Email: uncpress@unc.edu
Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America
by David S. Shields
"Here is literary history that in an exemplary manner links the history of taste and aesthetics with the social history of literary production."--David D. Hall, Harvard University
"In this wonderful book, David Shields brilliantly recovers the disappeared world of eighteenth-century belle lettres as a set of socially situated performances taking place at coffeehouses, private societies, literary salons, clubs, colleges, balls, and gaming tables. Whether poetry or prose, these circulated texts, written not for posterity but as group communications, served to display wit, to create shared pleasure, and to preserve genteel society. Shields's Civil Tongues and Polite Letters permanently changes our understanding of eighteenth-century literary history and offers a powerful account of the fate of social pleasure in American culture."--Jay Fliegelman, Stanford University
In cities from Boston to Charleston, elite men and women of eighteenth-century British America came together in private venues to script a polite culture. By examining their various "texts"--conversations, letters, newspapers, and privately circulated manuscripts--David Shields reconstructs the discourse of civility that flourished in and further shaped elite society in British America.
David S. Shields is professor of English at The Citadel.
ISBN 0-8078-2351-1, $49.95 s Cloth
ISBN 0-8078-4656-2, $17.95 t Paper
Approx. 424 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 7 illus., notes, index, LC 96-37377
[E]
Published for the Institute of Early American History
and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
May 1997
Contact Points
American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi,
1750-1830
ed. Andrew R.L. Cayton
and Fredrika J. Teute
The eleven essays in this volume probe multicultural
interactions between Indians, Europeans, and Africans in eastern
North
America's frontier zones from the late colonial era to the end of
the early republic. Focusing on contact points between these
groups, they construct frontiers as creative arenas that produced
new forms of social and political organization.
Contributors to the volume offer fresh perspectives on a
succession of frontier encounters from the era of the Seven
Years' War in Pennsylvania, New York, and South Carolina to the
Revolutionary period in the Ohio Valley to the Mississippi basin
in the early national era. Drawing on ethnography, cultural and
literary criticism, border studies, gender theory, and African
American studies, they open new ways of looking at intercultural
contact in creating American identities. Collectively, the essays
in Contact Points challenge ideas of either acculturation or
conquest, highlighting instead the complexity of various
frontiers while demonstrating their formative influence in
American history.
The contributors are Stephen Aron, Andrew R. L. Cayton, Gregory
E. Dowd, John Mack Faragher, William B. Hart, Jill Lepore, James
H. Merrell, Jane T. Merritt, Lucy Eldersveld
Murphy, Elizabeth A. Perkins, Claudio Saunt, and Fredrika J.
Teute.
About the author: Andrew R. L. Cayton is professor of history at
Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Fredrika J. Teute is editor of
publications at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History
and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
408 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 20 illus.,
5 maps, 2 tables, notes, bibl.,
index
$49.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-2427-5
$18.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-4734-8
1998
John Seelye is Graduate Research Professor of American Literature at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He is author of a number of books in the field of American studies, including two volumes on the role of rivers in opening and permitting communications between the territories that became the United States.
Long celebrated as a symbol of the country's origins, Plymouth Rock no longer receives much national attention. In fact, historians now generally agree that the Pilgrims' storied landing on the Rock never actually took place--the tradition having emerged more than a century after the arrival of the Mayflower. In Memory's Nation, however, John Seelye is not interested in the factual truth of the landing. He argues that what truly gives Plymouth Rock its significance is more than two centuries of oratorical, literary, and artistic celebrations of the Pilgrims' arrival. Seelye traces how different political, religious, and social groups used the image of the Rock on behalf of their own specific causes and ideologies. Drawing on a wealth of speeches, paintings, and popular illustrations, he shows how Plymouth Rock changed in meaning over the years, beginning as a symbol of freedom evoked in patriotic sermons at the start of the Revolution and eventually becoming an icon of exclusion during the 1920s.
NOVEMBER 1998 Cloth ISBN 0-8078-2415-1 $39.95 t
Revolutionary Brotherhood Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840
Steven C. Bullock is associate professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
In the first comprehensive history of the fraternity known to outsiders primarily for its secrecy and rituals, Steven Bullock traces Freemasonry through its first century in America. He follows the order from its origins in Britain and its introduction into North America in the 1730s to its near-destruction by a massive anti-Masonic movement almost a century later and its subsequent reconfiguration into the brotherhood we know today. With a membership that included Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Paul Revere, and Andrew Jackson, Freemasonry is fascinating in its own right, but Bullock also places the movement at the center of the transformation of American society and culture from the colonial era to the rise of Jacksonian democracy.
Using lodge records, members' reminiscences and correspondence, and local and Masonic histories, Bullock links Freemasonry with the changing ideals of early American society. Although the fraternity began among colonial elites, its spread during the Revolution and afterward allowed it to play an important role in shaping the new nation's ideas of liberty and equality. Ironically, however, the more inclusive and universalist Masonic ideas became, the more threatening its members' economic and emotional bonds seemed to outsiders, sparking an explosive attack on the fraternity after 1826.
Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
SEPTEMBER 1998 Cloth ISBN 0-8078-2282-5 $49.95 t (1996) Paper ISBN 0-8078-4750-X $18.95 t
Strangers and Pilgrims Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845
Catherine A. Brekus teaches American religious history at the University of Chicago.
Margaret Meuse Clay, who barely escaped a public whipping in the 1760s for preaching without a license; "Old Elizabeth," an ex- slave who courageously traveled to the South to preach against slavery in the early nineteenth century; Harriet Livermore, who spoke in front of Congress four times between 1827 and 1844-- these are just a few of the extraordinary women profiled in this, the first comprehensive history of female preaching in early America. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Catherine Brekus examines the lives of more than a hundred female preachers--both white and African American--who crisscrossed the country between 1740 and 1845. Outspoken, visionary, and sometimes contentious, these women stepped into the pulpit long before twentieth-century battles over female ordination began. They were charismatic, popular preachers, who spoke to hundreds and even thousands of people at camp and revival meetings, and yet with but a few notable excep tions--such as Sojourner Truth--these women have essentially vanished from our history. Recovering their stories, Brekus shows, forces us to rethink many of our common assumptions about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American culture.
Gender and American Culture
DECEMBER 1998 Cloth ISBN 0-8078-2441-0 $49.95 s Paper ISBN 0-8078-4745-3 $17.95 t
Slave Counterpoint Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry
Philip D. Morgan
Philip D. Morgan is editor of the William and Mary Quarterly and professor of history at the College of William and Mary.
On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South.
Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks--their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.
Cloth 0-8078-2409-7 $49.95 s Paper 0-8078-4717-8 $21.95 t
Sylvia R. Frey is professor of history at Tulane University. Betty Wood is lecturer in history at Girton College, Cambridge University.
The conversion of African-born slaves and their descendants to Protestant Christianity marked one of the most important social and intellectual transformations in American history. Come Shouting to Zion is the first comprehensive exploration of the processes by which this remarkable transition occurred. Using an extraordinary array of archival sources, Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood chart the course of religious conversion from the transference of traditional African religions to the New World through the growth of Protestant Christianity in the American South and British Caribbean up to 1830.
Come Shouting to Zion depicts religious transformation as a complex reciprocal movement involving black and white Christians. It highlights the role of African American preachers in the conversion process and demonstrates the extent to which African American women were responsible for developing distinctive ritual patterns of worship and divergent moral values within the black spiritual community. Finally, the book sheds light on the ways in which, by serving as a channel for the assimilation of Western culture into the slave quarters, Protestant Christianity helped transform Africans into African Americans.
Cloth 0-8078-2375-9 $49.95 x Paper 0-8078-4681-3 $16.95 t
William Merrill Decker, author of The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams, is director of undergraduate programs in English at Oklahoma State University.
Letters have long been read as primary sources for biography and history, but their performative, fictive, and textual dimensions have only recently attracted serious notice. In this book, William Merrill Decker examines the place of the personal letter in American popular and literary culture from the colonial to the postmodern period.
After offering an overview of the genre, Decker explores epistolary practices that coincide with American experiences of space, settlement, separation, and reunion. He discusses letters written by such well-known and well-educated persons as John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Clemens, Henry James, and Alice James, but also letters by persons who, except in their correspondence, were not writers at all: indentured servants, New England factory workers, slaves, soldiers, and Western pioneers. Individual chapters explore the letter writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Henry Adams--three of America's most ambitious, accomplished, and theoretically astute letter writers. Finally, Decker considers the ongoing transformation of letter writing in the electronic age.
NOVEMBER 1998 Cloth ISBN 0-8078-2438-0 $49.95 x Paper ISBN 0-8078-4743-7 $19.95 t
The people of colonial New England lived in a densely metaphoric landscape--a world where familiars invaded bodies without warning, witches passed with ease through locked doors, and houses blew down in gusts of angry, providential wind. Meaning, Robert St. George argues, was layered, often indirect, and inextricably intertwined with memory, apprehension, and imagination. By exploring the linkages between such cultural expressions as seventeenth-century farmsteads, witchcraft narratives, eighteenth-century crowd violence, and popular portraits of New England Federalists, St. George demonstrates that in early New England, things mattered as much as words in the shaping of metaphor.
According to the author, a complete understanding of the colonial worldview can emerge only if many forms of cultural representation--architecture and gravestones, metaphysical poetry and sermons, popular religion and labor politics--are connected through what St. George calls a "poetics of implication." These various words, objects, and actions, referentially interdependent, demonstrate the continued resilience and power of seventeenth-century popular culture throughout the eighteenth century. Illuminating their interconnectedness, St. George calls into question the actual impact of the so-called Enlightenment, suggesting just how long a shadow the colonial climate of fear and inner instability cast over the warm glow of the early national period.
