Books in the Early American Studies series

Sweet Liberty offers a history of Martinique and its relationship to metropolitan France during the final years of slavery in the French empire. It argues that an Atlantic-world approach reveals how race, slavery, class, and gender shaped what it meant to be French on both sides of the ocean.

Leading religious historians connect changes in law and rhetoric to daily cooperation and conflict in early America. These essays examine such topics as Native American spiritual life, the biblical sources of tolerance and intolerance, contemporary philosophies of religious liberty, and the resilience of African American faiths.

"If American studies scholars needed an example of how local history can be writ large, they can effectively point to this study of weavers in Chester County, Pennsylvania."-American Studies

Focusing on the rich heritage of art-making in the eighteenth century, this illustrated book positions both well-known painters and unknown artisans within the framework of their economic lives, their families, and the geographies through which they moved as they created notable careers and memorable objects.

Seasons of Misery offers a boldly original account of early English settlement in American by placing catastrophe and crisis at the center of the story. Donegan argues that the constant state of suffering and uncertainty decisively formed the colonial identity and produced the first distinctly colonial literature.

Political Gastronomy examines the many meanings of food as a symbol of power in the daily life and the political culture of early America. Struggling to establish status and precedence, English settlers and American Indians alike conveyed authority through shared meals and other significant exchanges of food.

Contested Bodies explores how the end of the transatlantic trade impacted Jamaican slaves and their children. Examining the struggles for control over biological reproduction, Turner shows how central childbearing was to the organization of plantation work, the care of slaves, and the development of their culture.

Building on the eighteenth-century commonplace that the theater could be a school for public virtue, this book illustrates the connections between the popularity of theatrical performances in eighteenth-century British North America and the British and American national identities that colonial and Revolutionary Americans espoused.

Vividly recounting the lives of enslaved women in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados, and their conditions of confinement through urban, legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, authorities, and the archive, Marisa J. Fuentes challenges how histories of vulnerable and invisible subjects are written.

In dozens of slave conspiracy scares in North American and the Caribbean, colonists terrorized and killed slaves whom they accused of planning to take over the colony. Jason T. Sharples explains the deep origins and historical triggers of these incidents and argues that conspiracy scares bound society together through shared fear.

In Historic Real Estate, Whitney Martinko shows how early Americans debated whether, and how, to preserve historic structures as permanent features of the new nation's landscape. She argues that early advocates of preservation affirmed a capitalist system of land development by promising to make it moral.

During the forty years of the Dutch presence in colonial America, their intrusion led to the betrayal of their own values and the betrayal of the indigenous peoples. They reaped the shame of reproaching themselves for unjust wars and faced a native insurgency that they could neither negotiate nor satisfactorily quell.

"A useful and readable account of the ways in which the poor were regulated by the emergent disciplinary power of the modern state."-William and Mary Quarterly

Envisioning an English Empire examines the founding of Jamestown in 1607 within its global, political, and cultural contexts.

Ranging from Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania to the backcountry regions of the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and northern New England, The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America offers an ambitious overview of political life in pre-Revolutionary America.

In the summer of 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, the grandson of England''s King James II, landed on the western coast of Scotland intending to overthrow George II and restore the Stuart family to the throne. He gathered thousands of supporters, and the insurrection he led—the Jacobite Rising of 1745—was a crisis not only for Britain but for the entire British Empire. Rebellion and Savagery examines the 1745 rising and its aftermath on an imperial scale.Charles Edward gained support from the clans of the Scottish Highlands, communities that had long been derided as primitive. In 1745 the Jacobite Highlanders were denigrated both as rebels and as savages, and this double stigma helped provoke and legitimate the violence of the government''s anti-Jacobite campaigns. Though the colonies stayed relatively peaceful in 1745, the rising inspired fear of a global conspiracy among Jacobites and other suspect groups, including North America''s purported savages.The defeat of the rising transformed the leader of the army, the Duke of Cumberland, into a popular hero on both sides of the Atlantic. With unprecedented support for the maintenance of peacetime forces, Cumberland deployed new garrisons in the Scottish Highlands and also in the Mediterranean and North America. In all these places his troops were engaged in similar missions: demanding loyalty from all local inhabitants and advancing the cause of British civilization. The recent crisis gave a sense of urgency to their efforts. Confident that "a free people cannot oppress," the leaders of the army became Britain''s most powerful and uncompromising imperialists.Geoffrey Plank argues that the events of 1745 marked a turning point in the fortunes of the British Empire by creating a new political interest in favor of aggressive imperialism, and also by sparking discussion of how the British should promote market-based economic relations in order to integrate indigenous peoples within their empire. The spread of these new political ideas was facilitated by a large-scale migration of people involved in the rising from Britain to the colonies, beginning with hundreds of prisoners seized on the field of battle and continuing in subsequent years to include thousands of men, women and children. Some of the migrants were former Jacobites and others had stood against the insurrection. The event affected all the British domains.

Susan Branson examines the avenues through which women's presence became central to the competition for control of the nation's political life in the post-Revolutionary era.

A Nation of Women provides a history of the significance of gender in Lenape/Delaware encounters with Europeans, and a history of women in these encounters.

During the seven years of British occupation that spanned the American Revolution, communities conventionally depicted as hostile opponents were, in fact, in frequent contact.

In attempting to steer young adults safely away from the dangers of market-driven society, reformers in early America created values that came to define the emerging urban middle class.

"The first comprehensive history of the settlement of Germans in the 1700s and how they influenced the economy, politics, and ways of life in the New World."-Pennsylvania

Talks about what liberty meant to an important group of common men in American society, those who lived and worked on the waterfront and aboard ships. This book shows that the idealized vision of liberty associated with the Founding Fathers had a much more immediate and complex meaning than previously thought.

Spanning the first fifty years of the nation's history, Revolutionary Backlash uncovers women's forgotten role in early American politics and explores an alternative explanation for the emergence of the first women's rights movement.

From the staged debates over religious enthusiasm to the earnest offerings of ordinary men and women to speak to and for God, Doomsayers shows that the contest between prophets and their critics for the allegiance of the reading public was part of a broader recalibration of the norms and values of civic discourse in the age of revolution.

Reveals how ideas about gender and family life were central to the ways people in colonial New England, and their neighbors in New France and Indian Country, described their experiences in cross-cultural warfare. This book argues that English, French, and Indian people had broadly similar ideas about gender and authority.

During the first half-century of American independence, a fundamental change in the meaning and morality of ambition emerged. Beyond the Farm blends biography, social history, and cultural history to describe and explain that change.

Catalysts in the birth of evangelicalism, the Moravians supported their religious projects through financial savvy, a distinctive communalism at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and transatlantic commercial networks. This book traces the Moravians' evolving projects, arguing that imperial war, not capitalism, transformed Moravian religious life.

Eric R. Schlereth places religious conflicts between deists and their opponents at the center of early American public life. This history recasts the origins of cultural politics in the United States by exploring how everyday Americans navigated questions of religious truth and difference in an age of emerging religious liberty.