Nature and History in the Potomac Country
From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson
James D. Rice
Description
James D. Rice’s unique study of the Potomac River basin begins with a mystery. Why, when the whole of the region offered fertile soil and excellent fishing and hunting, was nearly three-quarters of the land uninhabited on the eve of colonization? Rice wonders how the existence of this no man’s land affected nearby Native American and, later, colonial settlements. Did it function as a commons, as a place where all were free to hunt and fish? Or was it perceived as a strange and hostile wilderness? Rice discovers environmental factors at the center of the story. Making use of extensive archaeological and anthropological research, as well as the vast scholarship on farming practices in the colonial period, he traces the region’s history from its earliest known habitation. With exceptionally vivid prose, Rice makes clear the implications of unbridled economic development for the forests, streams, and wetlands of the Potomac River basin. How, Rice asks, did humankind exploit and alter the landscape and the quality of the river’s waters? Equal parts environmental, Native American, and colonial history, Nature and History in the Potomac Country is a useful and innovative study of the Potomac River, its valley, and its people.
Author Information
James D. Rice is a professor of history at SUNY Plattsburgh.
978-0-8018-9032-1 (1 ctn qty)
December 2008 384 pp. 6 halftones, 2 line drawings
Mathematical Works Printed in the Americas, 1554–1700
Bruce Stanley Burdick
Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Mathematics
Description
This annotated bibliography of the earliest mathematical works to be printed in the New World brings to light a recently rediscovered work from 1697 and challenges long-held assumptions about the earliest examples of American mathematical endeavor. Bruce Stanley Burdick brings together the mathematical writings from three centers of activity: Mexico, Lima, and the English colonies of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York. Arranged chronologically, the entries include author, printer, place of publication, transcription of the title page, and location of original copies. Languages used in the books range from English, Spanish, and Latin to one example of an indigenous tongue. Burdick’s exhaustive research has unearthed numerous examples of books not previously cataloged as mathematical. While it was thought that no mathematical writings in English were printed in the Americas before 1703, Burdick gives scholars one of their first chances to discover Jacob Taylor’s 1697 Tenebrae, a treatise on solving triangles and other figures using basic trigonometry. He also discusses Alonso de la Vera Cruz's 1554 logic text, the Recognitio Summularum; a book on astrology by Enrico Martínez; books on the nature of comets by Carlos De Sigüenza y Góngora and Eusebio Francisco Kino; and a 1676 almanac by Feliciana Ruiz, the first woman to produce a mathematical work in the Americas. American readers of all nations and origins will note with interest that many of these works, including all of the earliest ones, are from Mexico, not from what is now the United States. But what their diverse authors had in common was that they were clever and well-trained colonial people who used European mathematics to solve American problems.
Author Information
Bruce Stanley Burdick is a professor of mathematics at Roger Williams University.
978-0-8018-8823-6 (1 ctn qty)
December 2008 264 pp. 29 halftones, 2 line drawings
Scraping By
Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore
Seth Rockman
Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia
Description
Enslaved mariners, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free black domestic servants, and native-born street sweepers. All navigated the low-end labor market in post-revolutionary Baltimore. Seth Rockman considers this diverse workforce, exploring how race, sex, nativity, and legal status determined the economic opportunities and vulnerabilities of working families in the early republic. In the era of Frederick Douglass, Baltimore's distinctive economy featured many slaves who earned wages and white workers who performed backbreaking labor. By focusing his study on this boomtown, Rockman reassesses the roles of race and region and rewrites the history of class and capitalism in the United States during this time. Rockman describes the material experiences of low-wage workers—how they found work, translated labor into food, fuel, and rent, and navigated underground economies and social welfare systems. He also explores what happened if they failed to find work or lost their jobs. Rockman argues that the American working class emerged from the everyday struggles of these low-wage workers. Their labor was indispensable to the early republic’s market revolution, and it was central to the transformation of the United States into the wealthiest society in the Western world. Rockman’s research includes construction site payrolls, employment advertisements, almshouse records, court petitions, and the nation’s first “living wage” campaign. These rich accounts of day laborers and domestic servants illuminate the history of early republic capitalism and its consequences for working families.
