Cornell University Press

This book, the first to describe women medical practitioners other
than midwives in the colonial period, emphasizes that medical care
was part of every woman's work. The Healer's Calling uses
memorable anecdotes, engaging characters, and medical oddities to
tell the fascinating story of the practice of household medicine in
early America.

Rebecca J. Tannenbaum points out that housewives provided much
of the medical care available in the seventeenth century. Elite women
cared for the indigent in their towns and used medical practice to
make influential connections with powerful men; 'doctresses' or
'doctor women' supported themselves with their practices and
competed directly with male physicians; and midwives were crucial
'expert witnesses' in cases of fornication, murder, and witchcraft.
Yet there were limits to the authority of women's healing
communities, with consequences for those who overstepped the
bounds.
By setting women's practice in the context of contemporary
medicine, gender roles, and community norms, Tannenbaum also
reveals the relationship between women's medical practice and
witchcraft accusations. Tannenbaum examines colonial America's full
range of medical options--including the work of classically trained
male doctors and male lay practitioners--with a keen eye to the
interactions and tensions between men and women in the realm of
healing.Rebecca J. Tannenbaum is Assistant Professor of History at the
University of Illinois at Chicago and Visiting Assistant Professor of
History at Yale University.

WORLD World rights
HISTORY / United States / Colonial Period (1600-1775)
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women's Studies
MEDICAL / History
More about this Title
Cloth Available in JUNE 216pp 6 x 9
4 halftones
ISBN: 0-8014-3826-8 34.95s Quantity

SUSPECT RELATIONS
Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina

Kirsten Fischer

Over the course of the eighteenth century, race
came to seem as corporeal as sex. Kirsten
Fischer has mined unpublished court records
and travel literature from colonial North
Carolina to reveal how early notions of racial
difference were shaped by illicit sexual
relationships and the sanctions imposed on
those who conducted them. Fischer shows how
the personal--and yet often very public--sexual
lives of Native American, African American,
and European American women and men
contributed to the new racial order in this
developing slave society.

Liaisons between European men and native women, among white
and black servants, and between servants and masters, as well as
sexual slander among whites and acts of sexualized violence against
slaves, were debated, denied, and recorded in the courtrooms of
colonial North Carolina. Indentured servants, slaves, Cherokee and
Catawba women, and other members of less privileged groups
sometimes resisted colonial norms, making sexual choices that
irritated neighbors, juries, and magistrates and resulted in legal
penalties and other acts of retribution. The sexual practices of
ordinary people vividly bring to light the little-known but significant
ways in which notions of racial difference were alternately contested
and affirmed before the American Revolution.

Fischer makes an innovative contribution to the history of race, class,
and gender in early America by uncovering a detailed record of illicit
sexual exchanges in colonial North Carolina and showing how acts of
resistance to sexual rules complicated ideas about inherent racial
difference.

Kirsten Fischer is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.

WORLD World rights
HISTORY / United States / Colonial Period (1600-1775)
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination & Race Relations
More about this Title
Paper 2001 288pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
2 maps, 13 halftones, 1 line drawing
ISBN: 0-8014-8679-3 17.95t Quantity
Cloth 2001 288pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
2 maps, 13 halftones, 1 line drawing
ISBN: 0-8014-3822-5 45.00x Quantity

A CENTRE OF WONDERS
The Body in Early America

Janet Moore Lindman (Editor); Michele Lise Tarter (Editor)

Images of bodies and bodily practices abound in early
America: from spirit possession, Fasting Days, and
infanticide to running the gauntlet, going "naked as a
sign," flogging, bundling, and scalping. All have
implications for the study of gender, sexuality,
masculinity, illness, the "body politic," spirituality, race,
and slavery.

The first book devoted solely to the history and theory
of the body in early American cultural studies brings
together authors representing diverse academic
disciplines. Drawing on a wide range of archival
sources--including itinerant ministers' journals,
Revolutionary tracts and broadsides, advice manuals,
and household inventories--they approach the
theoretical analysis of the body in exciting new ways.

A Centre of Wonders covers such varied topics as dance and movement among
Native Americans; invading witch bodies in architecture and household spaces;
rituals of baptism, conversion, and church discipline; eighteenth-century women's
journaling; and the body as a rhetorical device in the language of diplomacy.

