Creating a Nation of Joiners
Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts
Johann N. Neem
The United States is a nation of joiners. Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville published his observations in Democracy in America, Americans have recognized the distinctiveness of their voluntary tradition. In a work of political, legal, social, and intellectual history, focusing on the grassroots actions of ordinary people, Neem traces the origins of this venerable tradition to the vexed beginnings of American democracy in Massachusetts.
Neem explores the multiple conflicts that produced a vibrant pluralistic civil society following the American Revolution. The result was an astounding release of civic energy as ordinary people, long denied a voice in public debates, organized to advocate temperance, to protect the Sabbath, and to abolish slavery; elite Americans formed private institutions to promote education and their stewardship of culture and knowledge. But skeptics remained. Followers of Jefferson and Jackson worried that the new civil society would allow the organized few to trump the will of the unorganized majority. When Tocqueville returned to France, the relationship between American democracy and its new civil society was far from settled.
The story Neem tells is more pertinent than ever—for Americans concerned about their own civil society, and for those seeking to build civil societies in emerging democracies around the world.
Johann N. Neem is Assistant Professor of History, Western Washington University.
Harvard edition World
264 pages
Harvard Historical Studies
Hardcover edition
Text
November 2008
Not yet available
$49.95
£32.95
E37.50
ISBN 13:
978-0-674-03079-4
ISBN 10: 0-674-03079-6
0674030796
9780674030794
The Death of Captain Cook
A Hero Made and Unmade
Glyn Williams
Since first reported to the world in 1780, the death of Captain Cook on a Hawaiian beach the previous year has been revered, celebrated, and shrouded in mystery. Simultaneously called a hero and an antihero, a ruthless invader, and a torchbearer of the Enlightenment, Cook’s reputation grew as much out of the moving story of his death as out of his adventures while he lived.
In a style that is more detective story than conventional biography, Glyn Williams explores the multiple narratives of Cook’s death. He reveals how the British Admiralty first attempted to censor accounts of Cook’s erratic behavior and how the “authorized” version of his death—a lengthy narrative serialized in the leading publications of the day—reduced the story to the final hours of a noble leader who gave his life to save others. Williams argues that the contrary evidence of a chaotic bloody fracas on the beach at Kealakekua Bay was ignored, and that the unexplained disappearance of Cook’s own journal helped the process of concealment. He believes that Cook was not entirely the man sanctified by the British public. More than two hundred years later, an explosive interplay between academic controversy and nationalist feelings has once more drawn attention to a life that has attracted praise and controversy, abhorrence and admiration. In short, Williams examines the story of Cook’s progress from obscurity to fame and, eventually, to infamy—a story that, until now, has never been fully told.
Glyn Williams is Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London.
Other HUP Books by Glyn Williams
The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment
Harvard edition North America
18 halftones
208 pages
Profiles in History
Hardcover edition
Trade
January 2009
Not yet available
$19.95
£12.95
E15.00
ISBN 13:
978-0-674-03194-4
ISBN 10: 0-674-03194-6
0674031946
9780674031944
Saltwater Slavery
A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Stephanie E. Smallwood
This bold, innovative book promises to radically alter our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and the depths of its horrors. Stephanie E. Smallwood offers a penetrating look at the process of enslavement from its African origins through the Middle Passage and into the American slave market.
Smallwood's story is animated by deep research and gives us a startlingly graphic experience of the slave trade from the vantage point of the slaves themselves. Ultimately, Saltwater Slavery details how African people were transformed into Atlantic commodities in the process.
She begins her narrative on the shores of seventeenth-century Africa, tracing how the trade in human bodies came to define the life of the Gold Coast. Smallwood takes us into the ports and stone fortresses where African captives were held and prepared, and then through the Middle Passage itself. In extraordinary detail, we witness these men and women cramped in the holds of ships, gasping for air, and trying to make sense of an unfamiliar sea and an unimaginable destination. Arriving in America, we see how these new migrants enter the market for laboring bodies, and struggle to reconstruct their social identities in the New World.