Reviews
"A creative treatment of an intriguing and important topic . . . The effort to make slavery history a part of labor history, and vice versa, is commendable, effective, and overdue."—Peter H. Wood, Duke University
Author Information
Seth Rockman is an assistant professor of history at Brown University and author of Welfare Reform in the Early Republic.
$50.00 hardcover
978-0-8018-9006-2 (1 ctn qty)
December 2008 432 pp. 8 halftones, 4 line drawings
978-0-8018-9007-9
December 2008 432 pp. 8 halftones, 4 line drawings
France and the American Tropics to 1700
Tropics of Discontent?
Philip P. Boucher
Description
Traditionally, the story of the Greater Caribbean has been dominated by the narrative of Iberian hegemony, British colonization, the plantation regime, and the Haitian Revolution of the eighteenth century. Relatively little is known about the society and culture of this region—and particularly France’s role in them—in the two centuries prior to the rise of the plantation complex of the eighteenth century. Here, historian Philip P. Boucher offers the first comprehensive account of colonization and French society in the Caribbean. Boucher’s analysis contrasts the structure and character of the French colonies with that of other colonial empires. Describing the geography, topography, climate, and flora and fauna of the region, Boucher recreates the tropical environment in which colonists and indigenous peoples interacted. He then examines the lives and activities of the region’s inhabitants—the indigenous Island Caribs, landowning settlers, indentured servants, African slaves, and people of mixed blood, the gens de couleur. He argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not merely a prelude to the classic plantation regime model. Rather, they were an era presenting a variety of possible outcomes. This original narrative demonstrates that the transition to sugar and the plantation complex was more gradual in the French properties than generally depicted—and that it was not inevitable.
Reviews
“Boucher presents a judicious mix of political narrative history and an economic, social, and cultural analysis of the Caribbean social and racial groups—Europeans, Caribs (the original inhabitants), and the African slaves. The book is an important contribution to the history of the Caribbean and to the growing field of comparative Atlantic Empires.”—Robert Forster, The Johns Hopkins University
Author Information
Philip P. Boucher is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and author of Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492–1763, also published by Johns Hopkins.
$55.00 hardcover
978-0-8018-8725-3 (24 ctn qty)
2008 392 pp. 25 line drawings
$24.95 paperback
978-0-8018-8726-0 (32 ctn qty)
2007 392 pp. 25 line drawings
The Upper Country
French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes
Claiborne A. Skinner
Regional Perspectives on Early America
Description
The Upper Country melds myth and conventional history to provide a memorable tale of French designs in the middle of what became the United States. Putting the reader on the battlefields, at the trading posts, and on the rivers with voyageurs and their allies from the Indian nations, Claiborne Skinner reveals the saintly missionaries and jolly fur traders of popular myth as agents of a hard-nosed, often ruthless, imperial endeavor. Skinner’s engaging narrative takes the reader through daily life at posts like Forts Saint Louis and Michilimakinac, illuminates the complexities of interracial marriage with the courtship of Michel Aco at Peoria, and explains how France’s New World adventurism played a role in the outbreak of the Seven Years War and the beginning of the modern era. In this story, many of the traditional heroes and villains of American history take on surprising roles. The last Stuart kings of England seem shrewd and even human; George Washington makes his debut appearance on the stage of history by assassinating a French officer and plunging Europe into the first truly global war. From unthinkable hardship to dreams of fur trade profits, this fascinating exploration sheds new light on France and its imperial venture into the Great Lakes.
Reviews
“A great analysis of the French colonial model and an historiographic leap forward . . . The best and most reliable synthesis I have read on the subject yet.”—Denys Delâge, Université Laval
“A very useful synthesis . . . From this story of an embattled Pax Gallica emerge larger-than-life characters like Nicolas Perrot, Duluth, Tonti ‘Iron Hand,’ Cadillac, Louvigny, the Huron Kondiaronk, and the Iroquois Black Kettle—important men too often neglected in American historiography.”—Gilles Havard, author of The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century
Author Information
Claiborne A. Skinner is an instructor of history and social science at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.
