Joseph A. Conforti

Regional Perspectives on Early America

Description

In the first general history of colonial New England to be published in over twenty-five years, Joseph A. Conforti synthesizes current and classic scholarship to explore how Puritan saints and "strangers" to Puritanism participated in the making of colonial New England.

Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop's famous description of New England as a "city upon a hill" has tended to reduce the region's history to an exclusively Pilgrim-Puritan drama, a world of narrow-minded founders, the First Thanksgiving, steepled churches, and the Salem witchcraft trials.

In a concise volume aimed at general readers and college students as well as historians, Conforti shows that New England was neither as Puritan nor as insular as most familiar stories imply. As the region evolved into British America's preeminent maritime region, the Atlantic Ocean served as a highway of commercial and cultural encounter, connecting white English settlers to different races and religious communities of the transatlantic world.

The Puritan elect—but also Natives, African slaves, and non-Puritan white settlers—became active participants in the creation of colonial New England. Conforti discusses how these subcommunities of white, red, and black strangers to Protestant piety retained their own cultures, coexisted, and even thrived within and beyond the domains of Puritan settlement, creating tensions and pressure points in the later development of early America.

Reviews

"This insightful, finely nuanced interpretation provides readers with a fresh, up-to-date narrative of New England history."--Richard Brown, University of Connecticut Humanities Institute

Author Information

Joseph A. Conforti is a professor of American and New England studies at the University of Southern Maine.
$55.00 hardcover
0-8018-8253-2
December 2005 248 pp. 7 halftones, 4 line drawings
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Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America

Jennifer J. Baker

Description

Securing the Commonwealth examines how eighteenth-century American writers understood the highly speculative financial times in which they lived. Spanning a century of cultural and literary life, this study shows how the era's literature commonly depicted an American ethos of risk taking and borrowing as the peculiar product of New World daring and the exigencies of revolution and nation building.

Some of the century's most important writers, including Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, and Judith Sargent Murray, believed that economic and social commonwealth--and one's commitment to that commonwealth--might be grounded in indebtedness and financial insecurity. These writers believed a cash-poor colony or nation could not only advance itself through borrowing but also gain reputability each time it successfully paid off a loan. Equally important, they believed that debt could promote communality: precarious public credit structures could exact popular commitment; intricate financial networks could bind individuals to others and to their government; and indebtedness itself could evoke sympathy for the suffering of others.

Close readings of their literary works reveal how these writers imagined how public life might be shaped by economic experience, and how they understood the public life of literature itself. Insecure times strengthened their conviction that writing could be publicly serviceable, persuading readers to invest in their government, in their fellow Americans, and in the idea of America itself.

Reviews

"Baker makes a consistently intriguing case for the centrality of financial themes to the varied literary landscape of eighteenth-century America--drawing poems, autobiography, essays, drama, and prose fiction into a broad, cultural conversation that focuses on the risks and the necessity for 'credit' in both the economic and the imaginative construction of the United States. No other book that I can think of presents eighteenth-century American writing in this stimulating and promising context."--Douglas Anderson, University of Georgia

Author Information

Jennifer J. Baker is an assistant professor of English at Yale University.

Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge

Michael McKeon

Description

Taking English culture as its representative sample, The Secret History of Domesticity asks how the modern notion of the public-private relation emerged in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Treating that relation as a crucial instance of the modern division of knowledge, Michael McKeon narrates its pre-history along with that of its essential component, domesticity.

This narrative draws upon the entire spectrum of English people's experience. At the most "public" extreme are political developments like the formation of civil society over against the state, the rise of contractual thinking, and the devolution of absolutism from monarch to individual subject. The middle range of experience takes in the influence of Protestant and scientific thought, the printed publication of the private, the conceptualization of virtual publics--society, public opinion, the market--and the capitalization of production, the decline of the domestic economy, and the increase in the sexual division of labor. The most "private" pole of experience involves the privatization of marriage, the family, and the household, and the complex entanglement of femininity, interiority, subjectivity, and sexuality.

McKeon accounts for how the relationship between public and private experience first became intelligible as a variable interaction of distinct modes of being--not a static dichotomy, but a tool to think with. Richly illustrated with nearly 100 images, including paintings, engravings, woodcuts, and a representative selection of architectural floor plans for domestic interiors, this volume reads graphic forms to emphasize how susceptible the public-private relation was to concrete and spatial representation. McKeon is similarly attentive to how literary forms evoked a tangible sense of public-private relations--among them figurative imagery, allegorical narration, parody, the author-character-reader dialectic, aesthetic distance, and free indirect discourse. He also finds a structural analogue for the emergence of the modern public-private relation in the conjunction of what contemporaries called the "secret history" and the domestic novel.