Throughout, Smallwood examines how the people at the center of her story--merchant capitalists, sailors, and slaves--made sense of the bloody process in which they were joined. The result is both a remarkable transatlantic view of the culture of enslavement, and a painful, intimate vision of the bloody, daily business of the slave trade.
Stephanie E. Smallwood teaches History at the University of Washington, Seattle.
4 halftones, 2 maps
288 pages
Hardcover edition
Academic Trade
February 2007
$29.95
£19.95
E22.50
ISBN 13:
978-0-674-02349-9
ISBN 10: 0-674-02349-8
0674023498
9780674023499
Paperback edition
Trade
September 2008
Not yet available
$17.95
£11.95
E13.50
ISBN 13:
978-0-674-03068-8
ISBN 10: 0-674-03068-0
1812
War with America
Jon Latimer
In the first complete history of the War of 1812 written from a British perspective, Jon Latimer offers an authoritative and compelling account that places the conflict in its strategic context within the Napoleonic wars. The British viewed the War of 1812 as an ill-fated attempt by the young American republic to annex Canada. For British Canada, populated by many loyalists who had fled the American Revolution, this was a war for survival. The Americans aimed both to assert their nationhood on the global stage and to expand their territory northward and westward.
Americans would later find in this war many iconic moments in their national story--the bombardment of Fort McHenry (the inspiration for Francis Scott Key's "Star Spangled Banner"); the Battle of Lake Erie; the burning of Washington; the death of Tecumseh; Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans--but their war of conquest was ultimately a failure. Even the issues of neutrality and impressment that had triggered the war were not resolved in the peace treaty. For Britain, the war was subsumed under a long conflict to stop Napoleon and to preserve the empire. The one lasting result of the war was in Canada, where the British victory eliminated the threat of American conquest, and set Canadians on the road toward confederation.
Latimer describes events not merely through the eyes of generals, admirals, and politicians but through those of the soldiers, sailors, and ordinary people who were directly affected. Drawing on personal letters, diaries, and memoirs, he crafts an intimate narrative that marches the reader into the heat of battle.
Jon Latimer is a guest lecturer at the Joint Services Staff College and a former officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He is also the author of Deception in War.
Harvard edition World, subsidiary rights restricted
16 halftones, 16 maps
Belknap Press
656 pages
Hardcover edition
Trade
September 2007
£22.95
E32.30
ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02584-4
ISBN 10: 0-674-02584-9
0674025849
9780674025844
The Betrayal of Faith
The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert
Emma Anderson
Emma Anderson uses one man's compelling story to explore the collision of Christianity with traditional Native religion in colonial North America.
Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan was born into a nomadic indigenous community of Innu living along the St. Lawrence River in present-day Quebec. At age eleven, he was sent to France by Catholic missionaries to be educated for five years, and then brought back to help Christianize his people.
Pastedechouan's youthful encounter with French Catholicism engendered in him a fatal religious ambivalence. Robbed of both his traditional religious identity and critical survival skills, he had difficulty winning the acceptance of his community upon his return. At the same time, his attempts to prove himself to his people led the Jesuits to regard him with increasing suspicion. Suspended between two worlds, Pastedechouan ultimately became estranged--with tragic results--from both his native community and his missionary mentors.
An engaging narrative of cultural negotiation and religious coercion, Betrayal of Faith documents the multiple betrayals of identity and culture caused by one young man's experiences with an inflexible French Catholicism. Pastedechouan's story illuminates key struggles to retain and impose religious identity on both sides of the seventeenth-century Atlantic, even as it has a startling relevance to the contemporary encounter between native and non-native peoples.
Photo by Mark Anderson
Harvard edition World, subsidiary rights restricted
11 halftones
336 pages
Harvard Historical Studies
Hardcover edition
Text
October 2007
$45.00
£29.95
E41.50
ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02608-7
ISBN 10: 0-674-02608-X
067402608X
9780674026087
My Dearest Friend
Letters of Abigail and John Adams
With a Foreword by Joseph J. Ellis
Edited by Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor
In 1762, John Adams penned a flirtatious note to "Miss Adorable," the 17-year-old Abigail Smith. In 1801, Abigail wrote to wish her husband John a safe journey as he headed home to Quincy after serving as president of the nation he helped create. The letters that span these nearly forty years form the most significant correspondence--and reveal one of the most intriguing and inspiring partnerships--in American history.