978-0-8018-8837-3 (1 ctn qty)
April 2008 208 pp. 3 halftones, 8 maps
$25.00 paperback
978-0-8018-8838-0 (1 ctn qty)
April 2008 208 pp. 3 halftones, 8 maps
Buying into the World of Goods
Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia
Ann Smart Martin
Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia
Description
How did people living on the early American frontier discover and then become a part of the market economy? How do their purchases and their choices revise our understanding of the market revolution and the emerging consumer ethos? Ann Smart Martin provides answers to these questions by examining the texture of trade on the edge of the upper Shenandoah Valley between 1760 and 1810. Reconstructing the world of one country merchant, John Hook, Martin reveals how the acquisition of consumer goods created and validated a set of ideas about taste, fashion, and lifestyle in a particular place at a particular time. Her analysis of Hook’s account ledger illuminates the everyday wants, transactions, and tensions recorded within and brings some of Hook’s customers to life: a planter looking for just the right clock, a farmer in search of nails, a young woman and her friends out shopping on their own, and a slave woman choosing a looking glass. This innovative approach melds fascinating narratives with sophisticated analysis of material culture to distill large abstract social and economic systems into intimate triangulations among merchants, customers, and objects. Martin finds that objects not only reflect culture, they are the means to create it.
Author Information
Ann Smart Martin is Chipstone Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
978-0-8018-8727-7
February 2008 288 pp. 12 color photos, 28 b&w photos, 10 b&w illustrations
Tribe, Race, History
Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880
Daniel R. Mandell
The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science
Description
Tribe, Race, History examines American Indian communities in southern New England between the Revolution and Reconstruction, when Indians lived in the region’s socioeconomic margins, moved between semiautonomous communities and towns, and intermarried extensively with blacks and whites. Drawing from a wealth of primary documentation, Daniel R. Mandell centers his study on ethnic boundaries, particularly how those boundaries were constructed, perceived, and crossed. He analyzes connections and distinctions between Indians and their non-Indian neighbors with regard to labor, landholding, government, and religion; examines how emerging romantic depictions of Indians (living and dead) helped shape a unique New England identity; and looks closely at the causes and results of tribal termination in the region after the Civil War. Shedding new light on regional developments in class, race, and culture, this groundbreaking study is the first to consider all Native Americans throughout southern New England.
Reviews
“A detailed, richly textured social history of Native people. Mandell accomplishes more than reconstructing and narrating the social history of tribal groups over the course of a century. He examines how Native social relations and collective consciousness revolved around complicated and adaptable racial and ethnic identities and consistently situates his analysis of Native life in the larger contexts of New England and American social and cultural history.”—Joseph A. Conforti, author of Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America
Author Information
Daniel R. Mandell is an associate professor of history at Truman State University and the author of Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts.
978-0-8018-8694-2
2007 344 pp. 11 halftones, 2 line drawings
Shipwrecks, Sea Raiders, and Maritime Disasters along the Delmarva Coast, 1632–2004
Donald G. Shomette
Description
Nor’easters, blizzards, and hurricanes. Spanish galleons, German U-boats, and presidential yachts. Pirates and privateers. The ephemeral and deadly nature of islands, dunes, inlets, and shoals. The history of the Delmarva Peninsula’s Atlantic coast is rich with tales of fantasy and adventure, heroism and tragedy, greed and charity. Claiming more than 2,300 vessels since 1632, it rivals North Carolina’s Outer Banks for the infamous title “The Graveyard of the Atlantic.” Maritime historian Donald G. Shomette brings these stories to life. Featuring the accounts of twenty-five ill-starred vessels—some notorious and some forgotten until now—this anthology provides a fascinating history of a local maritime culture and charts how the catastrophic events along this shore significantly affected U.S. merchant shipping as a whole. Shomette weaves together history, folklore, and legend in accounts of the tragic loss of the 1750 Spanish treasure fleet, the British blockade of the Delaware in the American Revolution, the depredations of Confederate commerce raiders during the Civil War, the Billy Mitchell affair, the Hurricane of 1933, and the Nazi U-boat offensive of World War II. His appendix provides a complete catalog of all 2,300 recorded wrecks, including coordinates and location descriptions where available. A vivid montage of seafaring adventures and pivotal events in American history, this volume makes an essential contribution to the library of the history buff, wreck diver, and local adventurer.
