Cornell University Press
CLAIMING THE PEN

Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South

Catherine Kerrison

  In 1710, the imperious Virginia patriarch William Byrd II spitefully refused his wife Lucy's plea for a book; a century later, Lady Jean Skipwith placed an order that sent the Virginia bookseller Joseph Swan scurrying to please. These vignettes bracket a century of change in white southern women's lives. Claiming the Pen offers the first intellectual history of early southern women. It situates their reading and writing within the literary culture of the wider Anglo-Atlantic world, thus far understood to be a masculine province, even as they daily inhabited the limited, provincial social circles of the plantation South. Catherine Kerrison uncovers a new realm of female education in which conduct-of-life advice--both the dry pedantry of sermons and the risqué plots of novels--formed the core reading program. Women, she finds, learned to think and write by reading prescriptive literature, not Greek and Latin classics; in homes serving as impromptu classrooms, not colleges and universities; and from kin and friends, rather than schoolmates and professors.

Kerrison also reveals that southern women, in their willingness to "take up the pen" and so claim new rights, seized upon their racial superiority to offset their gender inferiority. In depriving slaves of education, southern women claimed literacy as a privilege of their whiteness, and perpetuated and strengthened the repressive institutions of slavery.

Catherine Kerrison is Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University.

Cloth     Available in DECEMBER    288pp    6 x 9  5 halftones
ISBN: 0-8014-4344-X    $45.00s
DIVIDED UNION
The Politics of War in the Early American Republic

Scott A. Silverstone

Between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the United States was embroiled in competitive inter-state politics. Although it did not directly involve itself in European affairs, the United States did engage regularly in dangerous struggles with other states and with colonial powers with territory on the American periphery. Aside from the War of 1812, the Oregon Crisis, and the Mexican War, other “near misses” included here—disputes of 1807 and 1809 with Britain, with Spain over East Florida in 1811–13, with Mexico in 1853, and disputes with Spain over Cuba in 1853–55 and with Mexico in 1858–1860—have been ignored in the democratic peace literature. Scott A. Silverstone finds these cases particularly useful for testing alternative explanations of constraints on armed conflict, because the United States backed down each time, allowing each crisis to pass short of its full potential for violence.

Silverstone builds on a nascent theory of institutional constraints on the use of force presented in the Federalist Papers to explain American attitudes toward participation in conflicts. He argues that the federal character of American democracy that emerged from the founding and the large size of the new American republic provide the keys to understanding its decision-making processes. Divided Union shows how the institutional features of federal union and the diverse social, economic, and security interests within this geographically extended republic created political conditions that impeded the use of force by the United States before the Civil War.

Scott A. Silverstone is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the United States Military Academy.

Cornell Studies in Security Affairs

Cloth Available in AUGUST 304pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
ISBN: 0-8014-4230-3 $42.50s
©2004 Cornell University

DRY BONES AND INDIAN SERMONS
Praying Indians in Colonial America

Kristina Bross

Native converts to Christianity, dubbed “praying Indians” by seventeenth-century English missionaries, have long been imagined as benign cultural intermediaries between English settlers and “savages.” More recently, praying Indians have been dismissed as virtual inventions of the colonists: “good” Indians used to justify mistreatment of “bad” ones. In a new consideration of this religious encounter, Kristina Bross argues that colonists used depictions of praying Indians to create a vitally important role for themselves as messengers on an evangelical “errand into the wilderness” that promised divine significance not only for the colonists who had embarked on the errand, but also for their metropolitan sponsors in London.

In Dry Bones and Indian Sermons, Bross traces the response to events such as the English civil wars and Restoration, New England’s Antinomian Controversy, and “King Philip’s” war. Whatever the figure’s significance to English settlers, praying Indians such as Waban and Samuel Ponampam used their Christian identity to push for status and meaning in the colonial order. Through her focused attention to early evangelical literature and to that literature’s historical and cultural contexts, Bross demonstrates how the people who inhabited, manipulated, and consumed the praying Indian identity found ways to use it for their own, disparate purposes.
Kristina Bross is Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University.

Paper 2004 272pp 6 x 9 4 halftones
ISBN: 0-8014-8938-5 $21.95s
Cloth 2004 272pp 6 x 9 4 halftones
ISBN: 0-8014-4206-0 $50.00x
BECOMING GERMAN
The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York

Philip Otterness

Becoming German tells the intriguing story of the largest and earliest mass movement of German-speaking immigrants to America. The so-called Palatine migration of 1709 began in the western part of the Holy Roman Empire, where perhaps as many as thirty thousand people left their homes, lured by rumors that Britain’s Queen Anne would give them free passage overseas and free land in America. They journeyed down the Rhine and eventually made their way to London, where they settled in refugee camps. The rumors of free passage and land proved false, but in an attempt to clear the camps, the British government finally agreed to send about three thousand of the immigrants to New York in exchange for several years of labor. After their arrival, the Palatines refused to work as indentured servants and eventually settled in autonomous German communities near the Iroquois of central New York.