As a pivotal player in the American Revolution and the early republic, John had a front-row seat at critical moments in the creation of the United States, from the drafting of the Declaration of Independence to negotiating peace with Great Britain to serving as the first vice president and second president under the U.S. Constitution. Separated more often than they were together during this founding era, John and Abigail shared their lives through letters that each addressed to "My Dearest Friend," debating ideas and commenting on current events while attending to the concerns of raising their children (including a future president).
Full of keen observations and articulate commentary on world events, these letters are also remarkably intimate. This new collection--including some letters never before published--invites readers to experience the founding of a nation and the partnership of two strong individuals, in their own words. This is history at its most authentic and most engaging.
Margaret A. Hogan is Managing Editor of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
C. James Taylor is Editor in Chief of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.Harvard edition World
27 halftones
Belknap Press
488 pages
Hardcover edition
October 2007
$35.00
£22.95
E32.30
ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02606-3
ISBN 10: 0-674-02606-3
0674026063
9780674026063
On Religious Liberty
Selections from the Works of Roger Williams
James Calvin Davis
Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven in Rhode Island for those persecuted in the name of the religious establishment. He conducted a lifelong debate over religious freedom with distinguished figures of the seventeenth century, including Puritan minister John Cotton, Massachusetts governor John Endicott, and the English Parliament.
James Calvin Davis gathers together important selections from Williams's public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state. For Williams, the enforcement of religious uniformity violated the basic values of Calvinist Christianity and presumed upon God's authority to speak to the individual conscience. He argued that state coercion was rarely effective, often causing more harm to the church and strife to the social order than did religious pluralism.
This is the first collection of Williams's writings in forty years reaching beyond his major work, The Bloody Tenent, to include other selections from his public and private writings. This carefully annotated book introduces Williams to a new generation of readers.James Calvin Davis is Associate Professor of Religion, Middlebury College.
Harvard edition World
Belknap Press
298 pages
Hardcover edition
January 2008
$49.95
£32.95
E46.10
ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02622-3
ISBN 10: 0-674-02622-5
0674026225
9780674026223
Paperback edition
Academic Trade
January 2008
$19.95
£12.95
E18.50
ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02685-8
ISBN 10: 0-674-02685-3
0674026853
9780674026858
The Reaper's Garden
Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery
Vincent Brown
What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The Reaper's Garden, Vincent Brown asks this question about Jamaica, the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in America--and a human catastrophe. Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force.
In this compelling and evocative story of a world in flux, Brown shows that death was as generative as it was destructive. From the eighteenth-century zenith of British colonial slavery to its demise in the 1830s, the Grim Reaper cultivated essential aspects of social life in Jamaica--belonging and status, dreams for the future, and commemorations of the past. Surveying a haunted landscape, Brown unfolds the letters of anxious colonists; listens in on wakes, eulogies, and solemn incantations; peers into crypts and coffins, and finds the very spirit of human struggle in slavery. Masters and enslaved, fortune seekers and spiritual healers, rebels and rulers, all summoned the dead to further their desires and ambitions. In this turbulent transatlantic world, Brown argues, "mortuary politics" played a consequential role in determining the course of history.
Insightful and powerfully affecting, The Reaper's Garden promises to enrich our understanding of the ways that death shaped political life in the world of Atlantic slavery and beyond.
Vincent Brown is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University.Harvard edition World, subsidiary rights restricted
18 halftones, 4 maps, 2 graphs
310 pages
Hardcover edition
Academic Trade
February 2008
$35.00
£22.95
E32.30
ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02422-9
ISBN 10: 0-674-02422-2
0674024222
9780674024229
Fruits and Plains
The Horticultural Transformation of America
Philip J. Pauly
The engineering of plants has a long history on this continent. Fields, forests, orchards, and prairies are the result of repeated campaigns by amateurs, tradesmen, and scientists to introduce desirable plants, both American and foreign, while preventing growth of alien riff-raff. These horticulturists coaxed plants along in new environments and, through grafting and hybridizing, created new varieties. Over the last 250 years, their activities transformed the American landscape.
