Books in the Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia series

At the outset of the eighteenth century, many British Americans accepted the notion that virtuous sociable feelings occurred primarily among the genteel, while sinful and selfish passions remained the reflexive emotions of the masses, from lower-class whites to Indians to enslaved Africans. Yet by 1776 radicals would propose a new universal model of human nature that attributed the same feelings and passions to all humankind and made common emotions the basis of natural rights. In Passion Is the Gale, Nicole Eustace describes the promise and the problems of this crucial social and political transition by charting changes in emotional expression among countless ordinary men and women of British America.From Pennsylvania newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, correspondence, commonplace books, and literary texts, Eustace identifies the explicit vocabulary of emotion as a medium of human exchange. Alternating between explorations of particular emotions in daily social interactions and assessments of emotional rhetoric's functions in specific moments of historical crisis (from the Seven Years War to the rise of the patriot movement), she makes a convincing case for the pivotal role of emotion in reshaping power relations and reordering society in the critical decades leading up to the Revolution. As Eustace demonstrates, passion was the gale that impelled Anglo-Americans forward to declare their independence--collectively at first, and then, finally, as individuals.

Demonstrates that tales of Christian captives among Muslims, Amerindians, and hostile European nations were not only exploited in order to emphasize cultural oppositions and geopolitical hostilities. This work also demonstrates how the flexible identities of captives complicate clear-cut national, colonial, and religious distinctions.

An examination of the origin and legacies of the captive exchange economy within and among the Native Americans and Euro-American communities throughout the Southwest borderlands from the Spanish colonial era to the end of the 19th century.

In an exploration of the oceanic connections of the Atlantic world, Michael J. Jarvis recovers a mariner's view of early America as seen through the eyes of Bermuda's seafarers. The first social history of eighteenth-century Bermuda, this book profiles how one especially intensive maritime community capitalized on its position ""in the eye of all trade"".

Follows the Catawbas from their first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century until they carved out a place in the American republic three centuries later. This title tells the story of Native agency, creativity, resilience, and endurance.

Creolization describes the cultural adaptations that occur when a community moves to a new geographic setting. Exploring the consciousness of peoples defined as 'creoles' who moved from the Old World to the New World, this work investigates the creolization of literary forms and genres in the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries.

During French colonial rule in Louisiana, nuns from the French Company of Saint Ursula came to New Orleans, where they educated women and girls of different descents, in literacy, numeracy, and the Catholic faith. By incorporating their story into the history of early America, this work exposes the limits of the republican model of national unity.