Contributors
Kathleen M. Brown, University of Pennsylvania
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Yale University
Trudy Eden, University of Northern Iowa
Martha L. Finch, Colby College
Janet Moore Lindman, Rowan University
Joanne Pope Melish, University of Kentucky
Jacquelyn C. Miller, Seattle University
Alice Nash, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Nancy Shoemaker, University of Connecticut-Storrs
Todd D. Smith, Mint Museum of Art
Jennifer M. Spear, Dickinson College
Robert Blair St. George, University of Pennsylvania
Susan M. Stabile, Texas A & M University
Michele Lise Tarter, The College of New Jersey
Teresa A. Toulouse, Tulane University

Janet Moore Lindman is Associate Professor of History at Rowan University.
Michele Lise Tarter is Assistant Professor of English at The College of New
Jersey.

WORLD World rights
Cultural Studies|American History More about this Title
Paper JUNE 2001 296pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
7 halftones, 1 line drawing
ISBN: 0-8014-8739-0 $19.95s Quantity
Cloth JUNE 2001 296pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
7 halftones, 1 line drawing
ISBN: 0-8014-3601-x $49.95x Quantity


©2001 Cornell University

PURCHASING IDENTITY IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD
Massachusetts Merchants, 1670-1780

Phyllis Whitman Hunter

Americans have always had a love-hate relationship
with possessions. Early Americans suspected luxuries
as a corrupting force that would lead to an aristocracy.
In Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World, Phyllis
Whitman Hunter demonstrates how elite Americans
not only became infatuated with their belongings, but
also avidly pursued consumption to shape their world
and proclaim their success.

In eighteenth-century New England harbor towns, the
commercial gentry led their communities into full
participation in a flourishing Anglo-American
consumer culture. Affluent traders constructed roads,
wharves, and warehouses, built mansions and assembly
buildings, adopted new forms of sociability, and
fostered the rise of the public sphere. Using case studies of influential merchant
families, Hunter brings alive the process by which Boston and Salem evolved
from Puritan towns dominated by families of English origin to Georgian
provincial cities open to a diversity of religious affiliations and European
ethnicities.

Hunter then explores how revolutionary politics overturned polite society and
transformed the meanings of possessions. Patriots threw tea to the fish in Boston
Harbor, donned homespun at Harvard commencements, and transformed a silver
punch bowl into an icon of liberty. The wealthy either espoused republican values
and muted their material displays or fled to exile. Purchasing Identity in the
Atlantic World,reveals a critical link in the complex relationship between
capitalism and culture: the process by which material goods become symbols of
profound social and cultural significance.


Phyllis Whitman Hunter is Assistant Professor of History at the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro.

WORLD World rights
American History|Regional‹Northeast More about this Title
Cloth JUNE 2001 240pp 6 x 9
5 maps, 9 halftones, 2 line drawings, 3 tables.
ISBN: 0-8014-3855-1 $42.50s Quantity


©2001 Cornell University

SUSPECT RELATIONS: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina

Kirsten Fischer

Over the course of the eighteenth century, race came to seem as corporeal as sex.
Kirsten Fischer has mined unpublished court records and travel literature from
colonial North Carolina to reveal how early notions of racial difference were
shaped by illicit sexual relationships and the sanctions imposed on those who
conducted them. Fischer shows how the personal--and yet often very
public--sexual lives of Native American, African American, and European
American women and men contributed to the new racial order in this developing
slave society.

Liaisons between European men and native women, among white and black
servants, and between servants and masters, as well as sexual slander among
whites and acts of sexualized violence against slaves, were debated, denied, and
recorded in the courtrooms of colonial North Carolina. Indentured servants,
slaves, Cherokee and Catawba women, and other members of less privileged
groups sometimes resisted colonial norms, making sexual choices that irritated
neighbors, juries, and magistrates and resulted in legal penalties and other acts of
retribution. The sexual practices of ordinary people vividly bring to light the
little-known but significant ways in which notions of racial difference were
alternately contested and affirmed before the American Revolution.

Fischer makes an innovative contribution to the history of race, class, and gender
in early America by uncovering a detailed record of illicit sexual exchanges in
colonial North Carolina and showing how acts of resistance to sexual rules
complicated ideas about inherent racial difference.


Kirsten Fischer is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.