Author Information
Donald G. Shomette is a marine archeologist and cultural resource manager in Dunkirk, Maryland. He is the author of many books, including Maritime Alexandria: The Rise and Fall of an American Entrepôt; Lost Towns of Tidewater Maryland; Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay and Other Tales of the Lost Chesapeake; and Pirates on the Chesapeake: Being a True History of Pirates, Picaroons, and Raiders on Chesapeake Bay, 1610–1807.
978-0-8018-8670-6
2007 448 pp. 39 halftones, 3 line drawings
The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin
Lorraine Smith Pangle
The Political Philosophy of the American Founders
Description
The most famous man of his age, Benjamin Franklin was an individual of many talents and accomplishments. He invented the wood-burning stove and the lightning rod, he wrote Poor Richard’s Almanac and The Way to Wealth, and he traveled the world as a diplomat. But it was in politics that Franklin made his greatest impact. Franklin’s political writings are full of fascinating reflections on human nature, on the character of good leadership, and on why government is such a messy and problematic business. Drawing together threads in Franklin’s writings, Lorraine Smith Pangle illuminates his thoughts on citizenship, federalism, constitutional government, the role of civil associations, and religious freedom. Of the American Founders, Franklin had an unrivaled understanding of the individual human soul. At the heart of his political vision is a view of democratic citizenship, a rich understanding of the qualities of the heart and mind necessary to support liberty and sustain happiness. This concise introduction reflects Franklin’s valuable insight into political issues that continue to be relevant today.
Reviews
“An excellent piece of work, gracefully written, as befits a work on the printer and master-writer himself. Its insight into Benjamin Franklin’s thought is fresh and penetrating. Among the distinctive features of this work is its running comparison of Franklin with Socrates and with the high tradition of political philosophy. Pangle digs unusually deeply into Franklin’s writings and the history of his doings.”—Steven Forde, University of North Texas
Author Information
Lorraine Smith Pangle is an associate professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship and The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders.
$45.00 hardcover
978-0-8018-7931-9
2007 296 pp.
978-0-8018-8666-9
2007 296 pp.
The World Map, 1300–1492
The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation
Evelyn Edson
Published in cooperation with the Center for American Places, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Staunton, Virginia
Description
In the two centuries before Columbus, mapmaking was transformed. The World Map, 1300–1492 investigates this important, transitional period of mapmaking. Beginning with a 1436 atlas of ten maps produced by Venetian Andrea Bianco, Evelyn Edson uses maps of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to examine how the discoveries of missionaries and merchants affected the content and configuration of world maps. She finds that both the makers and users of maps struggled with changes brought about by technological innovation—the compass, quadrant, and astrolabe—rediscovery of classical mapmaking approaches, and increased travel. To reconcile the tensions between the conservative and progressive worldviews, mapmakers used a careful blend of the old and the new to depict a world that was changing—and growing—before their eyes. This engaging and informative study reveals how the ingenuity, creativity, and adaptability of these craftsmen helped pave the way for an age of discovery.
Author Information
$50.00 hardcover
978-0-8018-8589-1 (24 ctn qty)
2007 312 pp. 35 halftones, 3 line drawings
Republic of Intellect
The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature
Bryan Waterman
New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History
Description
In the 1790s, a single conversational circle—the Friendly Club—united New York City’s most ambitious young writers, and in Republic of Intellect, Bryan Waterman uses an innovative blend of literary criticism and historical narrative to re-create the club’s intellectual culture. The story of the Friendly Club reveals the mutually informing conditions of authorship, literary association, print culture, and production of knowledge in a specific time and place—the tumultuous, tenuous world of post-revolutionary New York City. More than any similar group in the early American republic, the Friendly Club occupied a crossroads—geographical, professional, and otherwise—of American literary and intellectual culture. Waterman argues that the relationships among club members’ novels, plays, poetry, diaries, legal writing, and medical essays lead to important first examples of a distinctively American literature and also illuminate the local, national, and transatlantic circuits of influence and information that club members called “the republic of intellect.” He addresses topics ranging from political conspiracy in the gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown to the opening of William Dunlap’s Park Theatre, from early American debates on gendered conversation to the publication of the first American medical journal. Voluntary association and print culture helped these young New Yorkers, Waterman concludes, to produce a broader and more diverse post-revolutionary public sphere than scholars have yet recognized.