Becoming German tracks the Palatines’ travels from Germany to London to New York City and into the frontier areas of New York. Philip Otterness demonstrates that the Palatines cannot be viewed as a cohesive “German” group until after their arrival in America; indeed, they came from dozens of distinct principalities in the Holy Roman Empire. It was only in refusing to assimilate to British colonial culture—instead maintaining separate German-speaking communities and mixing on friendly terms with Native American neighbors—that the Palatines became German in America.

Philip Otterness is Professor of History and Political Science, Warren Wilson College.

Cloth Available in JUNE 256pp 6 x 9 7 maps, 9 halftones
ISBN: 0-8014-4246-X $39.95s
RUM AND AXES
The Rise of a Connecticut Merchant Family, 1795-1850

Janet Siskind

Janet Siskind goes back to the beginnings of industrial capitalism in the United States to better understand the formation of the country's capitalist culture. She studies the papers and letters of three generations of the Watkinson family. The stories of their lives demonstrate how merchants amassed the capital to become industrial entrepreneurs, organized factories and private corporations, and constructed philanthropic and cultural institutions. The author traces how "upper-class work," the everyday tasks of organizing and maintaining trade or a system of production, shaped the family's experience and New England’s culture. The result is an intimate story of social class and capitalism.

The reader comes to know several members of this enterprising family, who emigrated from England in 1795. The young women married merchants; their brothers prospered as merchants in Connecticut's West Indian trade. The author shows how their account books, which balanced the imports of rum with the exports of horses, obscured the system of slavery that created their wealth.

After the War of 1812, the Watkinsons and their nephews the Collinses turned from trade to manufacturing textiles and axes. Their letters paint a vivid picture of the difficult process of shaping farmers' sons into a disciplined workforce and entrepreneurs into industrial and financial capitalists. Siskind skillfully blends social history and cultural anthropology to provide context for the engaging narrative of the Watkinsons' lives.

Janet Siskind is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University.
Paper Available in APRIL 208pp 5 5/8 x 8 3/4
3 halftones, 2 tables
ISBN: 0-8014-8920-2 $21.95s
MEMORY'S DAUGHTERS
The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America

Susan M. Stabile

A renowned literary coterie in eighteenth-century Philadelphia—Elizabeth Fergusson, Hannah Griffitts, Deborah Logan, Annis Stockton, and Susanna Wright—wrote and exchanged thousands of poems and maintained elaborate handwritten commonplace books of memorabilia. Through their creativity and celebrated hospitality, they initiated a salon culture in their great country houses in the Delaware Valley. In this stunningly original and heavily illustrated book, Susan M. Stabile shows that these female writers sought to memorialize their lives and aesthetic experience—a purpose that stands in marked contrast to the civic concerns of male authors in the republican era.

Drawing equally on material culture and literary history, Stabile discusses how the group used their writings to explore and at times replicate the arrangement of their material possessions, including desks, writing paraphernalia, mirrors, miniatures, beds, and coffins. As she reconstructs the poetics of memory that informed the women’s lives and structured their manuscripts, Stabile focuses on vernacular architecture, penmanship, souvenir collecting, and mourning.

Empirically rich and nuanced in its readings of different kinds of artifacts, this engaging work tells of the erasure of the women’s lives from the national memory as the feminine aesthetic of scribal publication was overshadowed by the proliferating print culture of late eighteenth-century America.

Susan M. Stabile is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her articles have appeared in several scholarly journals.

Cloth Available in DECEMBER 336pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
55 halftones
ISBN: 0-8014-4031-9 34.95s

WITCHCRAFT AND SOCIETY IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA, 1550–1750

Marion Gibson (Editor)

A unique collection of materials, including works of literature as well as historical documents, Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550–1750 provides a broad view of how witches and magicians were represented in print and manuscript over three centuries. It combines newly annotated selections from famous texts, such as Macbeth, Doctor Faustus, and The Faerie Queene with unjustly obscure ones: portrayals of witchcraft and magic from private papers, court records, and little-known works of fiction. In this rich, broad context, Marion Gibson presents the voices of “witches,” accusers, ministers, physicians, poets, dramatists, magistrates, and witchfinders from both sides of the Atlantic. Each text is introduced with a short essay and fully annotated to explain unfamiliar words and concepts, give biographical details of participants and/or authors, and explore the context in which the text was produced.

Marion Gibson teaches at the University of Exeter in Cornwall, England. She is the author of Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing and Reading Witchcraft.

PUSAC Rights limited to the United States and its dependencies plus the Philippine Republic and Canada.

Paper AUGUST 256pp 6 x 9
5 halftones
ISBN: 0-8014-8874-5 19.95s
Cloth AUGUST 256pp 6 x 9
5 halftones
ISBN: 0-8014-4224-9 55.00x ---

DOMINION AND CIVILITY
English Imperialism and Native America, 1585-1685

Michael Leroy Oberg

Was the relationship between English settlers and Native Americans in the New World destined to turn tragic? This book investigates how the newcomers interacted with Algonquian groups in the Chesapeake Bay area and New England, describing the role that original Americans occupied in England’s empire during the critical first century of contact.