Paper Available in 304pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
2 maps, 13 halftones, 1 line drawing
ISBN: 0-8014-8679-3 $17.95t Quantity
Cloth Available in 304pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
2 maps, 13 halftones, 1 line drawing
ISBN: 0-8014-3822-5 $45.00x Quantity


©2001 Cornell University

THE EMPIRE STATE: A History of New York

Milton M. Klein (Editor)

New York now has a new, comprehensive history book that chronicles the state
through centuries of change. A richly illustrated volume, The Empire State begins
in the early seventeenth century (when the region was still populated solely by
Native Americans) and concludes in the mid-1990s, by which time people from all
over the world had made the state their home. Throughout the book, politics,
economics, culture, and social history all are emphasized, as are the important
contributions made by ethnic groups and women.

The Empire State serves as a successor to A History of New York State, for many
years the standard one-volume account of the region but today outdated and long
out of print. Now students, scholars, and history enthusiasts will find thorough
and fascinating coverage in The Empire State. The authors--distinguished
authorities on New York State--draw on current research and perspectives as they
address such topics as
¥ the Dutch colonization of the region,
¥ the English province,
¥ the Revolution,
¥ antebellum society,
¥ the abolition of slavery and the Civil War,
¥ the New York City media,
¥ New York's vibrant political culture,
¥ labor and leisure
¥ women's suffrage
¥ immigration and migration,
¥ the World Wars, and
¥ the state's economic development.

Readers from the Big Apple to Buffalo and beyond will find The Empire State,
which provides equal coverage to "upstate" and "downstate" events and people,
satisfying and informative reading.


Contributors
Paula Baker, University of Pittsburgh
Edward Countryman, Southern Methodist University
L. Ray Gunn, University of Utah
Ronald W. Howard, Mississippi College
Oliver Rink, California State University at Bakersfield
Joel Schwartz, Montclair State University

Milton M. Klein is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Tennessee,
Knoxville. He is author, most recently, of The American Whig: William
Livingston of New York.

Regional History
Cloth Available in 864pp 7 x 9 1/4
6 tables, 1 map, 20 line drawings, 80 halftones, 16-page color insert
ISBN: 0-8014-3866-7 Quantity


©2001 Cornell University

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 EnglandÕs
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. She
is the author of To Hunt in the Morning.

Cloth Available in 240pp 6 x 9
3 halftones, 2 tables
ISBN: 0-8014-3932-9

©2001 Cornell University

THE PUNISHED SELF
Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South

Akex Bontemps

The Punished Self describes enslavement in the American South during the
eighteenth century as a systematic assault on Blacks' sense of self. Alex
Bontemps focuses on slavery's effects on the slaves' framework of self-awareness
and understanding. Whites wanted Blacks to act out the role "Negro" and Blacks
faced a basic dilemma of identity: how to retain an individualized sense of self
under the incredible pressure to be Negro? Bontemps addresses this dynamic in
The Punished Self.

The first part of The Punished Self reveals how patterns of objectification were
reinforced by written and visual representations of enslavement. The second
examines how captive Africans were forced to accept a new identity and the
expectations and behavioral requirements it symbolized. Part 3 defines and
illustrates the tensions inherent in slaves' being Negro in order to survive.

Bontemps offers fresh interpretations of runaway slave ads and portraits. Such
views of black people expressing themselves are missing entirely from other
historical sources. This book's revelations include many such original examples
of the survival of the individual in the face of enslavement.


Alex Bontemps is Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College.

WORLD World rights
African American Studies|American History
Cloth Available in JANUARY 2001 256pp 6 x 9
4 line drawings
ISBN: 0-8014-3521-8 $29.95s Quantity

DISOWNING SLAVERY
Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860

Joanne Pope Melish

Following the abolition of slavery in New England, white
citizens seemed to forget that it had ever existed there.
Drawing on a wide array of primary sources--from
slaveowners' diaries to children's daybooks to racist
broadsides--Joanne Pope Melish reveals not only how
northern society changed but how its perceptions
changed as well.

Melish explores the origins of racial thinking and
practices to show how ill-prepared the region was to
accept a population of free people of color in its midst.
Because emancipation was gradual, whites transferred
prejudices shaped by slavery to their relations with free
people of color, and their attitudes were buttressed by
abolitionist rhetoric which seemed to promise riddance of
slaves as much as slavery. She tells how whites came to blame the impoverished
condition of people of color on their innate inferiority, how racialization became
an important component of New England ante-bellum nationalism, and how
former slaves actively participated in this discourse by emphasizing their African
identity.