Author Information
Bryan Waterman is an assistant professor of English at New York University.
$55.00 hardcover978-0-8018-8566-2
2007 344 pp. 8 halftones
Southern Sons
Becoming Men in the New Nation
Lorri Glover
Description
Between the generations of Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, the culture of white Southerners experienced significant changes, including the establishment of a normative male identity that exuded confidence, independence, and power. Southern Sons, the first work in masculinity studies to concentrate on the early South, explores how young men of the southern gentry came of age between the 1790s and the 1820s. Lorri Glover examines how standards for manhood came about, how young men experienced them in the early South, and how those values transformed many American sons into southern nationalists who ultimately would conspire to tear apart the republic they had been raised to lead. This was the first generation of boys raised to conceive of themselves as Americans, as well as the first cohort of self-defined southern men. They grew up believing that the fate of the American experiment in self-government depended on their ability to put away personal predispositions and perform prescribed roles. Because men faced demanding gender norms, boys had to pass exacting tests of manhood—in education, refinement, courting, careers, and slave mastery. Only then could they join the ranks of the elite and claim power in society. Revealing the complex interplay of nationalism and regionalism in the lives of southern men, Glover brings new insight to the question of what led the South toward sectionalism and civil war.
Reviews
“Southern Sons adds immeasurably to our understanding of gender relations in the antebellum South. Compellingly argued, lucidly written, and thoroughly researched, this work is a model of sensitive historical analysis. Especially valuable is her demonstration of the complexities in social relations between parents and sons, peers and kin, college authorities and their often immature students. She pursues the lives of these favored young slaveholders through their courtships, marriages, and arrival on the threshold of responsible adulthood. Throughout their development, Glover persuasively asserts, they sought to become ‘men of honor’ and refinement in the classic terms of their /time and culture. This study will be highly acclaimed by ordinary readers well as scholars of American history.”—Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South and The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War
Author Information
Lorri Glover is an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee and author of All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds among the Early South Carolina Gentry.
$50.00 hardcover978-0-8018-8498-6
2007 264 pp.
Lacrosse Legends of the First Americans
Thomas Vennum
Description
An ancient Native American sport, lacrosse was originally played to resolve conflicts, heal the sick, and develop strong, virile men. In Lacrosse Legends of the First Americans, Thomas Vennum draws on centuries of oral tradition to collect thirteen legends from five tribes—the Cherokee, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Seneca, Ojibwa, and Menominee. Reflecting the game’s origins and early history, these myths provide a glimpse into Native American life and the role of the “Creator’s Game” in tribal culture. From the Great Game in which the Birds defeated the Quadrupeds to high-stakes contests after which the losers literally lost their heads, these stories reveal the fascinating spiritual world of the first lacrosse players as well as the violent reality of the original sport. Lacrosse enthusiasts will learn about game equipment, ritual preparations, dress, and style of play, from stick handling to scoring. They will discover how the :coach”—a medicine man—conjured potions to prevent game injuries or make the opponent’s leg cramp as well as how early craftsmen identified the perfect tree—marked by a lightning strike—from which to carve a lacrosse stick. The game is no longer played by large numbers of men on mile-long fields, and plastic, titanium, and nylon have replaced hickory and ash, leather, and catgut. As lacrosse continues to evolve, this collection will help us remember and understand its rich and complex history.
Author Information
Thomas Vennum is senior ethnomusicologist emeritus at the Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. He is the author of American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War. He is retired and living in Tucson, Arizona, where he continues research among Indian tribes in Sonora, Mexico, specifically the Seri.