"Horticulture" may bring to mind white-glove garden clubs and genteel lectures about growing better roses. But Philip J. Pauly wants us to think of horticulturalists as pioneer "biotechnologists," hacking their plants to create a landscape that reflects their ambitions and ideals. Those standards have shaped the look of suburban neighborhoods, city parks, and the "native" produce available in our supermarkets.
In telling the histories of Concord grapes and Japanese cherry trees, the problem of the prairie and the war on the Medfly, Pauly hopes to provide a new understanding of not only how horticulture shaped the vegetation around us, but how it influenced our experiences of the native, the naturalized, and the alien--and how better to manage the landscapes around us.
Philip J. Pauly is Professor of History at Rutgers University.Harvard edition World
34 halftones, 3 line illustrations, 11 maps
312 pages
Hardcover edition
February 2008
$39.95
£25.95
E36.90
ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02663-6
ISBN 10: 0-674-02663-2
0674026632
9780674026636
Papers of John Adams, Volume 14, 27 October 1782 - 31 May 1783
John Adams
Volume editor Gregg L. Lint
Volume editor C. James Taylor
Volume editor Margaret A. Hogan
Volume editor Hobson Woodward
John Adams reached Paris on October 26, 1782, for the final act of the American Revolution: the peace treaty. This volume chronicles his role in the negotiations and the decision to conclude a peace separate from France. Determined that the United States pursue an independent foreign policy, Adams's letters criticized Congress's naive confidence in France. But in April 1783, frustrated at delays over the final treaty and at real and imagined slights from Congress and Benjamin Franklin, Adams believed the crux of the problem was Franklin's moral bankruptcy and servile Francophilia in the service of a duplicitous Comte de Vergennes.
Volume 14 covers more than just the peace negotiations. As American minister to the Netherlands, Adams managed the distribution of funds from the Dutch-American loan. Always an astute observer, he commented on the fall of the Shelburne ministry and its replacement by the Fox-North coalition, the future of the Anglo-American relationship, and the prospects for the United States in the post-revolutionary world. But he was also an anxious father, craving news of John Quincy Adams's slow journey from St. Petersburg to The Hague. By May 1783, Adams was tired of Europe, but resigned to remaining until his work was done.
C. James Taylor is Editor in Chief of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Margaret A. Hogan is Managing Editor of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Harvard edition World12 halftones
Belknap Press
608 pages
Adams Papers
Series III: General Correspondence and Other Papers of the Adams Statesmen
Hardcover edition
February 2008
$100.00
£64.95
E92.00
ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02607-0
ISBN 10: 0-674-02607-1
0674026071
9780674026070
The Jamestown Project
Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Captain John Smith’s 1607 voyage to Jamestown was not his first trip abroad. He had traveled throughout Europe, been sold as a war captive in Turkey, escaped, and returned to England in time to join the Virginia Company’s colonizing project. In Jamestown migrants, merchants, and soldiers who had also sailed to the distant shores of the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and Ireland in search of new beginnings encountered Indians who already possessed broad understanding of Europeans. Experience of foreign environments and cultures had sharpened survival instincts on all sides and aroused challenging questions about human nature and its potential for transformation.
It is against this enlarged temporal and geographic background that Jamestown dramatically emerges in Karen Kupperman’s breathtaking study. Reconfiguring the national myth of Jamestown’s failure, she shows how the settlement’s distinctly messy first decade actually represents a period of ferment in which individuals were learning how to make a colony work. Despite the settlers’ dependence on the Chesapeake Algonquians and strained relations with their London backers, they forged a tenacious colony that survived where others had failed. Indeed, the structures and practices that evolved through trial and error in Virginia would become the model for all successful English colonies, including Plymouth.