Placing race at the center of New England history, Melish contends that slavery
was important not only as a labor system but also as an institutionalized set of
relations. The collective amnesia about local slavery's existence became a
significant component of New England regional identity.


Joanne Pope Melish is Associate Professor of History at the University of
Kentucky.

American History|African American Studies|Regional?Northeast

Paper December 2001 320pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
9 black-and-white photographs
ISBN: 0-8014-8437-5 $16.95s
Cloth 1998 320pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
9 black-and-white photographs
ISBN: 0-8014-3413-0 $35.00s

PIETY IN PROVIDENCE
Class Dimensions of Religious Experience in Antebellum Rhode Island

Mark S. Schantz

At the start of the nineteenth century, churches in
Providence sought to bring together rich and poor "as
Members of One great Family." Within a few
decades, however, congregations had split along class
lines, with plebeian men and women choosing to
worship at their own meetinghouses. In this innovative
and compelling history, Mark S. Schantz explores the
relationship between religious culture and class
formation in a New England city.

Covering topics from pew auctioning to the rise of
self-anointed street preachers, Schantz provides a rich
sense of the daily texture of religious life. In the early
national period churches were, he explains, inclusive
but also firmly controlled by affluent, white men. The
revival of 1820 led the poorer citizens of Providence to adopt their own religious
traditions and establish their own congregations. In contrast to bourgeois
churchgoers, who were wedded to decorum and rationality, the plebeians
welcomed emotional outbursts and evinced an abiding belief in the supernatural.
Schantz charts the ways in which these contrasting religious subcultures collided
in the political turmoil of the Dorr Rebellion of 1842.

Schantz concludes with a fascinating look at how, prior to the Civil War, the city's
churches constructed a new understanding of religious community, one that
embraced the reality of profound class divisions among Christ's followers.


Mark S. Schantz is Associate Professor of History at Hendrix College in
Arkansas

WORLD World rights
American History|Religion
Cloth JUNE 288pp 6 x 9
4 black-and-white photographs, 1 map, 24 tables
ISBN: 0-8014-2952-8 $45.00s

POSSIBLE PASTS
Becoming Colonial in Early America

Robert Blair St. George

Possible Pasts represents a landmark in early American studies, bringing to that
field the theoretical richness and innovative potential of the scholarship on
colonial discourse and postcolonial theory. Drawing on the methods and
interpretive insights of history, anthropology, history of art, folklore, and textual
analysis, its authors explore the cultural processes by which individuals and
societies become colonial. Rather than define early America in terms of
conventional geographical, chronological, or subdisciplinary boundaries, their
essays span landscapes from New England to Peru, time periods from the
sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, and topics from religion to race and
novels to nationalism.

In his introduction Robert Blair St. George offers an overview of the genealogy of
ideas and key terms appearing in the book. Part I, "Interrogating America," then
challenges readers to rethink the meaning of "early America" and its relation to
postcolonial theory. In Part II, "Translation and Transculturation," essays explore
how both Europeans and native peoples viewed such concepts as dissent,
witchcraft, family piety, and race. The construction of individual identity and
agency in Philadelphia is the focus of Part III, "Shaping Subjectivities." Finally,
Part IV, "Oral Performance and Personal Power," considers the ways in which
political authority and gendered resistance were established in early America.

Contributors

Louise M. Burkhart, SUNY-Albany
Toby L. Ditz, Johns Hopkins University
Sandra M. Gustafson, University of Notre Dame
David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School
Peter Hulme, University of Essex
Susan Juster, University of Michigan
Margaretta M. Lovell, University of California, Berkeley
José Antonio Mazzotti, Harvard University
Michael Meranze, University of California, San Diego
Laura J. Murray, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario
Anne G. Myles, University of Northern Iowa
Dana D. Nelson, University of Kentucky
Robert Blair St. George, University of Pennsylvania
Irene Silverblatt, Duke University
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, University of Michigan
John Thornton, Millersville University
Michael Warner, Rutgers University

Robert Blair St. George is Associate Professor of History at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is the author of Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in
Colonial New England Culture.

