Books in the Early American Places series

Shortly after winning its independence in 1804, Haiti's leaders realized that if their nation was to survive, it needed to build strong diplomatic bonds with other nations. This book documents the rise and fall of the campaign for black emigration to Haiti, drawing on a variety of archival sources to share the rich voices of emigrants themselves.

Focuses on a late eighteenth-century conflict between Creek Indians and Georgians. The conflict was marked by years of seemingly random theft and violence culminating in open war along the Oconee River. Joshua Haynes argues that the period should be viewed as the struggle of non-state indigenous people to develop a method of resisting colonization.

""An Empire Transformed" explores bodies and landscapes in Restoration Atlantic"--

Examines the critical role of urban taverns in the social and political life of colonial and revolutionary America From exclusive ¿city taverns¿ to seedy ¿disorderly houses,¿ urban taverns were wholly engrained in the diverse web of British American life. By the mid-eighteenth century, urban taverns emerged as the most popular, numerous, and accessible public spaces in British America. These shared spaces, which hosted individuals from a broad swath of socioeconomic backgrounds, eliminated the notion of ¿civilized¿ and ¿wild¿ individuals, and dismayed the elite colonists who hoped to impose a British-style social order upon their local community. More importantly, urban taverns served as critical arenas through which diverse colonists engaged in an ongoing act of societal negotiation. Inn Civility exhibits how colonists¿ struggles to emulate their British homeland ultimately impelled the creation of an American republic. This unique insight demonstrates the messy, often contradictory nature of British American society building. In striving to create a monarchical society based upon tenets of civility, order, and liberty, colonists inadvertently created a political society that the founders would rely upon for their visions of a republican America. The elitist colonists¿ futile efforts at realizing a civil society are crucial for understanding Americäs controversial beginnings and the fitful development of American republicanism.

A fascinating history of a contested frontier, where struggles over landownership brought Native Americans and English colonists togetherProperties of Empire shows the dynamic relationship between Native and English systems of property on the turbulent edge of Britain's empire, and how so many colonists came to believe their prosperity depended on acknowledging Indigenous land rights.As absentee land speculators and hardscrabble colonists squabbled over conflicting visions for the frontier, Wabanaki Indians' unity allowed them to forcefully project their own interpretations of often poorly remembered old land deeds and treaties. The result was the creation of a system of property in Maine that defied English law, and preserved Native power and territory. Eventually, ordinary colonists, dissident speculators, and grasping officials succeeded in undermining and finally destroying this arrangement, a process that took place in councils and courtrooms, in taverns and treaties, and on battlefields.Properties of Empire challenges assumptions about the relationship between Indigenous and imperial property creation in early America, as well as the fixed nature of Indian "sales" of land, revealing the existence of a prolonged struggle to re-interpret seventeenth-century land transactions and treaties well into the eighteenth century. The ongoing struggle to construct a commonly agreed-upon culture of landownership shaped diplomacy, imperial administration, and matters of colonial law in powerful ways, and its legacy remains with us today.

A fascinating journey through the origins of American tourismIn the early nineteenth century, thanks to a booming transportation industry, Americans began to journey away from home simply for the sake of traveling, giving rise to a new cultural phenomenon -the tourist.In Selling the Sights, Will B. Mackintosh describes the origins and cultural significance of this new type of traveler and the moment in time when the emerging American market economy began to reshape the availability of geographical knowledge, the material conditions of travel, and the variety of destinations that sought to profit from visitors with money to spend. Entrepreneurs began to transform the critical steps of travel-deciding where to go and how to get there-into commodities that could be produced in volume and sold to a marketplace of consumers. The identities of Americans prosperous enough to afford such commodities were fundamentally changed as they came to define themselves through the consumption of experiences.Mackintosh ultimately demonstrates that the cultural values and market forces surrounding tourism in the early nineteenth century continue to shape our experience of travel to this day.