Michael Leroy Oberg considers the history of Anglo-Indian relations in transatlantic context while viewing the frontier as a zone where neither party had the upper hand. He tells how the English pursued three sets of policies in America--securing profit for their sponsors, making lands safe from both European and native enemies, and “civilizing” the Indians--and explains why the British settlers found it impossible to achieve all of these goals.

Oberg places the history of Anglo-Indian relations in the early Chesapeake and New England in a broad transatlantic context while drawing parallels with subsequent efforts by England as well as its imperial rivals--the French, Dutch, and Spanish--to plant colonies in America. Dominion and Civility promises to broaden our understanding of the exchange between Europeans and Indians and makes an important contribution to the emerging history of the English Atlantic world.

MICHAEL LEROY OBERG is Assistant Professor of History at the State University of New York, Geneseo.

JANUARY 2004 256pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
4 maps, 1 black-and-white photograph
ISBN: 0-8014-8883-4 24.95s
Cloth 1999 256pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
4 maps, 1 black-and-white photograph
ISBN: 0-8014-3564-1 44.5s

HOW EARLY AMERICA SOUNDED

Richard Cullen Rath

“My hope is that by attending to sound I have been able to open up parts of these worlds, not to get a glimpse of them but to listen in. These were worlds much more alive with sound than our own, worlds not yet disenchanted, worlds perhaps even chanted into being.”—from the Introduction

In early America, every sound had a living, willful force at its source. Sometimes these forces were not human or even visible. In this fascinating and highly original work of cultural history, Richard Cullen Rath recreates in rich detail a world remote from our own, one in which sounds were charged with meaning and power.

From thunder and roaring waterfalls to bells and drums, natural and human-made sounds other than language were central to the lives of the inhabitants of colonial America. Rath considers the multiple soundscapes shaped by European Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans from 1600 to 1770, and particularly the methods that people used to interpret
and express their beliefs about sound. In the process he shows how sound shaped identities, bonded communities, and underscored—or undermined—the power of authorities.

This book’s stunning evidence of the importance of sound in early America—even among the highly literate New England Puritans—reminds us of a time before a world dominated by the visual, a young country where hearing was a more crucial part of living.

Richard Cullen Rath is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Cloth Available in JANUARY 2004 232pp 6 x 9
2 tables, 2 charts/graphs, 29 halftones, 1 line drawing
ISBN: 0-8014-4126-9 32.5s

THE CAPTORS' NARRATIVE
Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early American Frontier

William Henry Foster

Between 1690 and 1760, close to two thousand New Englanders were taken captive by French Canadians and their Native American allies during five intercolonial wars. Puritan propagandists reacted by evoking the vulnerability of New England's homes and Protestant faith with images of captive women in sexual peril, a titillating vision only amplified in popular Victorian and modern portrayals of female captives as stock literary figures.

In The Captors' Narrative, William Henry Foster demonstrates that the majority of Anglo-American captives taken along the New England frontier were, in fact, men. Free French Canadian women (both secular and monastic) routinely became the men's captors and benefited from their labor when they were brought to New France. In testimonials written by returning male captives, Foster finds fascinating instances of protest and resistance against the female authority that Protestant New England deemed "illegitimate."

In the tales of Catholic women captors, Foster uncovers evidence that the control of male captive domestic labor expanded the public roles of the women in charge. The author painstakingly reconstructs the lived experience of both captors and captives to show that captivity was always intertwined with gender struggles. The Captors' Narrative provides a novel perspective on the struggles over female authority pervasive in the early modern Atlantic world.

William Henry Foster is Keasbey Research Fellow in American Studies, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge.

Cloth Available in 224pp 6 x 9
2 maps, 1 halftone
ISBN: 0-8014-4059-9 29.95s

BRABBLING WOMEN
Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia

Terri L. Snyder

Brabbling Women takes its title from a 1662 law enacted by Virginia's burgesses, which was intended to offer relief to the "poore husbands" forced into defamation suits because their "brabling" wives had slandered or scandalized their neighbors. To quell such episodes of female misrule, lawmakers decreed that husbands could choose either to pay damages or to have their wives publicly ducked.

But there was more at stake here. By examining women's use of language, Terri L. Snyder demonstrates how women resisted and challenged oppressive political, legal, and cultural practices in colonial Virginia. Contending that women's voices are heard most clearly during episodes of crisis, Snyder focuses on disorderly speech to illustrate women's complex relationships to law and authority in the seventeenth century.

Ordinary women, Snyder finds, employed a variety of strategies to prevail in domestic crises over sexual coercion and adultery, conflicts over women's status as servants or slaves, and threats to women's authority as independent household governors. Some women entered the political forum, openly participating as rebels or loyalists; others sought legal redress for their complaints. Wives protested the confines of marriage; unfree women spoke against masters and servitude. By the force of their words, all strove to thwart political leaders and local officials, as well as the power of husbands, masters, and neighbors. The tactics colonial women used, and the successes they met, reflect the struggles for empowerment taking place in defiance of the inequalities of the colonial period.

Terri L. Snyder is Associate Professor of American Studies and Liberal Studies at California State University, Fullerton.

Cloth Available in 200pp 6 x 9
2 maps, 6 halftones
ISBN: 0-8014-4052-1 34.95s
May 31, 2005