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

The traditional history of early America paints the colonies as a transplantation of European culture to a new continent - a 'virgin land' in which Native Americans were assigned the role of foil whose contribution was to stimulate the energy of European dispossessors. This book recasts the story of American colonization as a territorial invasion.

The origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender are examined in this book. The author argues that gender was both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, and assesses its role in the construction of racism in Virginia.

Shows that men and women created a vibrant urban pleasure culture, including the eroticization of print culture. By reading representations of sex against actual behavior, the author reveals the clash of meanings given to sex and illuminates struggles to recast sexuality in order to eliminate its subversive potential.

This Violent Empire traces the origins of American violence, racism, and paranoia to the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans' national sense of self.Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series of "Others" (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless) whose differences from European American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders. These "Others," dangerous and polluting, had to be excluded from the European American body politic. Feared, but also desired, they refused to be marginalized, incurring increasingly enraged enactments of their political and social exclusion that shaped our long history of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Close readings of political rhetoric during the Constitutional debates reveal the genesis of this long history.

In the wake of American independence, it was clear that the new United States required novel political forms. Moving beyond traditional accounts of social unrest, republican and liberal ideology, and the rise of the autonomous individual, this work offers an interpretation of the American Revolution as a transformation of self and society.

This work examines the British public's predominantly loyal reponse to its government's actions during the American revolution. Drawing on nearly 1000 political pamphlets, as well as broad sides, private memoirs and popular cartoons it offers an insight into 18th-century British political culture.

Traces Freemasonry through its first century in America. The text follows the order from its origins in Britain and its introduction into North America in the 1730s to its near-destruction by a massive anti-Masonic movement and its reconfiguration into the brotherhood we know today.

A study of the Anti-Federalist legacy. Saul Cornell argues that, while the Anti-Federalists won the battle over ratification of the Constitution in 1788, their ideas continue to define the soul of US politics. He explores the range and influence of Anti-Federalist thought on the early Republic.

At the close of the 18th century, the poet and clergyman Timothy Dwight waged a literary and intellectual war against the forces of ""infidelity"". This text re-examines this episode by focusing on ""The Triumph of Fidelity"" (1788), the verse satire that launched Dwight's campaign.

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.

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.

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.

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"".

The American revolutionaries themselves believed the change from monarchy to republic was the essence of the Revolution. King and People in Provincial Massachusetts explores what monarchy meant to Massachusetts under its second charter and why the momentous change to republican government came about.

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.

A challenge to the belief that the introduction of racial slavery in America was the consequence of a scarce labour market. It contends that during the late-17th and early-18th centuries a small, powerful planter class, to further its own economic interests, brought racial slavery to Virginia.

Presenting an examination of Spanish California, this book aims to illuminate Indian struggles against a confining colonial order and amidst harrowing depopulation. Concentrating on the experiences of the Costanoan and Esselen peoples during the colonial period, it concludes with an epilogue that carries the story of their survival.

The rapid rise in popularity of maps and geography handbooks in the eighteenth century ushered in a new geographic literacy among non elite Americans. This illustrated book argues that geographic literacy as it was played out in popular literary genres significantly influenced the formation of identity in America from the 1680s to the 1820s.

Examines how various people in the British colonies understood and represented the natural world around them from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth. The author uncovers early descriptions of American natural phenomena as well as clues to how people in the colonies construed their own identities through the natural world.

Education played a decisive role in recasting women's collective experience in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Asking how and why women shaped their lives anew through education, this title measures the significant transformation in individual and social identities fostered by female academies and seminaries.

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.

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.

This text explores the mental processes and emotional crises that Americans faced in their first national war. The author aims to present a portrait of how individuals and the populace at large faced the Revolution and its implications.

Drawn from the direct testimony provided by women in their letters, diaries, and legal records, this text describes women's participation in the American Revolution, evaluates changes in their education in the late 18th century and analyzes their status in law and society.

Edited by the late Philip L. Barbour, acknowledged as the leading authority on Captain John Smith, this annotated three-volume work is the only modern edition of the works of the legendary figure who captured the interest of scholars and general readers for over four centuries.

Edited by the late Philip L. Barbour, acknowledged as the leading authority on Captain John Smith, this annotated three-volume work is the only modern edition of the works of the legendary figure who captured the interest of scholars and general readers for over four centuries.

Edited by the late Philip L. Barbour, acknowledged as the leading authority on Captain John Smith, this annotated three-volume work is the only modern edition of the works of the legendary figure who captured the interest of scholars and general readers for over four centuries.

In this series of provocative essays, nine specialists in early American history examine some of the more important aspects of the seventeenth-century colonial experience, presenting an impressive sampling of modern historical research on such topics as colonists and Indians, people and society, church and state, and history and historians. Originally published 1959.