Books in the Early American Studies series

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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

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.

Examines Ralegh's plan to create an English empire in the New World but also the attempts of native peoples to make sense of the newcomers who threatened to transform their world in frightening ways.

In this cultural history of the War of 1812, Nicole Eustace examines the way this expensive, unproductive war won popular support through appeal to the emotions. 1812 looks at the major dramatic events of the war and the subsequent songs, speeches, and images that spoke of opportunity and romantic adventure.

In this first full biography of Philip Vickers Fithian, John Fea tells the story of how one young man sought to pursue the life of an eighteenth-century Presbyterian gentleman while continuing to yearn for the everyday passions that defined what it meant for him to be human.

Friends and Strangers offers a provocative new look at the transfer of English culture to North America. Setting Pennsylvania in the context of the broader Atlantic phenomenon of creolization, Smolenski's account of the Quaker colony's origins reveals the vital role this process played in creating early American society.

This study of eighteenth-century Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and its Scots-Irish inhabitants reconsiders the role early American towns played in the development of the American interior. Towns were not spearheads of a progressive Euro-American civilization but volatile places functioning in the middle of a diverse and dynamic mid-Atlantic.

Jesus Is Female chronicles the religious violence that erupted in many German and Swedish communities in colonial America as colonists fought over whether to accept the Moravians, and suggests that gender issues were at the heart of the raging conflict.

"O'Shaughnessy's excellent, clearly written book is an important contribution to Caribbean and US history. He successfully explains why the Caribbean colonists, far from supporting the American Revolution, preferred to keep the British empire intact. . . . Highly recommended."-Choice

Liam Riordan explores how the American Revolution politicized religious, racial, and ethnic identity among the diverse inhabitants of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey from 1770 to 1830.

Lenape Country is a sweeping narrative history of Lenape Indian encounters with European settlers in the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

New World Orders juxtaposes case studies from Brazil to California to New York to explore the wide variety of legal and extralegal means by which social order was maintained in the early Americas.

Covering more than two centuries of social, economic, and political change, and offering a challenging, innovative approach to urban as well national history, First City tells the Philadelphia story through the wealth of material culture its citizens have chosen to preserve.

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.

"An exemplary study of public memory because of its wide vision, its attentiveness to context, and its careful delineation of change over time."-David Waldstreicher, author of In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820

A New Nation of Goods highlights the significant role of provincial artisans in four crafts in the northeastern United States-chairmaking, clockmaking, portrait painting, and book publishing-to explain the shift from preindustrial society to an entirely new configuration of work, commodities, and culture.

Seneca Possessed explores how the Seneca people and their homeland were "possessed"-culturally, spiritually, materially, and legally-in the wake of the American Revolution.

A compelling history of nineteenth-century economic, social, and cultural life, Capitalism by Gaslight explores the blurred boundary between legitimate and illegitimate economic activity, describing the dealings of prostitutes, dealers in dirty books and used goods, mock auctioneers, illegal slavers, and other entrepreneurs.

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.

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.

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.

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.