A capacious and synthetic historical investigation, The Secret History of Domesticity exemplifies how the methods of literary interpretation and historical analysis can inform and enrich one another.

Author Information

Michael McKeon is Board of Governors Professor of Literature at Rutgers University, the author of Politics and Poetry in Restoration England , The Origins of the English Novel , and the editor of Theory of the Novel , the latter two available from the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Matthew Mulcahy

Description

Hurricanes created unique challenges for the colonists in the British Greater Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These storms were entirely new to European settlers and quickly became the most feared part of their physical environment, destroying staple crops and provisions, leveling plantations and towns, disrupting shipping and trade, and resulting in major economic losses for planters and widespread privation for slaves.

In this study, Matthew Mulcahy examines how colonists made sense of hurricanes, how they recovered from them, and the role of the storms in shaping the development of the region's colonial settlements. Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783 provides a useful new perspective on several topics including colonial science, the plantation economy, slavery, and public and private charity. By integrating the West Indies into the larger story of British Atlantic colonization, Mulcahy's work contributes to early American history, Atlantic history, environmental history, and the growing field of disaster studies.

Reviews

"An excellent book on the role and impact of Caribbean hurricanes on the greater British Caribbean. A fine piece of scholarship, thoroughly researched, clearly and elegantly written. A major contribution to the topic."--Stuart B. Schwartz, Yale University

Author Information

Matthew Mulcahy teaches history at Loyola College in Maryland.

Early America: History, Context, Culture

Edited by Robert Olwell and Alan Tully

Anglo-America in the Transatlantic World

Description

Never truly a "new world" entirely detached from the home countries of its immigrants, colonial America, over the generations, became a model of transatlantic culture. Colonial society was shaped by the conflict between colonists' need to adapt to the American environment and their desire to perpetuate old world traditions or to imitate the charismatic model of the British establishment. In the course of colonial history, these contrasting impulses produced a host of distinctive cultures and identities.

In this impressive new collection, prominent scholars of early American history explore this complex dynamic of accommodation and replication to demonstrate how early American societies developed from the intersection of American and Atlantic influences. The volume, edited by Robert Olwell and Alan Tully, offers fresh perspectives on colonial history and on early American attitudes toward slavery and ethnicity, native Americans, and the environment, as well as colonial social, economic, and political development. It reveals the myriad ways in which American colonists were the inhabitants and subjects of a wider Atlantic world.

Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America , one of a three-volume series under the editorship of Jack P. Greene, aims to give students of Atlantic history a "state of the field" survey by pursuing interesting lines of research and raising new questions. The entire series, "Anglo-America in the Transatlantic World," engages the major organizing themes of the subject through a collection of high-level, debate-inspiring essays, inviting readers to think anew about the complex ways in which the Atlantic experience shaped both American societies and the Atlantic world itself.

Author Information

Robert Olwell and Alan Tully teach early American history at the University of Texas, Austin.

The American Revolution in the Atlantic World

Edited by Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf

Anglo-America in the Transatlantic World

Description
How did events and ideas from elsewhere in the British empire influence development in the thirteen American colonies? What was the effect of the American Revolution on the wider Atlantic world? In Empire and Nation, leading historians reconsider the American Revolution as a transnational event, with many sources and momentous implications for Ireland, Africa, the West Indies, Canada, and Britain itself.

The opening section situates the origins of the American Revolution in the commercial, ethnic, and political ferment that characterized Britain's Atlantic empire at the close of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). The empire then experienced extraordinary changes, ranging from the first stirrings of nationalism in Ireland to the dramatic expansion of British rule in Canada, Africa, and India. The second part focuses on the rebellion of the thirteen colonies--touching on slavery and ethnicity, the changing nature of religious faith, and ideas about civil society and political organization. Finally, contributors examine the changes wrought by the American Revolution both within Britain's remaining imperial possessions and among the other states in the emerging "concert of Europe."

The essays in Empire and Nation challenge facile assumptions about the "exceptional" character of the republic's founding moment, even as they invite readers to think anew about the complex ways in which the Revolution reshaped both American society and the Atlantic world.

Author Information
Eliga H. Gould is an associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Peter S. Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia.

Neil Kamil

Early America: History, Context, Culture Description French Huguenots made enormous contributions to the life and culture of colonial New York during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Huguenot craftsmen were the city's most successful artisans, turning out unrivaled works of furniture which were distinguished by unique designs and arcane details. More than just decorative flourishes, however, the visual language employed by Huguenot artisans reflected a distinct belief system shaped during the religious wars of sixteenth-century France.

