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

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.

Historians now recognize that development of American party machinery is most accurately and profitably studied at the state level. The emphasis of this work is on party machinery, for it was in this area that New Jersey's Jeffersonian Republican party made its most original contributions to the emerging American party system.

The dissolution of the ill-starred Virginia Company in 1624 left Virginia -- now England's first royal colony -- without a formal raison d'etre. Most historians have suggested that the nascent local societies were anarchic, under the thrall of violent and unscrupulous men.James Perry asserts the opposite: The Formation of a Society on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1615-1655 depicts emergent social cohesion. In a model of network analysis, Perry mines county court records to trace landholders through four decades -- their land, families, neighborhoods, local and offshore economic relations, and institutions. A wealth of statistics documents their development from rudimentary beginnings to a more highly articulated society capable of resolving conflict and working toward communal good.Perry's methodology will serve as a model for analyzing other new settlements, particularly those lacking the close-knit religious bonds and contractual foundations of New England towns. His conclusions will reshape notions of the development of early Chesapeake society.Originally published in 1990.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Now available again, this important biography of the early New England intellectual leader was greeted as a "landmark in the history of the American mind" by Clifford K. Shipton when it appeared in 1962. Stiles lived at a critical time - the transition from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, which came suddenly in New England - and because of his position, his influence was great.

Written in the 1750s by Scottish physician Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding members of the Tuesday Club of Annapolis, this book is a mock-heroic narrative of ten years in the life of an eighteenth-century social club, as well as a political satire of the proprietor struggles in colonial Maryland and a humorous treatment of the outcry against luxury.

By focusing on the Howe brothers, their political connections, their relationships with the British ministry, their attitude toward the Revolution, and their military activities in America, Gruber answers the frequently asked question of why the British failed to end the American Revolution in its early years.

UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Tench Coxe participated in or commented on most of the major events in American history from the Revolution to the 1820s. His long career of public involvement embodies many of the significant historical themes of the time: he was a Philadelphia aristocrat, a loyalist out of opportunism, a merchant during the period of economic adjustment in the 1780s, a grandiose land speculator, a Federalist with Alexander Hamilton and later a Republican with Thomas Jefferson, a nationalist theorist, a major prophet of industrial growth, and a prolific journalist. As this biography conclusively demonstrates, Coxe's role was considerably more consequential in the early history of the nation than has hitherto been supposed.Coxe's career is more interesting because it is paradoxical. Although he persistently aspired to fame as a public official, the posthumous recognition he has received is the result of his extensive writings on economic and mercantile policy. This volume expecially emphasizes Coxe's farsighted views and achievements as a political economist: his support of protective tarrifts, his advocacy of laborsaving machinery, and his prescient belief that cotton growing was the key to American economic independence and industrialization.Based on more than a decade's work in the voluminous collection of Coxe Papers, to which Jacob Cooke was given exclusive access, this biography provides much information on the operations of the Treasury Department under Alexander Hamilton, whom Coxe served as assistant secretary, and on the development of political parties. A Federalist apostate, Coxe was representative of a small but historically significant wing of his party that enthusiastically endorsed the fiscal policies of Hamilton while championing the commercial policies of Jefferson. Coxe openly became one of the Virginian's most active supporters, as a state party leader, national campaign coordinator, and partisan polemicist.Originally published in 1978.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.Yet in the course of his career Coxe managed to alienate Jefferson and most of his other powerful associates, including Hamilton and John Adams. These men and others have left damaging portraits of Coxe. Professor Cooke examines the paradox presented by such uncomplimentary assessments of a man of uncommon ability and conspicuous accomplishments and at the same time opens for readers many new views of the stage upon which Tench Coxe played out his frustrated ambitions -- the whole political and economic life of the early Republic.

Provides the first comprehensive study of Puritan primitivism, defined as the drive to recover and return to church and society the ordinances of biblical times. This work traces a campaign to purify English Christianity of postapostolic accretions from the Henrician Reformation to the Great Migration of 1630 and through the first five decades in New England.

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 colonial North Carolina, German-speaking settlers from the Moravian Church founded a religious refuge, a society they hoped would live by Biblical teachings. The Moravian Brethren bought slaves to help operate their farms and industries. This volume examines that era.

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 social, economic, and political study of Philadelphia merchants, this study presents both the spirit and statistics of merchant life. Doerflinger studies the Philadelphia merchant community from three perspectives: their commercial world, their confrontation with the Revolution and its aftermath, and their role in diversifying the local economy.

Ten leading scholars of early American social history here examine the nature of work and labour in America from 1614 to 1820. The authors scrutinize work diaries, private and public records, and travellers' accounts. Subjects include farmers, farmwives, urban labourers, plantation slave workers, midwives, and sailors; locales range from Maine to the Caribbean and the high seas.

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".