THE FRAMED HOUSES
OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY, 1625-1725
ABBOTT LOWELL CUMMINGS
Winner of the Alice Davis
Hitchcock Book Award of the Society of Architectural Historians
Winner of the Laurence L.
Winship Book Award of the Boston Globe
In a rich blend of architectural and social history, Abbott Lowell Cummings reconstructs some of our nation's first houses. This is a splendid story of innovations, of restless, migratory people and their architectural and social responses to their environment. It is the first chapter in the long saga of America's preoccupation with technology, showing how it affected the early American home.
"The early evolution of frame houses in the Bay State is traced in...admiring detail in this handsome, sumptuously illustrated book...Cummings has given us a valuable and expert insight." --Ray Murphy, Boston Globe
"This will probably be the definitive book on 17th-century
American architecture. Richly illustrated, highly detailed,
it...will reward careful study by those interested in the
subject." --Geoffrey Elan, Yankee
"A major contribution to American architectural
history...[with] solidly researched, eloquently presented text...The
Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay will be
the standard reference for architects, architectural historians
and preservationists for many years to come." --Dell Upton, AIA
Journal
"[A] meticulous, wonderfully illustrated book...[Cummings]
has made a grand book. It fills the lap, enchants the eye, and
illuminates all Massachusetts Bay." --R. C. Haskett,
Journal of American History
"After more than 25 years of research into the houses and
the associated documentary material Abbott Cummings has produced
a book which deserves the description `definitive
study"...English scholars will be well served when someone
produces a book of this quality concerned with traditional
buildings in the old world rather than the new." --Richard
Harris, Architectural Review
[UK]
Abbott Lowell Cummings was Executive Director of the Society for
the Preservation of New England Antiquities and a member of the
faculty at Antioch College, Boston
University, and
Yale University.
Belknap Press
August 1998
11 3/4 x 10 inches
165 halftones, 115 line illus.
280 pages
ISBN 0-674-31681-9
IRA BERLIN
Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation.
Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves--who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites--gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil.
As the nature of the slaves' labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.
Ira Berlin is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Belknap Press
September 1998
6 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches
4 maps, 4 woodcuts, 3 tables
512 pages
ISBN 0-674-81092-9
SPREADING THE NEWS
RICHARD R. JOHN
Winner of the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians
In the seven decades from its establishment in 1775 to the commercialization of the electric telegraph in 1844, the American postal system spurred a communications revolution no less far-reaching than the subsequent revolutions associated with the telegraph, telephone, and computer. This book tells the story of that revolution and the challenge it posed for American business, politics, and cultural life.
"[A] splendid new book...that gives the lie to any notion that 'government' and 'administration' were 'absent' in early America." --Theda Skocpol, Social Science History
"This well-researched and elegantly written book will become
a model for historians attempting to link public policy to
cultural and political change...[It] will engage not only
historians of the early republic, but all scholars interested in
the relationship between state and society." --John
Majewski, Journal of Economic History
"The strength of the book is...the author's ability to
untangle the thousands of social, political, economic, and
cultural threads of the postal fabric and to rearrange them into
a clear and compelling social history." --Roy Alden Atwood, Journal
of American History
"Richard R. John provides an insightful cultural history of
the often-overlooked American postal system, concentrating on its
preeminent status for long-distance communication between its
birth in 1775 and the commercialization of the electric telegraph
in 1844...John effectively draws upon government documents,
newspapers, travelogues, and contemporary social and political
histories to argue that the postal system causes and mirrors
dramatic changes in American public life during this
period...John focuses his study on the communication revolution
of the past, yet his meticulous analysis of the complex motives
forming the postal institution and its policies relate to such
current controversies as those that surround the transmission of
information in cyberspace. These contemporary disputes highlight
the power of the government in shaping the communication of the
people. John privileges the postal institution as the reigning
communication system, yet he links it with the developing
ideology of the nation, and the scope of his study ensures its
value--in the disciplines of communication studies, literature,
history, and political science, among others--as a history of the
past and present." --Sarah R. Marino, Canadian
Review of American Studies
"Spreading the News
exemplifies the kind of sophisticated and nuanced research that
US postal history has long needed. Richard R. John breaks from
the internalist, antiquarian tradition characteristic of so many
post office histories to place the postal system at the centre of
American national development." --Richard B. Kielbowicz, Business
History
"[John] presents a thoroughly researched and well-written
book...[which will give] insight into the history of the post
office and its impact on American life." --Library
Journal
"It is surely true that in Richard John the post has had the
good fortune to have found its proper historian, one capable of
appreciating the complex design and social importance of the
means a people use to distribute information. He has also
accomplished the impressive feat of gathering together the pieces
of a postal history present elsewhere as so many tiny fragments.