Capturing England’s intoxication with a wider world through ballads, plays, and paintings, and the stark reality of Jamestown--for Indians and Europeans alike--through the words of its inhabitants as well as archeological and environmental evidence, Kupperman re-creates these formative years with astonishing detail.
Karen Ordahl Kupperman is Silver Professor of History at New York University.
Harvard edition WorldBelknap Press
392 pages
Hardcover edition
March 2007
ISBN 0-674-02474-5
$29.95
£19.95
E27.70
ISBN 13 978-0-674-02474-8
Adams Family Correspondence, Volume 8, March 1787-December 1789
Adams Family
Edited by Margaret A. Hogan
Edited by C. James Taylor
Edited by Jessie May Rodrique
Edited by Hobson Woodward
Edited by Gregg L. Lint
Edited by Mary T. Claffey
By early 1787, as this latest volume of the award-winning series Adams Family Correspondence opens, John and Abigail Adams were eagerly planning their return home to Massachusetts from Great Britain, frustrated by John's lack of progress in his diplomatic mission and anxious for a reunion with family and friends. Arriving in Massachusetts in mid-1788, they anticipated a quiet retirement from government service as they returned to running their farm. But they barely had time to settle in before they were pulled back into the public sphere by John's election as the first vice president under the new Constitution. Moving to New York City in 1789 with their daughter Nabby, and her family, John and Abigail found themselves once again center stage in American political life. The Adamses serve as prescient and thoughtful observers of the world around them, from the manners and mores of English court life to the political intrigues of the new federal government in New York. Beyond that wider world, however, these letters observe the more intimate domestic concerns of a New England family. With more of the forthright candor that marks the Adamses' correspondence, this volume offers a unique perspective on a crucial period in American history.
Harvard edition World
10 halftones
Belknap Press
592 pages
Adams Papers
Series II: Adams Family Correspondence
Hardcover edition
February 2007
ISBN 0-674-02278-5
$90.00
£58.95
E82.90
ISBN 13 978-0-674-02278-2
0674022785
9780674022782
The Declaration of Independence
A Global History
David Armitage
In a stunningly original look at the American Declaration of Independence, David Armitage reveals the document in a new light: through the eyes of the rest of the world. Not only did the Declaration announce the entry of the United States onto the world stage, it became the model for other countries to follow.
Armitage examines the Declaration as a political, legal, and intellectual document, and is the first to treat it entirely within a broad international framework. He shows how the Declaration arose within a global moment in the late eighteenth century similar to our own. He uses over one hundred declarations of independence written since 1776 to show the influence and role the U.S. Declaration has played in creating a world of states out of a world of empires. He discusses why the framers' language of natural rights did not resonate in Britain, how the document was interpreted in the rest of the world, whether the Declaration established a new nation or a collection of states, and where and how the Declaration has had an overt influence on independence movements--from Haiti to Vietnam, and from Venezuela to Rhodesia.
Included is the text of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and sample declarations from around the world. An eye-opening list of declarations of independence since 1776 is compiled here for the first time. This unique global perspective demonstrates the singular role of the United States document as a founding statement of our modern world.David Armitage is Professor of History at Harvard University.
Hardcover edition
January 2007
ISBN 0-674-02282-3
$23.95
£15.95
E22.10
ISBN 13 978-0-674-02282-9
0674022823
9780674022829
Violence over the Land
Indians and Empires in the Early American West
Ned Blackhawk
American Indians remain familiar as icons, yet poorly understood as historical agents. In this ambitious book that ranges across Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and eastern California (a region known as the Great Basin), Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples squarely at the center of a dynamic and complex story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West.
On the distant margins of empire, Great Basin Indians increasingly found themselves engulfed in the chaotic storms of European expansion and responded in ways that refashioned themselves and those around them. Focusing on Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone Indians, Blackhawk illuminates this history through a lens of violence, excavating the myriad impacts of colonial expansion. Brutal networks of trade and slavery forged the Spanish borderlands, and the use of violence became for many Indians a necessary survival strategy, particularly after Mexican Independence when many became raiders and slave traffickers. Throughout such violent processes, these Native communities struggled to adapt to their changing environments, sometimes scoring remarkable political ends while suffering immense reprisals.
