commercial banking in the new United States. And third, the struggle over the national banking system and the international gold standard in the late nineteenth century. Each section explores a broader problem of power that framed each conflict in successive phases of capitalist development: circulation, representation, and association. The three parts also encompass intellectual biographies of opposing reformers for each period, shedding new light on the connections between economic thought and other aspects of early American culture. The result is a fascinating, insightful, and deeply considered contribution to the history of capitalism.

Shows how Quakers forged a paradoxical sense of their place in the world as militant warriors fighting for peace. The author argues that during the turbulent Age of Revolution and Reaction, the Religious Society of Friends forged a "holy nation," a transnational community of like-minded believers committed to divine law and to one another.

In the years before the Civil War, many Americans saw the sea as a world apart, an often violent and insular culture governed by its own definitions of honor and ruled by its own authorities. This title tracks how seamen conceived of themselves as individuals and how they defined their place within the United States.

In the months after the end of the Civil War, there was one word on everyone's lips: redemption. This title explores how the violence of a protracted civil war shaped the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the new South.

Americans have long acknowledged a deep connection between evangelical religion and democracy in the early days of the republic. This title challenges this standard interpretation and describes the intertwined relationship between religion and partisan politics that emerged in the formative era of the early republic.

"Evan Haefeli argues that America's professed religious tolerance arose out of necessity, since no standard could prevail on its polyglot immigrants. More important, Haefeli ties the emergence of religious toleration to events worldwide, creating a true transnationalist history that links developing American realities to political and social conflicts and resolutions in Europe, showing the ways in which the codification of relationships among states, churches, and publics was endlessly contested in the colonial era. This is an ambitious attempt to reconcile our understandings of power-secular and otherwise- and refine our narratives about what came to be seen as American values"--

"As the first Europeans settled in America, they found themselves often sick, weak, and likely to die. Here, Ben Mutschler explores how illness shaped society and government in New England from roughly 1690 through 1820. He focuses on the building blocks of society and government-family, household, town, colony-and their multifaceted engagements with the problems that diseases caused. Illness both defined and strained early American institutions, bringing people together in the face of calamity yet also driving them apart when the costs of persevering became too high or were too unequally shared"--

How does a state function during the collapse of institutions that revolutions bring? Pashman answers that in the case of New York during and after the Revolutionary War, showing how a new state was built on the fly.