John has drawn into a coherent design the stories of postal
patronage, the decisions about postal privacy, the incidents
along post roads used by others as illustrative anecdotes. John's
work has inspired in him a deep appreciation for the
accomplishments of the post." --Ann Fabian, The
Yale Review
"John's book explains how the letters and newspapers sent
through the post were really the glue that held the early 13
states together and that embraced additional states as the nation
expanded westward...It is a splendid attempt to show the
importance of mail service in the years before the telegraph or
the telephone made at least brief news transmission possible. The
postal system of the 19th century really was a factor, perhaps
the major factor, in making the United States one nation."
--Richard B. Graham, Linn's Stamp News
"This book traces the central role of the postal system in
[its] communications revolution and its contribution to American
public life. The author shows how the postal system influenced
the establishment of a national society out of a loose union of
confederated states. Richard John throws light onto a chapter in
American history that is often neglected but sets up the origins
of some of the most distinctive features of American life
today...The book is a comprehensive study on an important
American institution during a critical epoch in its
history." --Monika Plum, Prometheus
[UK]
"John has produced an original, well-documented, and
thoughtful study that offers alternative and enticing
interpretations of Jacksonian policies and public
institutions." --Choice
Richard R. John is Associate Professor of History, University of Illinois at Chicago
November 1998
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
384 pages
ISBN 0-674-83342-2
This concise literary history of the American Enlightenment captures the varied and conflicting voices of religious and political conviction in the decades when the new nation was formed. Ferguson's trenchant interpretation yields new understanding of this pivotal period for American culture.
"[A] learned, highly intelligent study of American revolutionary writing…Ferguson's chapters on the intellectual and social sources of the revolution, on how the rhetoric of revolutionary writing works now and worked then, politically, and on aspects of the American enlightenment, are masterful: original, challenging, immensely informative." --Stephen Fender, Times Literary Supplement
"[The] chapter on `Religious Voices' is a tour de force of intelligence and conviction…In his concluding chapter [we] hear the voices of Native and African Americans…Ferguson's narrative [is] engrossing." ---Philip F. Gura, New England Quarterly
"The best interpretation of the American Enlightenment since that of Henry F. May…[It] should be required reading for anyone concerned with eighteenth-century American thought." ---Larzer Ziff, Modern Language Quarterly
Robert A. Ferguson is Woodberry Professor in the Department of English and the Law School, Columbia University.
March 1997
6 x 9 inches
240 pp.
ISBN 0-674-02322-6
World price $14.95s / £9.95 paper
What does it mean to be an American, and how have individual Americans consciously endeavored to create their own identity? "Self-improvement," "self-culture," "self-made man," to "make something of oneself"-all are terms that were used from colonial to Victorian times. The particular language that framed the quest has fallen out of fashion, but it was a powerful cultural imperative for hundreds of years. The quest, in all its "post" guises, continues. Daniel Howe considers the ideas Americans once had about a proper construction of the self. Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Bushnell, Horace Mann, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Dorothea Dix, Frederick Douglass, among others, engaged in discussion about the composition of human nature, the motivation of human behavior, and what can be done about the social problems these create. They shared a common model of human psychology, in which powerful but base passions must be mastered by reason in the service of virtue. How to accomplish this was often itself a subject of passionate controversy.