Violence over the Land is a passionate reminder of the high costs that the making of American history occasioned for many indigenous peoples, written from the vantage point of an Indian scholar whose own family history is intimately bound up in its enduring legacies.
Ned Blackhawk is Associate Professor of History and American Indian Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Harvard edition World
18 halftones, 2 maps, 1 graph
384 pages
Hardcover edition
November 2006
$35.00
£22.95
E32.30
ISBN 13 978-0-674-02290-4
0674022904
9780674022904
A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders
Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America
James Delbourgo
2005 Thomas J. Wilson Prize of Harvard University Press
Benjamin Franklin's invention of the lightning rod is the founding fable of American science, but Franklin was only one of many early Americans fascinated by electricity. As a dramatically new physical experience, electricity amazed those who dared to tame the lightning and set it coursing through their own bodies. Thanks to its technological and medical utility, but also its surprising ability to defy rational experimental mastery, electricity was a powerful experience of enlightenment, at once social, intellectual, and spiritual.
In this compelling book, James Delbourgo moves beyond Franklin to trace the path of electricity through early American culture, exploring how the relationship between human, natural, and divine powers was understood in the eighteenth century. By examining the lives and visions of natural philosophers, spectacular showmen, religious preachers, and medical therapists, he shows how electrical experiences of wonder, terror, and awe were connected to a broad array of cultural concerns that defined the American Enlightenment. The history of lightning rods, electrical demonstrations, electric eels, and medical electricity reveals how early American science, medicine, and technology were shaped by a culture of commercial performance, evangelical religion, and republican politics from mid-century to the early republic.
The first book to situate early American experimental science in the context of a transatlantic public sphere, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders offers a captivating view of the origins of American science and the cultural meaning of the American Enlightenment. In a story of shocks and sparks from New England to the Caribbean, Delbourgo brilliantly illuminates a revolutionary New World of wonder.
James Delbourgo is Assistant Professor of History and Chair of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science at McGill University.
Harvard edition World, subsidiary rights restricted
15 halftones, 2 maps
384 pages
Hardcover edition
October 2006
$29.95
£19.95
E27.70
ISBN 13 978-0-674-02299-7
0674022998
9780674022997
Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina
S. Max Edelson
This impressive scholarly debut deftly reinterprets one of America's oldest symbols--the southern slave plantation. S. Max Edelson examines the relationships between planters, slaves, and the natural world they colonized to create the Carolina Lowcountry.
European settlers came to South Carolina in 1670 determined to possess an abundant wilderness. Over the course of a century, they settled highly adaptive rice and indigo plantations across a vast coastal plain. Forcing slaves to turn swampy wastelands into productive fields and to channel surging waters into elaborate irrigation systems, planters initiated a stunning economic transformation.
The result, Edelson reveals, was two interdependent plantation worlds. A rough rice frontier became a place of unremitting field labor. With the profits, planters made Charleston and its hinterland into a refined, diversified place to live. From urban townhouses and rural retreats, they ran multiple-plantation enterprises, looking to England for affirmation as agriculturists, gentlemen, and stakeholders in Britain's American empire. Offering a new vision of the Old South that was far from static, Edelson reveals the plantations of early South Carolina to have been dynamic instruments behind an expansive process of colonization.
With a bold interdisciplinary approach, Plantation Enterprise reconstructs the environmental, economic, and cultural changes that made the Carolina Lowcountry one of the most prosperous and repressive regions in the Atlantic world.
S. Max Edelson is Professor of History at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Harvard edition World
6 halftones, 1 line illustration, 5 maps, 15 tables
400 pages
Hardcover edition
October 2006
$45.00
£29.95
E41.50
ISBN 13 978-0-674-02303-1
067402303X
9780674023031
The Faithful Shepherd
A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century, with a New Introduction
David D. Hall
This description of the Americanization of a European institution, the Puritan ministry as it was transported to the New England colonies in the seventeenth century, offers a host of new insights into American religious history. By focusing on such areas as the ministers' authority, church membership, and ecclesiastical organization, David D. Hall shows that, although the effects of the American experience might be considered liberalizing or democratizing in the first years of settlement, during the entire course of the seventeenth century the New World environment produced an institutional development that returned the churches to forms and doctrines that existed before the emigration from Europe.