American History
Paper Available in APRIL 432pp 6 x 9
6 tables, 33 black-and-white photos, 1 map
ISBN: 0-8014-8392-1 |

Cloth Available in APRIL 432pp 6 x 9
6 tables, 33 black-and-white photos, 1 map
ISBN: 0-8014-3344-4 |

COLONIAL INTIMACIES
Indian Marriage in Early New England

Ann Marie Plane

In 1668 Sarah Ahhaton, a married Native American woman of the Massachusetts
Bay town of Punkapoag, confessed in an English court to having committed
adultery. For this crime she was tried, found guilty, and publicly whipped and
shamed; she contritely promised that if her life were spared, she would return to
her husband and "continue faithfull to him during her life yea although hee
should beat her againe. . . ."

These events, recorded in the court documents of colonial Massachusetts, may
appear unexceptional; in fact, they reflect a rapidly changing world. Native
American marital relations and domestic lives were anathema to English
Christians: elite men frequently took more than one wife, while ordinary people
could dissolve their marriages and take new partners with relative ease. Native
marriage did not necessarily involve cohabitation, the formation of a new
household, or mutual dependence for subsistence. Couples who wished to
separate did so without social opprobrium, and when adultery occurred, the blame
centered not on the "fallen" woman but on the interloping man. Over time, such
practices changed, but the emergence of new types of "Indian marriage" enabled
the legal, social, and cultural survival of New England's native peoples.

The complex interplay between colonial power and native practice are treated with
subtlety and wisdom in Colonial Intimacies. Ann Marie Plane uses travel
narratives, missionary tracts, and legal records to reconstruct a previously
neglected history. Plane's careful reading of fragmentary sources yields both
conclusive and fittingly speculative findings, and her interpretations form an
intimate picture, moving and often tragic, of the familial bonds of Native
Americans in the first century and a half of European contact.

Ann Marie Plane is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California
at Santa Barbara.


American History | Native American Studies
Paper Available in pp
ISBN: 0-8014-8363-8 | £

Cloth Available in JULY 320pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
2 maps, 15 black-&-white photographs
ISBN: 0-8014-3291-X $39.95s | £30.50

INDIANS AND ENGLISH
Facing Off in Early America

Karen Ordahl Kupperman

In this vividly written book, prize-winning author Karen Ordahl Kupperman
refocuses our understanding of encounters between English venturers and
Algonquians all along the East Coast of North America in the early years of
contact and settlement. All parties in these dramas were uncertain--hopeful and
fearful--about the opportunity and challenge presented by new realities. Indians
and English both believed they could control the developing relationship. Each
group was curious about the other, and interpreted through their own standards
and traditions. At the same time both came from societies in the process of
unsettling change and hoped to derive important lessons by studying a
profoundly different culture.

These meetings and early relationships are recorded in a wide variety of sources.
Native people maintained oral traditions about the encounters, and these were
written down by English recorders at the time of contact and since; many are
maintained to this day. English venturers, desperate to make readers at home
understand how difficult and potentially rewarding their enterprise was, wrote
constantly of their own experiences and observations and transmitted native lore.
Kupperman analyzes all these sources in order to understand the true nature of
these early years, when English venturers were so fearful and dependent on native
aid and the shape of the future was uncertain.

Building on the research in her highly regarded book Settling with the Indians,
Kupperman argues convincingly that we must see both Indians and English as
active participants in this unfolding drama.

Karen Ordahl Kupperman is Professor of History at New York University. She is
the author of, Providence Island, 1630-1641: The Other Puritan Colony, winner of
the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association for the best
book in American history, and America in European Consciousness 1493-1750.

American History | Native American Studies

Paper Available in APRIL 320pp 6 x 9
33 black-and-white photographs
ISBN: 0-8014-8282-8 $17.95s | £13.50

Cloth Available in APRIL 304pp 6 x 9
33 black-and-white photographs
ISBN: 0-8014-3178-6 $45.00x | £34.50

PEOPLE OF THE WACHUSETT: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630-1860
          
David P. Jaffee

Nashaway became Lancaster, Wachusett became Princeton, and all of Nipmuck County became the county of Worcester. Town by town, New England grew--Watertown, Sudbury, Turkey Hills, Fitchburg, Westminster, Walpole--and with each new community the myth of America
flourished.  In People of the Wachusett the history of the New England town becomes the cultural history of America's first frontier. Integral to this history are the firsthand narratives of town founders and citizens, English, French, and Native American, whose accounts of trading and warring, relocating and putting down roots proved essential to the building of these communities. Town plans, local records, broadside ballads, vernacular house forms and furniture, festivals--all  come into play in this innovative book, giving a rich picture of early Americans creating towns and crafting historical memory. Beginning with the Wachusett, in northern Worcester County, Massachusetts, David Jaffee traces the founding of towns through inland New England and Nova Scotia, from the mid-seventeenth century through the Revolutionary Era. His history of New England's settlement is one in which the replication of towns across the landscape is inextricable from the creation of a regional and national culture, with stories about colonization giving shape and meaning to New England life.
 