The riveting story of control over the mobility of poor migrants, and how their movements shaped current perceptions of class and status in the United States Vagrants. Vagabonds. Hoboes. Identified by myriad names, the homeless and geographically mobile have been with us since the earliest periods of recorded history. In the early days of the United States, these poor migrants ¿ consisting of everyone from work-seekers to runaway slaves ¿ populated the roads and streets of major cities and towns. These individuals were a part of a social class whose geographical movements broke settlement laws, penal codes, and welfare policies. This book documents their travels and experiences across the Atlantic world, excavating their life stories from the records of criminal justice systems and relief organizations. Vagrants and Vagabonds examines the subsistence activities of the mobile poor, from migration to wage labor to petty theft, and how local and state municipal authorities criminalized these activities, prompting extensive punishment. Kristin O¿Brassill-Kulfan examines the intertwined legal constructions, experiences, and responses to these so-called ¿vagrants,¿ arguing that we can glean important insights about poverty and class in this period by paying careful attention to mobility. This book charts why and how the itinerant poor were subject to imprisonment and forced migration, and considers the relationship between race and the right to movement and residence in the antebellum US. Ultimately, Vagrants and Vagabonds argues that poor migrants, the laws designed to curtail their movements, and the people charged with managing them, were central to shaping everything from the role of the state to contemporary conceptions of community to class and labor status, the spread of disease, and punishment in the early American republic.

Too often, says Jennifer Goloboy, we equate being middle class with "niceness" - a set of values frozen in the antebellum period and centred on long-term economic and social progress and a close, nurturing family life. Goloboy's case study of merchants in Charleston looks to an earlier time to establish the roots of middle-class culture in America.

Tells the story of African American's battle against the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816 with the intention to return free blacks to its colony Liberia.

"Also available as an ebook"--Title page verso.

The everyday lives of Irish and Africans are obscured by sources constructed by elites. Through her research, Shaw overcomes the constraints such sources impose by pushing methodological boundaries to fill in the gaps, silences, and absences that dominate the historical record.

Britain's colonial empire in southeastern North America relied on the maintenance of economic ties with the Indian confederacies of the region. Those ties also relied on British traders adapting to Indian ideas of land and power. Paulett examines this interaction, revealing the ways that conceptions of space competed, overlapped, and changed.

Addresses the significance of Sylvester Manor's plantation history to American attitudes about diversity, Indian land politics, slavery and Jim Crow, in tension with idealized visions of white colonial community

Explores the history of the abolitionist movement in Pennsylvania and social, political and religious reasons for the support of colonization

Uncovers the often overlooked participation of African Americans and Native Americans in early Protestant churchesPhillis Wheatley was stolen from her family in Senegambia, and, in 1761, slave traders transported her to Boston, Massachusetts, to be sold. She was purchased by the Wheatley family who treated Phillis far better than most eighteenth-century slaves could hope, and she received a thorough education while still, of course, longing for her freedom. After four years, Wheatley began writing religious poetry. She was baptized and became a member of a predominantly white Congregational church in Boston. More than ten years after her enslavement began, some of her poetry was published in London, England, as a book titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. This book is evidence that her experience of enslavement was exceptional. Wheatley remains the most famous black Christian of the colonial era. Though her experiences and accomplishments were unique, her religious affiliation with a predominantly white church was quite ordinary. Dividing the Faith argues that, contrary to the traditional scholarly consensus, a significant portion of northern Protestants worshipped in interracial contexts during the eighteenth century. Yet in another fifty years, such an affiliation would become increasingly rare as churches were by-and-large segregated.Richard Boles draws from the records of over four hundred congregations to scrutinize the factors that made different Christian traditions either accessible or inaccessible to African American and American Indian peoples. By including Indians, Afro-Indians, and black people in the study of race and religion in the North, this research breaks new ground and uses patterns of church participation to illuminate broader social histories. Overall, it explains the dynamic history of racial integration and segregation in northern colonies and states.

Throughout history the British Atlantic has often been depicted as a series of well-ordered colonial ports that functioned as nodes of Atlantic shipping. The author examines the networks that connected British settlers in New York and the Caribbean and Dutch traders in the Netherlands and in the Dutch colonies in North America and the Caribbean.

"Also available as an ebook"--Title page verso.