$35.00 hardcover
978-0-8018-8628-7
July 2007 184 pp. 11 halftones, 8 line illustrations
978-0-8018-8629-4
July 2007 184 pp. 11 halftones, 8 line illustrations
The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America
Wendy Gamber
Description
In nineteenth-century America, the bourgeois home epitomized family, morality, and virtue. But this era also witnessed massive urban growth and the acceptance of the market as the overarching model for economic relations. A rapidly changing environment bred the antithesis of “home”: the urban boardinghouse. In this groundbreaking study, Wendy Gamber explores the experiences of the numerous people—old and young, married and single, rich and poor—who made boardinghouses their homes. Gamber contends that the very existence of the boardinghouse helped create the domestic ideal of the single family home. Where the home was private, the boardinghouse theoretically was public. If homes nurtured virtue, boardinghouses supposedly bred vice. Focusing on the larger cultural meanings and the commonplace realities of women’s work, she examines how the houses were run, the landladies who operated them, and the day-to-day considerations of food, cleanliness, and petty crime. From ravenous bedbugs to penny-pinching landladies, from disreputable housemates to “boarder’s beef,” Gamber illuminates the annoyances—and the satisfactions—of nineteenth-century boarding life.
Reviews
“A superb study. Gamber has identified a major lacuna in our historical understanding of nineteenth-century domesticity, women’s work, family, and urban history, and filled it with rich detail and a nuanced treatment of class and ethnic differences.”—Angel Kwolek-Folland, University of Florida
“Gamber skillfully integrates analysis of the changing realities and perceptions of boardinghouse life. She is sensitive to the contradictions between domestic ideals and actualities and teases out the broader significance of these oppositions. Moreover, her narrative strategy provides nice continuity across the book’s chapters, permitting the analysis to explore broad issues while being grounded in stories about concrete individuals.”—Thomas Dublin, Binghamton University
“Gamber offers a very valuable account of the evolution of business, society, and culture in the U. S. by examining the development of boardinghouses in the full contexts of nineteenth-century American history. Thoroughly researched in a wide range of primary and secondary sources, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America tells an important story about American life.”—Mansel Blackford, Ohio State University
“Centers on the important recognition that the ‘golden age of the bourgeois home’ was also ‘the age of the boardinghouse,’ when an estimated one-third to one-half of all urban residents either took in boarders or were themselves boarders. Boardinghouses, Wendy Gamber demonstrates, were unsavory counterparts to the idealized home; they offered a constant reminder that the much-vaunted distance between the home-as-haven and the venal, worldly marketplace was a fiction. The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America uncovers in rich detail the social experiences of boardinghouse life by various sorts of residents—young and old, female and male, middle-class and working-class—and various sorts of boardinghouse keepers, ranging from shrewdly ambitious businesswomen to impoverished widows. This valuable and engaging study takes an understudied phenomenon of US urban history and draws from it a rich study of the American understanding of ‘home,’ and the ways that market and labor forces have made it vulnerable from its first emergence as the summum bonum of middle-class life.”—Karen Halttunen, University of Southern California
Author Information
Wendy Gamber is an associate professor of history at Indiana University.
$45.00 hardcover978-0-8018-8571-6
2007 232 pp. 10 halftones
The Brave New World
A History of Early America
Second Edition
Peter Charles Hoffer
Description
The Brave New World covers the span of early American history, from 30,000 years before Europeans ever landed on North American shores to creation of the new nation. With its exploration of the places and peoples of early America, this comprehensive, lively narrative brings together the most recent scholarship on the colonial and revolutionary eras, Native Americans, slavery, politics, war, and the daily lives of ordinary people. The revised, enlarged edition includes a new chapter carrying the story through the American Revolution, the War for Independence, and the creation of the Confederation. Additional material on the frontier, the Southwest and the Caribbean, the slave trade, religion, science and technology, and ecology broadens the text, and maps drawn especially for this edition will enable readers to follow the story more closely. The bibliographical essay, one of the most admired features of the first edition, has been expanded and brought up to date. Peter Charles Hoffer combines the Atlantic Rim scholarship with a Continental perspective, illuminating early America from all angles—from its first settlers to the Spanish Century, from African slavery to the Salem witchcraft cases, from prayer and drinking practices to the development of complex economies, from the colonies’ fight for freedom to an infant nation’s struggle for political and economic legitimacy. Wide-ranging in scope, inclusive in content, the revised edition of The Brave New World continues to provide professors, students, and historians with an engaging and accessible history of early North America.
Author Information
Peter Charles Hoffer, Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Georgia, has published many books, including Sensory Worlds in Early America,Law and People in Colonial America, and The Devil’s Disciples: The Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, all three published by Johns Hopkins.
$25.00 paperback978-0-8018-8483-2
2006 544 pp. 17 line drawings
May 13, 2008