In Fortress of the Soul , historian Neil Kamil traces the Huguenots' journey to New York from the Aunis-Saintonge region of southwestern France. There, in the sixteenth century, artisans had created a subterranean culture of clandestine workshops and meeting places inspired by the teachings of Bernard Palissy, a potter, alchemist, and philosopher who rejected the communal, militaristic ideology of the Huguenot majority which was centered in the walled city of La Rochelle. Palissy and his followers instead embraced a more fluid, portable, and discrete religious identity that encouraged members to practice their beliefs in secret while living safely--even prospering--as artisans in hostile communities. And when these artisans first fled France for England and Holland, then left Europe for America, they carried with them both their skills and their doctrine of artisanal security.

Drawing on significant archival research and fresh interpretations of Huguenot material culture, Kamil offers an exhaustive and sophisticated study of the complex worldview of the Huguenot community. From the function of sacred violence and alchemy in the visual language of Huguenot artisans, to the impact among Protestants everywhere of the destruction of La Rochelle in 1628, to the ways in which New York's Huguenots interacted with each other and with other communities of religious dissenters and refugees, Fortress of the Soul brilliantly places American colonial history and material life firmly within the larger context of the early modern Atlantic world.

Reviews "An absolutely brilliant, seminal, forefront work. Neil Kamil combines the deepest kind of erudition with a one-in-a-thousand level of sheer intellectual creativity. Most striking is the disciplinary range of this work: material culture analysis, demography, genealogy, geography, textual exegesis, ethnography, as well as more conventional forms of political, military, religious, and economic history. All are here in various contexts and proportions. Kamil's overall touch is so sure and deft that the reader is barely aware of these numerous methodological crossings. His prose is remarkably effective as well. Even where the ideas are complex and difficult, the words are simple, direct, and forceful."--John P. Demos, Samuel Knight Professor of American History, Yale University

Neil Kamil is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Sold by the Carroll family in 1838, the house and grounds eventually became the Homewood campus of the Johns Hopkins University. In 1971, Homewood received National Historic Landmark status, and five years later--through the generosity of Robert G. Merrick, an alumnus and university patron who developed a love for Homewood as a student in the 1920s--Johns Hopkins University began a major restoration effort. Today, open to the public as a museum, the house reflects the height of early-nineteenth-century style and the tastes of the Carroll family.

In a lavishly illustrated yet scholarly study of this exquisite American residence, Catherine Rogers Arthur and Cindy Kelly explore Homewood's history, detailing its construction, reliving the Carroll family's experiences here, and recounting the expert restoration that preserves this home for generations to come. The book includes more than one hundred full-color photographs of the house's graceful exterior, its elegant rooms and furnishings, and the many architectural details that have made Homewood so beloved. 

Author Information
Catherine Rogers Arthur is the curator of the Homewood House Museum and holds an M.A. in Early American Culture from the University of Delaware Winterthur Program. Cindy Kelly, former director of the Historic Houses of the Johns Hopkins University, now lives in New York; she holds an M.A. in Art History from Johns Hopkins University.

"In this important new book, Cathy Matson breaks the mold by examining the entire New York merchant community across the entire colonial period. This inclusiveness yields good results; it provides a better understanding of New York's success as an American port city . . . Matson constructs her story out of careful research in the extensive correspondence and account books left by New York merchants and tells her story in rich and compelling detail, along the way constructing a new standard and a new paradigm for scholarship on colonial merchants."--Russell Menard, Journal of American History

Cathy Matson is an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware. She is coauthor of A Union of Interests: Politics and Economy in the Revolutionary Era.

$21.95 paperback
0-8018-7247-2 (1 ctn qty)
2003 472 pp. 10 illus.

Lawrence A. Peskin

Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia

Cathy Matson, Series Editor

John Wood Sweet

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

"Bodies Politic is brilliant and eloquent -- a refreshing original analysis of how the legacy of colonialism shaped the emergence of a democratic nation." -- Christine Leigh Heyrman, University of Delaware and author of Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt

"In subtle and ingenious ways, Bodies Politic recovers the textures of real people doing real things -- of African Americans, Native Americans, and Euro-Americans interacting to create the racial formation of the early nineteenth-century North." -- Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania
"Ambitious, detailed, and provocative, this is the best multicultural history of early New England I have read." -- Joseph A. Conforti, University of Southern Maine

A century after the Pilgrims' landing, the ongoing interactions of conquered Indians, English settlers, and enslaved Africans in southern New England had produced a closely interwoven, though radically divided, colonial society. In Bodies Politic, John Wood Sweet argues that the coming together of these diverse peoples profoundly shaped the character of colonial New England, the meanings of the Revolution in the North and the making of American democracy.

