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PIOUS PERSUASIONS: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England

Erik R. Seeman

The growing pre-revolitionary independent
thought of lay people in New England

"Pious Persuasions deftly examines the faith of New England's 'second century.' It also
engages the major historiographical issues, including the importance of the Great
Awakening, the troublesome relationship between clergy and laity, and the degree to which
lay spirituality should be construed as 'individualistic' or 'communitarian.' It employs a
gender analysis when called for and offers some of the most suggestive comments about
religion and sexuality seen in these scholarly precincts for some time." -- Charles L.
Cohen, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Congregational ministers in early New England worked hard to advance the cause of
orthodox religion among the region's laypeople, but the people's willingness to voice
differences with their ministers persisted. By the time of the Revolutionary War, New
Englanders had established a strong tradition of independent-mindedness, shaped in part
by the previous century's struggles over piety and religious practice.

In Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England, historian
Erik R. Seeman explores both Congregational doctrine and laypeople's practices
throughout the 1700s. Seeman looks at the piety of ordinary folk, including a Boston
housewright; the interplay of magic and religious culture; the changing experience of
women; and the persistence of revivalism. His findings supply a fresh perspective on the
Great Awakening of the 1740s, which appears not as a historical turning point but rather as
one of four major revivals that fostered communal piety. Seeman further examines how
pastors and parishioners negotiated their increasingly contentious religious culture when
participating in highly charged events: deathbed scenes, rituals of baptism and the Lord's
Supper, and religious revivals.

Incorporating the widest ranging examination to date of contemporary lay sources -- letters,
diaries, conversion narratives, and published poems and broadsides -- Pious Persuasions
is a significant work for Early Americanists, social historians, and students of American
religion.

Erik R. Seeman is an assistant professor of history at State University of New York at Buffalo.

Early America: History, Context, Culture
Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole, Series Editors

December 1999, 200 pp., 1 map and 1 halftone
0-8018-6208-6 (hardcover) $36.00

NEW YORK BEFORE CHINATOWN: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882

John Kuo Wei Tchen

The changing image of the Chinese in America
"Tchen has already established himself as the leading authority on the history of the
Chinese in New York and this new book will be met with great enthusiasm. By placing
Chinese immigrants on the East Coast before their arrival in appreciable numbers due to the
Gold Rush, he adds an important perspective to Asian American history in particular and to
American immigration history in general. While not discounting the importance of Chinese
immigration to the West Coast, Tchen's work broadens our understanding of the Chinese
presence in the United States -- in many ways, turning the standard interpretation of
Chinese American history on its head." -- K. Scott Wong, Williams College, coeditor of
Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era

"This fascinating book by Professor Tchen is required reading for anyone interested in the
history of New York City." -- Dolores Hayden, Yale University, author of The Power of
Place

"Treating social history and questions of representation with equal brilliance and with keen
awareness of their dialectical relation, Tchen sets a new standard for the study of how race
was both lived and seen." -- David R. Roediger, University of Minnesota, author of
Wages of Whiteness

"Tchen's study is a careful model of the historian's craft, locating broad theoretical and
comparative issues in a masterful use of archival materials that few know about or use
effectively." -- Arjun Appadurai, University of Chicago, author of Modernity at Large

"New York Before Chinatown is a large, ambitious, and impressive work -- one of the very
best and certainly one of the most original studies of its kind." -- Lawrence Levine, George
Mason University, author of The Opening of the American Mind

"This book is the meticulous work of an influential scholar and public intellectual who
quickly captures and seriously engages our attention as he probes, with stunning depth, the
role of Chinese ideas, people and things in the formation of American cultural identity." --
Johnetta B. Cole, President Emerita, Spelman College and Presidential Distinguished
Professor, Emory University

"This fascinating book recounts the rise of the Chinese in Manhattan and the declension in
ways other New Yorkers perceived and responded to them. First characterized and
welcomed as members of an advanced civilization, Chinese-Americans were later portrayed
and marketed as exotic curiosities. Finally -- reviled as barbarians -- they were ghettoized in
the city and barred from the country. A sophisticated and sobering study of the interaction
between representation and reality." -- Mike Wallace, coauthor of Gotham: A History of
New York City to 1898

From George Washington's desire (in the heat of the Revolutionary War) for a proper set
of Chinese porcelains for afternoon tea, to the lives of Chinese-Irish couples in the 1830s,
to the commercial success of Chang and Eng (the "Siamese Twins"), to rising fears of
"heathen Chinee," New York before Chinatown offers a provocative look at the role
Chinese people, things, and ideas played in the fashioning of American culture and politics.