The story reveals that Americans both distrusted individual autonomy and were enthusiastic about it; passions, reason, and moral sense collided on how to manage it. Howe is empathetic to all the quests-for elites and artisans, blacks and women-seeing in them a basic pursuit of identity. The author demonstrates that aspirations for "self-control" and "self-discipline," grounded in conservatism and evangelical Christianity, also shaped movements that branched leftward to promote social welfare, feminism, and civil rights.
Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History, Oxford.
Studies in
Cultural History, 9
April 1997
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
352 pp.
ISBN 0-674-16555-1
Single World Price: $39.95s / £26.50 cloth
The separation of powers along functional lines-legislative, executive, and judicial-has been a core concept of American constitutionalism ever since the Revolution. As noted constitutional law scholar Gerhard Casper points out in this collection of essays, barren assertions of the importance of keeping the powers separate do not capture the complexity of the task when it is seen as separating power flowing from a single source--the people. Popular sovereignty did not underlie earlier versions of the separation of powers doctrine.
Casper vividly illustrates some of the challenges faced by Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, Gallatin, Jefferson, and many others in Congress and the executive branch as they guided the young nation, setting precedents for future generations. He discusses areas such as congressional-executive relations, foreign affairs, appropriations, and the Judiciary Act of 1789 from the separation of powers vantage point.
The picture of our government's formative years that emerges here, of a rich and overlapping understanding of responsibilities and authority, runs counter to rigid, syllogistic views. Separating Power gives us a clear portrait of the issues of separation of power in the founding period, as well as suggesting that in modern times we should be reluctant to tie separation of powers notions to their own procrustean bed.
Gerhard Casper is President of Stanford University.
March 1997
5 x 7 1/2 inches
208 pp.
ISBN 0-674-80140-7
Single World Price: $27.00s / £17.95 cloth
Law
EDITED BY RICHARD S.
DUNN,
JAMES SAVAGE,
AND LAETITIA YEANDLE
For 350 years Governor John Winthrop's journal has been recognized as the central source for the history of Massachusetts in the 1630s and 1640s. Winthrop reported events--especially religious and political events--more fully and more candidly than any other contemporary observer.
The governor's journal has been edited and published three times since 1790, but these editions are long outmoded. Richard Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle have now prepared a long-awaited scholarly edition, complete with introduction, notes, and appendices. This full-scale, unabridged edition uses the manuscript volumes of the first and third notebooks (both carefully preserved at the Massachusetts Historical Society), retaining their spelling and punctuation, and James Savage's transcription of the middle notebook (accidentally destroyed in 1825).
Winthrop's narrative began as a journal and evolved into a history. As a dedicated Puritan convert, Winthrop decided to emigrate to America in 1630 with members of the Massachusetts Bay Company, who had chosen him as their governor. Just before sailing, he began a day-to-day account of his voyage. He continued his journal when he reached Massachusetts, at first making brief and irregular entries, followed by more frequent writing sessions and contemporaneous reporting, and finally, from 1643 onward, engaging in only irregular writing sessions and retrospective reporting. Naturally he found little good to say about such outright adversaries as Thomas Morton, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson. Yet he was also adept at thrusting barbs at most of the other prominent players: John Endecott, Henry Vane, and Richard Saltonstall, among others.
Winthrop built lasting significance into the seemingly small-scale actions of a few thousand colonists in early New England, which is why his journal will remain an important historical source.
Richard S. Dunn is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History. James Savage, 1784-1873, prepared the 1825-1826 edition of Winthrop's journal. Laetitia Yeandle is Curator of Manuscripts, Folger Shakespeare Library.
The John Harvard Library / Belknap Press
7 x 9 5/8 inches
1 halftone, 14 line illus./704 pages
ISBN 0-674-48425-8
This abridged edition of Winthrop's journal, which incorporates about 40 percent of the governor's text, with his spelling and punctuation modernized, includes a lively Introduction and complete annotation. It also includes Winthrop's famous lay sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," written in 1630.