Of Plimmoth Plantation and the Printed Word
Douglas Anderson

"Anderson's skilled and subtle take on a classic text and its contexts reconstructs our image of Bradford's mental world. Catching the ebb tide of postmodernism, this keen work furnishes a model for future literary-historical scholarship." -- Michael McGiffert, Editor Emeritus, William and Mary Quarterly
Widely regarded as the most important narrative of seventeenth-century New England, William Bradford's Of Plimmoth Plantation is one of the founding documents of American literature and history. In William Bradford's Books this portrait of the religious dissenters who emigrated from the Netherlands to New England in 1620 receives perhaps its sharpest textual analysis to date -- and the first since that of Samuel Eliot Morison two generations ago. Far from the gloomy elegy that many readers find, Bradford's history, argues Douglas Anderson, demonstrates remarkable ambition and subtle grace, as it contemplates the adaptive success of a small community of religious exiles. Anderson offers fresh literary and historical accounts of Bradford's accomplishment, exploring the context and the form in which the author intended his book to be read.
Douglas Anderson is the Sterling Goodman Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature and The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin, the latter available from Johns Hopkins.

$45.00 | hardcover | 0-8018-7074-7
January 2003, 304 pp., 12 line drawings

Garrett Ward Sheldon

Among the founders, James Madison wielded the greatest influence in drafting the Constitution of 1789. In this book, Garrett Ward Sheldon offers a concise synthesis of Madison's political philosophy in the context of the social and political history of his day.

Tracing the history of Madison's thought to his early education in Protestant theology, Sheldon argues that it was a fear of the potential "tyranny of the majority" over individual rights, along with a firmly Calvinist suspicion of the motives of sinful men, that led him to support a constitution creating a strong central government with power over state laws. In this way, Madison aimed to protect individual liberties and provide checks to "spiteful" human interests and selfish parochial prejudices. Among the topics Sheldon covers are Madison's Princeton education, his contributions to the Federalist Papers, his arguments in defense of states' rights on behalf of Virginia, his views on federal power during his terms as secretary of state and president, and, in his later years, his defense of the Union against those Southerners who advocated nullification.
Garrett Ward Sheldon is the John Morton Beaty Professor of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Virginia's College at Wise. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, also available from Johns Hopkins.

Edited by Gail Lee Dubrow and Jennifer B. Goodman

Historic sites are visited by millions of people every year, but most of these places perpetuate the public notion that men have been the primary agents of historical change. This book reveals that historic sites and buildings have much to tell us about women's history. It documents women's contributions to the historic preservation movement at places such as Mount Vernon and explores women's history at several existing landmarks such as historic homes, as wells as in a wider array of cultural landscapes ranging from nurses' residences in Montreal to prostitutes' quarters in Los Angeles. The book includes essays on six exemplary projects that have advanced the integration of women's history into historic preservation and closes with three perspectives on preservation policy and practice.
National in scope but applicable in any locality, Restoring Women's History through Historic Preservation combines the most important recently published information with the best new research and covers many national, state, and local initiatives of the past decade. It collects in one volume the seminal work of twenty academic historians, preservationists, and professionals at parks and monuments throughout the country who examine practical ways to represent women's history through historic preservation programs.
Over the past several decades, work in the areas of women's history and historic preservation has done much to change not only how we regard history but also how we might broaden the very notion of what we consider historical. This volume reflects a growing commitment to historic preservation and shows how practitioners in both fields can benefit from an exchange of insights and create more effective public history.

Gail Lee Dubrow is professor of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and planning and director of the Preservation Planning and Design Program at the University of Washington. Jennifer Goodman is executive director of the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance.

Center Books on Contemporary Landscape Design
Frederick R. Steiner, Consulting Editor George F. Thompson, Series Founder and Director

January 2003, 464 pp., 107 halftones and 10 line drawings

Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America
John E. Crowley

How did our modern ideas of physical well-being originate? As John Crowley demonstrates in The Invention of Comfort, changes in sensible technology owed a great deal to fashion-conscious elites discovering discomfort in surroundings they earlier had felt to be satisfactory.
Written in an engaging style that will appeal to historians and material culture specialists as well as to general readers, this pathbreaking work brings together such disparate topics of analysis as climate, fire, food, clothing, the senses, and anxiety -- especially about the night.

John E. Crowley is the George Munro Professor of History at Dalhousie University. He is currently studying the creation of a global landscape in British visual culture c. 1750--1820.