Piecing together various historical fragments and anecdotes from the years before
Chinatown emerged in the late 1870s, historian John Kuo Wei Tchen redraws Manhattan's
historical landscape and broadens our understanding of the role of port cultures in the
making of American identities. Tchen tells his story in three parts. In the first, he explores
America's fascination with Asia as a source of luxury items, cultural taste, and lucrative
trade. In the second, he explains how Chinese, European-Americans in Yellowface, and
various caricatures became objects of curiosity in the expansive commercial marketplace. In
the third part, Tchen focuses on how Americans' attitude toward the Chinese changed from
fascination to demonization, leading to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts
beginning in 1882.

John Kuo Wei Tchen is director of Asian/Pacific/American Studies and associate professor of History at New York
University. Tchen received an American Book Award for Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old
Chinatown, 1895-1906 and he edited Paul C. P. Siu's The Chinese Laundryman. In 1980, Tchen co-founded the
Museum of Chinese in the Americas.

August 1999, 400 pp., 43 line illustrations
0-8018-6006-7 (hardcover) $42.50

PROVIDENCE TALES AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

James D. Hartman

"Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature establishes James Hartman as an
authority on an important American genre, the Indian captivity narrative, and on its
importance for early American literature. Written with wonderful clarity and directness, the
book reveals the roots of the captivity narrative in the style and themes of the English
providence tale. Hartman's work nicely complements the largely gender- and race-based
discussions of the captivity narrative that have recently proliferated." -- David S. Reynolds,
Baruch College and the City University of New York Graduate School, author of Beneath
the American Renaissance and Walt Whitman's America

"By elucidating the transatlantic literary conversation that took place between Britain and
the North American colonies, Hartman has made a welcome addition to the growing body
of scholarly writing that places issues in 'American' nation-formation not in the nineteenth
century but squarely in the middle of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Anglo-American literary marketplace of ideas. This is an interesting and indeed splendid
study in English colonial intellectual and literary history, and an important contribution to
the study of American letters." -- Carla Mulford, Pennsylvania State University, Colonial
and Eighteenth-century editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature

"Hartman's impressive grounding of the captivity stories in a well-established tradition of
providential narratives revises interpretations that attempt to describe the writings of Mary
Rowlandson and other early Indian captives as indigenous productions that reflect an
exceptionalist frontier experience. An important contribution to our understanding of the
early captivity narratives as well as to our knowledge of the imaginative world of late
seventeenth-century England and New England." -- Frank Shuffelton, University of
Rochester; editor of A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America

In colonial America, tales about the capture of English settlers by Native American war
parties and the captives' subsequent suffering and privations were wildly popular among
readers. In these captivity narratives, writers such as Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan
Dickinson, and John Williams told autobiographical stories that combined images of brutal
violence with examples of spiritual fortitude. In their accounts, as well as in similar and
equally popular tales of witchcraft, exploration, and shipwreck, lie the roots of a uniquely
American literature, providing distinct patterns for later writers, from James Fenimore
Cooper to Herman Melville. Despite their importance in the development of American
literature, however, the origins of the captivity narrative have until now been largely
unexplored.

In Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature, James D. Hartman uncovers
the genesis of the captivity narrative in the English providence tale and its transformation in
the seventeenth century. Accounts of miracles, answered prayers, and divine judgments in
the form of natural catastrophes meant to prove the existence of God have been a staple of
religious literature. But, as Hartman details, in seventeenth-century England, religious
writers were faced with challenges to their faith by the increasingly vital cultural forces of
empiricism, skepticism, and atheism. Creators of providence tales responded to this
challenge by appropriating the language of scientific methodology. They also attempted to
broaden their audience by adding violence, sentimentality, melodrama, and other attributes
of secular literature to their otherwise spiritual tales.

