Books in the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press series

Examines the intricate financial history of the American Revolution and the Confederation and connects it to political and constitutional developments in the period. Whether states or Congress should pay the debts of the Revolution and collect the taxes was a pivotal question whose solution would largely determine the country's progress toward national union.

Presenting an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to colonial America's best-known literary genre, Andrew Newman analyses depictions of reading, writing, and recollecting texts in Indian captivity narratives.

This biography of William Plumer - New Hampshire lawyer, politician, senator, and governor - furnishes unique insight into state, local, and national politics in the formative period of party development. Plumer was an important participant in the American political scene for forty years. Originally published in 1962.

Fraden explores artist Rhodessa Jones's theater work with incarcerated women, known as the Medea Project. Balancing narrative and commentary, Fraden chronicles the process of turning the inmates' personal stories into public performance and investigates the possibilities for communication and social change of such combinations of art and activism.

Winthrop's Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649

Abbot's study of the colony of Georgia, from the time it came under the administration of the Crown in 1754 until the beginning of the American Revolution, tells the story of unprecedented expansion and growth against a backdrop of fast-developing crisis throughout the Empire. Originally published in 1959.

This absorbing appraisal of colonial South Carolina political history is developed in three parts: The Age of the Goose Creek Men", covering 1670-1712; "Breakdown and Recovery", in which the central dispute was over local currency, 1712-43; and "The Rise of the Commons House of Assembly, 1743-63". Originally published in 1966.

In the battle for empire that was the Seven Years' War, France's Sugar Islands, Guadeloupe and Martinique, were stakes as important as the Dominion of Canada. This book sketches the background strategy that led William Pitt to send an expedition to capture them, but it is chiefly the story of the campaign itself. Originally published in 1955.

This is the first full-length biography of Rufus King. It emphasizes politics and diplomacy but also presents a well-rounded appraisal of King's personality, outlook, and interests. Many little-known facets of King's life are illuminated, including his relationship to the Burr-Hamilton duel. Originally published in 1968.

Moses Brown carried on a wide range of business activities, seeking profit as capital for humanitarian purposes. He became a reluctant participant and eventually a leader in many reform movements - crusades against slavery and war; efforts to provide education for the underprivileged, orphans, and Afro-Americans; and programs of urban redevelopment and public health. Originally published in 1962.

This is the biography of a wily Scots settler who arrived in New York in 1675 and became one of the colony's wealthiest and most powerful citizens. His career illustrates the growing breach between English and American approaches to political and administrative problems. Originally published in 1961.

George Croghan - land speculator, Indian trader, and prominent Indian agent - was a man of fascinating, if dubious, character whose career epitomized the history of the US West before the Revolution. This study is based on Croghan's long-lost personal papers that were found by the author in an old Philadelphia attic. Originally published in 1959.

Describes the courts of vice-admiralty as they existed in the American colonies at the beginning of the revolutionary struggles, analyses the changes in the courts and their jurisdiction from 1763 to the outbreak of the war, and examines the American objections to the vice-admiralty system. Originally published in 1960.

Focusing on the role of the American Loyalists in Great Britain's military policy throughout the Revolutionary War, this book also analyses the impact of British politics on plans to utilize those colonists who remained faithful to the Crown.

The formal side of Adams is reconciled with his remarkably colourful private life by Shaw's penetrating grasp of the whole man. Considerable attention is given to his clash of wills with Franklin in Europe and his later relationship with Jefferson. Originally published in 1976.

Pinckney's lifetime as a leading member of the southern oligarchy is important to an understanding of that group's assumptions about itself, its aspirations, and its exacting standards of public and private conduct for its leaders. It also provides insight into the development of the Federalist and Republican parties in the South.

This brilliant, dramatic reconstruction of the Puritan mind in action, informed with psychological and sociological insights, provides a fresh understanding of Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and gives her controversy with the Puritan Saints a new dimension in American colonial history.

In this remarkable revisionist study, Webb shows that English imperial policy was shaped by a powerful and sustained militaristic, autocratic tradition that openly defined English empire as the imposition of state control by force on dependent people. Originally published in 1987.

In a pungent revision of the professional educator's school of history, Bailyn traces the cultural context of education in early American society and the evolution of educational standards in the colonies. His analysis ranges beyond formal education to encompass such vital social determinants as the family, apprenticeship, and organised religion.

This summary essay and the heavily annotated bibliography covering the period from the first colonization to 1826 are primarily intended to aid the scholar and student by suggesting areas of further study and ways of expanding the conventional interpretations of early American history. Originally published in 1935.

Provides a vivid picture of late eighteenth-century Virginia's keen and often hot-tempered local politics. Sydnor has filled his book with the lively details of campaign practices, the drama of election day, the workings of the county oligarchies, and the practical politics of that training school for statesmen, the Virginia House of Burgesses.

This prize-winning volume describes and explains the process by which the cirumstances of life in the New World transformed the quasi-medieval ideas of seventeenth-century English jurists about subjectship, community, sovereignty, and allegiance into a wholly new doctrine of "volitional allegiance".

In this first comprehensive assessment of where research on prerevolutionary economy stands, what it seeks to achieve, and how it might best proceed, the authors discuss those areas in which traditional work remains to be done and address new possibilities for a "new economic history".

"Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia."

In the late sixteenth century, the English started expanding westward, establishing control over parts of neighbouring Ireland as well as exploring and later colonising distant North America. Audrey Horning deftly examines the relationship between British colonization efforts in both locales, depicting their close interconnection as fields for colonial experimentation.

Taking a material culture approach, this book examines urban domestic buildings from Charleston, South Carolina, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as well those in English cities and towns, to better understand why people built the houses they did and how their homes informed everyday city life.

The author has put simple solutions and flashy theories aside and brought to his task a patience, skepticism, thoroughness, and humility commensurate with the vast undertaking. He combines these qualities with imagination and insight. The result is a massive and learned work that stands as the most informed and impressive pronouncement on the subject yet made."" New York Times Book Review