The Faithful Shepherd not only sustains a bold thesis about Americanization but also affords the reader one of the freshest and most comprehensive histories of the seventeenth-century New England mind and society. This new printing contains a new introduction reflecting on how our understanding of seventeenth-century New England has developed since the book was first published.
David D. Hall is John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History at Harvard Divinity School
Harvard edition World
300 pages
Harvard Theological Studies
Paperback edition
Text
May 2006
$28.00
£17.95
E25.90
ISBN 13 978-0-674-01959-1
0674019598
9780674019591
Religion: History
History: United States: Colonial Period (1600-1775)
The Forgotten Fifth
African Americans in the Age of Revolution
Gary B. Nash
As the United States gained independence, a full fifth of the country's population was African American. The experiences of these men and women have been largely ignored in the accounts of the colonies' glorious quest for freedom. In this compact volume, Gary B. Nash reorients our understanding of early America, and reveals the perilous choices of the founding fathers that shaped the nation's future.
Nash tells of revolutionary fervor arousing a struggle for freedom that spiraled into the largest slave rebellion in American history, as blacks fled servitude to fight for the British, who promised freedom in exchange for military service. The Revolutionary Army never matched the British offer, and most histories of the period have ignored this remarkable story. The conventional wisdom says that abolition was impossible in the fragile new republic. Nash, however, argues that an unusual convergence of factors immediately after the war created a unique opportunity to dismantle slavery. The founding fathers' failure to commit to freedom led to the waning of abolitionism just as it had reached its peak. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, as Nash demonstrates, their decision enabled the ideology of white supremacy to take root, and with it the beginnings of an irreparable national fissure. The moral failure of the Revolution was paid for in the 1860s with the lives of the 600,000 Americans killed in the Civil War.
The Forgotten Fifth is a powerful story of the nation's multiple, and painful, paths to freedom.
Gary B. Nash is Professor of History Emeritus, UCLA and Professor and Director, National Center for History in the Schools.
OTHER HARVARD BOOKS BY GARY B. NASH
Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840
The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution, Abridged Edition
Harvard edition World
The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures
7 halftones
256 pages
Hardcover edition
Trade
February 2006
$19.95
£12.95
E18.50
Birthing a Slave
Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South
Marie Jenkins Schwartz
The deprivations and cruelty of slavery have overshadowed our understanding of the institution's most human dimension: birth. We often don't realize that after the United States stopped importing slaves in 1808, births were more important than ever; slavery and the southern way of life could continue only through babies born in bondage.
In the antebellum South, slaveholders' interest in slave women was matched by physicians struggling to assert their own professional authority over childbirth, and the two began to work together to increase the number of infants born in the slave quarter. In unprecedented ways, doctors tried to manage the health of enslaved women from puberty through the reproductive years, attempting to foster pregnancy, cure infertility, and resolve gynecological problems, including cancer.
Black women, however, proved an unruly force, distrustful of both the slaveholders and their doctors. With their own healing traditions, emphasizing the power of roots and herbs and the critical roles of family and community, enslaved women struggled to take charge of their own health in a system that did not respect their social circumstances, customs, or values. Birthing a Slave depicts the competing approaches to reproductive health that evolved on plantations, as both black women and white men sought to enhance the health of enslaved mothers--in very different ways and for entirely different reasons.
Birthing a Slave is the first book to focus exclusively on the health care of enslaved women, and it argues convincingly for the critical role of reproductive medicine in the slave system of antebellum America.
Marie Jenkins Schwartz is Associate Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island.
OTHER HARVARD BOOKS BY MARIE JENKINS SCHWARTZ
Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South
Harvard edition World
416 pages
Hardcover edition
Academic Trade
May 2006
$29.95
£19.95
E27.70
May 13, 2008