These new providence tales set out to entertain readers while convincing them through
copious and rational documentation that God and his supernatural hosts were still actively
managing humanity's daily affairs on earth. Writers in New England, for example, adapted
the reinvigorated providence tale to their unique experiences in the New World. Exploring
the cultural context in which both English providence tales and their American counterparts
emerged -- focusing in particular on the influence of religious, scientific, and literary
developments during this critical period -- Hartman offers a provocative reassessment of
the origins of American literature.

James D. Hartman teaches American and world literature at the City University of New York.

April 1999, 216 pp.
0-8018-6027-X (hardcover) $38.50

HISTORIC AMERICAN TOWNS ALONG THE ATLANTIC COAST

Warren Boeschenstein

A fascinating guide for coastal travelers and a usefulframework for historical
preservation and innovative town planning.

In the tentative early settlements along the Atlantic coast, the ocean meant everything --
offering ties to the outside world and yielding an abundance that allowed colonists to
establish thriving outposts. With industrialization in the nineteenth century, some of these
coastal communities grew into important cities. Other settlements -- the ones that are the
affectionate focus of this book -- fell behind and survived in relative isolation.

Bypassed by the transportation and industrial revolutions, the places surveyed by Warren
Boeschenstein have remained unspoiled by the usually unstoppable forces of the modern
world. These towns have since become cherished landmarks because of their remarkable
natural settings and cultural legacies. Dotting the coast from Maine to Florida, they
exemplify historic America at its best.

In Historic American Towns along the Atlantic Coast, Boeschenstein celebrates the scale
and style of these places -- more than 140 towns in all -- and offers wonderfully evocative
descriptions of each. The book divides naturally into three regional sections: North Atlantic,
Mid-Atlantic, and South Atlantic. In these areas, Boeschenstein focuses on nine places that
are among the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America, towns that still
possess a delightful pedestrian scale and sense of community, towns whose physical
settings evoke time-honored qualities: Castine and Kennebunks' Port, Maine, Edgartown,
Massachusetts, and Stonington, Connecticut, in the North; Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and
New Castle, Delaware, in the Mid-Atlantic; and Edenton, North Carolina, Beaufort, South
Carolina, and Saint Augustine, Florida, in the South.

Each of these coastal villages reveals a different past, and Boeschenstein gives each story its
due. Ocean Grove is the accomplishment of primarily one generation, the fervent post-Civil
War Methodists. Beaufort reflects most magnificently not one but several generations of
antebellum planters, who, over a century, asserted their authority and importance. In
Kennebunks' Port, Victorians built a community distinct from that of the earlier Federalists.
In Stonington, New Castle, and Edenton residents "infilled" buildings, intermixing
structures from different periods.

Using nearly 200 historic maps, drawings, and photographs to illustrate the spectrum of
change in these communities, the author also examines qualities common to all: location,
community, scale, and time. Here, on the coast, the quality of time is tangibly evident. The
reliable rhythms of the tides magnify the perceptions of time repeating and time passing.
Human history permeates buildings that reflect the values of different periods. Animal
migrations mark the seasons -- birds along the Atlantic flyway, fish through the nearby
ocean currents, and vacationers in search of the sun. Geologic time, the most ancient of all
and the one usually most hidden, is readily visible within the communities in which water,
wind, and sand have worn away the land's edge to reveal the distant past in the underlying
strata.

Engagingly written and handsomely illustrated, this book is a fascinating guide for coastal
travelers and offers a useful framework for historic preservation and innovative town
planning.

"All [of these towns] have experienced the inevitable economic cycles, population shifts,
technological revolutions, political changes, human disasters, and natural calamities that
communities of this age have faced... In every one, intimacy is a part of everyday life --
continually fostered by the human scale of the town fabric, the pedestrian orientation, and
the proximity of people to institutions and commerce and to other people." -- from the
Preface (pp.xi-xii)

Warren Boeschenstein is a professor of architecture at the University of Virginia.

Gregory Conniff, Bonnie Loyd, Edward K.
Muller, and David Schuyler, Consulting Editors
George F. Thompson, Series Founder and
Director

September 1999, 320 pp., 152 halftones and 41
line drawings
0-8018-6144-6 (hardcover) $39.95

COLONIAL CRAFTSMEN
And the Beginnings of American Industry

Edwin Tunis

The vanished ways of colonial America's skilled craftsmen are vividly reconstructed in this
superb book by Edwin Tunis. With incomparable wit and learning, and in over 450 meticulous
drawings, the author describes the working methods and products, houses and shops, town and
country trades, and individual and group enterprises by which the early Americans forged the
economy of the New World.