DAVID JAFFEE is Associate Professor of History, City College of the City University of New York

American History|Regional-Northeast
Cloth  Available in JULY  320pp  6 1/8 x 9 1/4
13 drawings, 30 black-and-white photographs
ISBN: 0-8014-3610-9  $39.95 | £29.50

THESE DARING DISTURBERS OF THE PUBLIC PEACE: The Struggle for Property and Power in Early New Jersey

Brendan McConville
 

During the century preceding the American Revolution, bitter conflicts raged in New Jersey over control of the land tenure system. This book examines how the struggle between yeoman farmers and landed gentry shaped public life in the colony. At once a cultural, political, and
social history, it carefully delineates the beliefs of rioters and upholders of order, both of whom wanted control over land. Brendan J. McConville describes how changes in provincial society--affecting politics and government, religious life, economic conditions, gender relations, and ethnic composition--led farmers to resort to violence as a means of settling property disputes. He examines the disagreements in light of competing conceptions of property held by separate landowning classes, differences in the legal and political traditions of British and Dutch colonists, and local conditions unique to New Jersey. He also considers the ways in which the lack of a shared perception of deference among Puritan, Dutch, and multi-ethnic farmers helped foster insurrection. According to McConville, the social transformations brought into sharp focus by the agrarian unrest ultimately undermined imperial control and encouraged the creation of a new American identity. His book--the recipient of the Driscoll Prize from the New Jersey Historical Commission prior to its publication--is an eagerly awaited account of a colony that has seldom been seriously examined by colonial historians and a challenge to those scholars to rethink commonly accepted arguments about the development of the United States.

BRENDAN J. MCCONVILLE is Associate Professor of History at Binghamton University.

American History|Regional-Northeast
Cloth  Available in JULY  320pp  6 1/8 x 9 1/4
9 drawings, 10 maps, 8 black-and-white photographs
ISBN: 0-8014-3389-4  $45.00 | £33.50

DEATH OF A NOTARY: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York

Donna Merwick
 

"He was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town's seventeenth-century history." So begins Donna Merwick's fascinating tale of a Dutch notary who ended his life in his adopted community of Albany. In a major feat of historical reconstruction, she introduces us to Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam and the long-forgotten world he inhabited in Holland's North American colony. Her powerful narrative will make readers care for this quiet and studious man, an "ordinary" settler for whom the clash of empires brought tragedy. Like so many of his fellow countrymen, Janse left his Dutch homeland as a young adult to try his luck in New Netherland. After spending a few years on Manhattan Island, he moved on to the fur trading settlement today known as Albany. Merwick traces his journey to a new continent and re-creates the satisfying existence this respected burgher enjoyed with his wife in the bustling town. As a notary Janse was, in the author's words, "surrounded by stories, those he listened to and recorded, the hundreds he archived in a chest or trunk." His familiar life was turned upside down by the British conquest of the colony. Merwick recounts the changes brought about by the new rulers and imagines the despair Janse must have felt when English, a language he had never learned, replaced his native tongue in official transactions. In any military adventure, truth is alleged to be the first casualty. Merwick offers a poignant reminder that the first casualties are in fact people. As much a musing on what history obscures as what it reveals, her book is a superior work by a master practitioner of her craft.

DONNA MERWICK is Visiting Fellow at the Center for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian
National University. Her most recent book is Possessing Albany, 1630?1710: The Dutch and
English Experiences.

American History|Regional-Northeast   More about this Title
Cloth  Available in MAY  304pp  6 x 9
33 black-and-white photographs
ISBN: 0-8014-3608-7  $35.00 | £25.9

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.

American History|Native American Studies|Regional-Northeast & Southeast  
Cloth  Available in JUNE  256pp  6 1/8 x 9 1/4
4 maps, 1 black-and-white photograph
ISBN: 0-8014-3564-1  $42.50 | £31.50

April 26, 2002