As in the fuller journal, this abridged edition contains the drama of Winthrop's life--his defeat at the hands of the freemen for governor, the banishment and flight of Roger Williams to Rhode Island, the Pequot War that exterminated his Indian opponents, and the Antinomian controversy. Here is the earliest American document on the perpetual contest between the forces of good and evil in the wilderness--Winthrop's recounting of how God's Chosen People escaped from captivity into the promised land. While he recorded all the sexual scandal--rape, fornication, adultery, sodomy, and buggery--it was only to show that even in Godly New England the Devil was continually at work, and man must be forever militant.
The John Harvard Library / Belknap Press
6 x 9 inches
1 halftone, 14 line illus./384 pages
ISBN 0-674-48427-4
World price: $19.95s / £13.50 paper
Also available in cloth: ISBN 0-674-48426-6
$39.95t / £26.50 cloth
History
Ever the chronicler and teacher, Franklin wrote an autobiography, ostensibly for his illegitimate son William. Apart from hurried additions whenhe was in his eighties, his story halts at 1757. Tracing his footsteps centuries later, Franklin's most celebrated biographer completes the last twenty-five years of the autobiography by drawing on Franklin's most personal and insightful letters and writings--even making additions within the interrupted Autobiography to give us the expository memoir that Franklin intended. Indeed, as he wrote it.
"Wright has chosen passages that reveal Franklin's daily life and public career, his wit and wisdom, and Wright gives continuity to them with brief introductions and comments." --Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books
"This book...allows one to become much better acquainted with the enduring Mr. Franklin. And that is a delight." --Keith Henderson, Christian Science Monitor
"By judiciously selecting from [a] vast potpourri of materials, Wright has created a single, manageable work that functions as the penultimate introduction to Franklin in all his guises...Any person seeking to know Franklin the man, the scientist, the printer, and the patriot could not find a better introduction." --Donald McGraw, Science
Esmond Wright, Professor of History, Emeritus,
University of London, is the author of Franklin of Philadelphia
(Harvard).
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
18 halftones/312 pages
ISBN 0-674-06655-3
$14.95 paper
Cloth edition: Spring 1990
History/Biography
Harvard edition not available world-wide: NA
In a country founded on the principle of religious freedom, with no medieval past, no legal nobility, and no national church, how did anti-Semitism become a presence here? Frederic Cople Jaher considers this question in A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness, the first history of American anti-Semitism from its origins in the ancient world to its first widespread outbreak during the Civil War.
"To find evidence of serious anti-Semitism in America for much of the time Jews have lived here, you need to put on knee pads and go searching in the nooks and crannies of history. Frederic Cople Jaher has searched strenuously, beginning with the first Jews to arrive in 1654...His writing has a pleasingly solid feel to it, packing in fact after fact." --David Klinghoffer, New York Times Book Review
Frederic Cople Jaher is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Among his books are Doubters and Dissenters and The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
352 pages
ISBN 0-674-79007-3
World price: $16.95s /
£10.50 paper
Cloth edition: Spring 1994
American History/Judaica
I. Bernard Cohen, the eminent historian of science and the principal elucidator of Franklin's scientific work, examines Franklin's scientific activities in fields ranging from heat to astronomy. He provides masterly accounts of the theoretical background of Franklin's science (especially his study of Newton), the experiments he performed, and their influence throughout Europe and the United States.
"Cohen provides not only a lucid analysis of Franklin's ideas but also a sense of the intellectual context...Cohen's position as a leading historian of American science has found eloquent expression in this engaging and valuable book." --Simon Baatz, Journal of American History
"Reminds us that being the New World's foremost scientist was no easy task. The inventor of the lightning rod had to contend with a superstitious age...Resisting the urge of many scholars to allow their specialties to distort the subject, Cohen shows us Franklin's science as related to the other characteristics of a cheerily curious mind at work in yeasty times." --Peter Wild, Bloomsbury Review
I. Bernard Cohen, emeritus Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, is one of the founders of the modern study of the history of science.
September
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
3 halftones, 9 line
illus./288 pages
World price: $17.95s /
£11.95 paper
ISBN 0-674-06659-6
Cloth edition: Spring 1990
Science/Biography
March 17, 2000