In the tiny coastal settlements, which usually sprang up around a mill or near a tanyard, the
first craftsmen set up their trades. The blacksmith, cooper, joiner, weaver, cordwainer, and
housewright, working alone or with several assistants, invented their own tools and devised
their own methods. Soon they were making products that far surpassed their early models: the
American ax was so popular that English ironmongers often labeled their own axes
"American" to sell them more readily. In the town squares a colonist could have his bread
baked to order, bring in his wig to be curled, have his eyeglasses ground, his medicine
prescription filled, or buy snuff for his many pocket boxes. With the thriving trade in
"bespoke" or made-to-order work, fine American styles evolved; many of these are priceless
heirlooms now--the silverware of Paul Revere and John Coney, redware and Queensware
pottery, Poyntell hand-blocked wallpaper, the Kentucky rifle, Conestoga wagon, and the iron
grillework still seen in some parts of the South. The author discusses in detail many of the
trades which have since developed into important industries, like papermaking, glassmaking,
shipbuilding, printing, and metalworking, often reconstructing from his own careful research
the complex equipment used in these enterprises.

The ingenious, liberty-loving artisans left few written records of their work, and only Mr.
Tunis, with his painstaking attention to authentic detail and his vast knowledge, could present
such a complete treasury of the way things were done before machines obliterated this phase
of early American life.

"This is no how-to-do-it book; it is intended to be read for the interest that old ways may
have... The ways to do things are often lost. A small example: a master carpenter showed the
author how to form a neat bead on the edge of a board, using as a cutter only the head of a
common wood screw set in a block. Some apprentice of his may remember that and pass it on,
but it isn't likely to be recorded elsewhere than here."--from the Preface

Edwin Tunis was a well-known artist, illustrator, and muralist. His work has appeared at the Baltimore Museum of
Art, Society of American Etchers, National Academy of Design, and Victoria and Albert Museum. Colonial Living
won the 1958 Thomas Alva Edison Foundation Children's Book Award. His other books include Colonial Living
and Weapons, are also available in paperback from Johns Hopkins.

July 1999 paperback, 160 pp.
0-8018-6228-0 (paperback) $18.95

COLONIAL LIVING

Edwin Tunis

Colonial Living is EdwinTunis's a vigorous re-creation of 17th- and 18th-century
America--of the everyday living of those sturdy men and women who carved a way of life out
of the wilderness. In lively text and accurate drawings we see the dugouts and wigwams of
New England's first settlers and the houses they learned to build against the cruel winters; the
snug Dutch and Flemish farmhouses of Nieuw Amsterdam; the homes of the early planters in
the South which would one day be kitchens for the houses they dreamed of building when
tobacco had made them rich.

Long research and love for his subject gave Tunis an intimate knowledge of the details of daily
living in colonial times, from the period of tiny coastal settlements to the flourishing,
interdependent colonies which fought a major war for independence. He shares all with his
reader--the building of houses, with their trunnels, girts, and hand-hewn beams, the spinning of
yarn and its weaving and dyeing, the making of candles and soap, and the intricate business of
cooking on the open hearth with lug poles, cranes, bake kettles, and spits. He describes the
early crops, and pictures the implements and animals used to produce them; in detailed pictures
we see again the tools and products of the craftsmen--the blacksmith, the cooper, the miller, the
joiner, and the silversmith.

Edwin Tunis has brought the significant past to life with consummate skill. Rich in enjoyment,
rich in information, with more than 200 drawings, his book is a warm, lively, and authentic
panorama of a lost way of life.

"A book that anyone would pick up and pursue for enjoyment, this is also a volume that no
American school should be without."--Wisconsin Library Journal

Edwin Tunis was a well-known artist, illustrator, and muralist. His work has appeared at the Baltimore Museum of
Art, Society of American Etchers, National Academy of Design, and Victoria and Albert Museum. Colonial Living
won the 1958 Thomas Alva Edison Foundation Children's Book Award. His other books include Colonial
Craftsmen and Weapons, are also available in paperback from Johns Hopkins.

July 1999 paperback, 160 pp., 143 pages w/ art
0-8018-6227-2 (paperback) $18.95

September 29, 2000