Robert Blair St. George is associate professor of folklore and folklife at the University of Pennsylvania.
ISBN 0-8078-2382-1, $60.00x Cloth ISBN 0-8078-4688-0, $24.95t Paper Approx. 576 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 134 illus., 5 maps, notes, index February 1998
A Separate Canaan The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840
Jon F. Sensbach
Jon F. Sensbach is assistant professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. Previously, he worked as a public historian at Old Salem in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
In colonial North Carolina, German-speaking settlers from the Moravian Church founded a religious refuge--an ideal society, they hoped, whose blueprint for daily life was the Bible and whose Chief Elder was Christ himself. As the community's demand for labor grew, the Moravian Brethren bought slaves to help operate their farms, shops, and industries. Moravians believed in the universalism of the gospel and baptized dozens of African Americans, who became full members of tightly knit Moravian congregations. For decades, white and black Brethren worked and worshiped together--though white Moravians never abandoned their belief that black slavery was ordained by God.
Based on German church documents, including dozens of rare biographies of black Moravians, A Separate Canaan is the first full-length study of contact between people of German and African descent in early America. Exploring the fluidity of race in Revolutionary era America, it highlights the struggle of African Americans to secure their fragile place in a culture unwilling to give them full human rights. In the early nineteenth century, white Moravians forsook their spiritual inclusiveness, installing blacks in a separate church. Just as white Americans throughout the new republic rejected African American equality, the Moravian story illustrates the power of slavery and race to overwhelm other ideals.
Cloth 0-8078-2394-5 $45.00 s Paper 0-8078-4698-8 $17.95 t
Les Sauvages Americains Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature
"In Les Sauvages Americains, Gordon Sayre draws an alluring map of the linguistic and cultural codes through which two major European peoples constructed Native Americans. Energetically conceived and sharply rendered, his book offers excellent guid ance through a very large, complex, and important terrain."--Wayne Franklin, Northeastern University
Algonquin and Iroquois natives of the American Northeast were described in great detail by colonial explorers who ventured into the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beginning with the writings of John Smith and Samuel de Champlain, Gord on Sayre analyzes French and English accounts of Native Americans to reveal the rhetorical codes by which their cultures were represented and the influence that these images of Indians had on colonial and modern American society. By emphasizing the work o f Pierre Franáois-Xavier Charlevoix, Joseph-Franáois Lafitau, and Baron de Lahontan, among others, Sayre highlights the important contribution that French explorers and ethnographers made to colonial literature.
Sayre's interdisciplinary approach draws on anthropology, cultural studies, and literary methodologies. He cautions against dismissing these colonial texts as purveyors of ethnocentric stereotypes, asserting that they offer insights into Native America n cultures. Furthermore, early accounts of American Indians reveal Europeans' serious examination of their own customs and values: Sayre demonstrates how encounters with natives' wampum belts, tattoos, and pelt garments, for example, forced colonists to q uestion the nature of money, writing, and clothing; and how the Indians' techniques of warfare and practice of adopting prisoners led to new concepts of cultural identity and inspired key themes in the European enlightenment and American individualism.
Gordon M. Sayre is assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon.
ISBN 0-8078-2346-5, $45.00 x Cloth ISBN 0-8078-4652-X, $19.95 t Paper Approx. 336 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 8 illus., notes, bibl., index, LC 96-36993 [PS]
August 1997
The Culture of
Wilderness
Agriculture as Colonization in the American West
by Frieda Knobloch
"Beautifully written, wonderfully provocative, and at the same time deeply informative. That's a combination hard to pull off."--John Mack Faragher, Yale University
In this innovative work of cultural and technological history, Frieda Knobloch describes how agriculture functioned as a colonizing force in the American West between 1862 and 1945. Using agricultural textbooks, USDA documents, and historical accounts of western settlement, she explores the implications of the premise that civilization progresses by bringing agriculture to wilderness. Her analysis is the first to place the trans-Mississippi West in the broad context of European and classical Roman agricultural history.
Knobloch shows how western land, plants, animals, and people were subjugated in the name of cultivation and improvement. Illuminating the cultural significance of plows, livestock, trees, grasses, and even weeds, she demonstrates that discourse about agriculture portrays civilization as the emergence of a colonial, socially stratified, and bureaucratic culture from a primitive, feminine, and unruly wilderness. Specifically, Knobloch highlights the displacement of women from their historical role as food gatherers and producers and reveals how Native American land-use patterns functioned as a form of cultural resistance. Describing the professionalization of knowledge, Knobloch concludes that both social and biological diversity have suffered as a result of agricultural "progress."
Frieda Knobloch is assistant professor of history at St. Olaf College.
ISBN 0-8078-2280-9, $39.95x Cloth
ISBN 0-8078-4585-X, $14.95s Paper
Approx. 256 pp., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, notes, bibl., index, LC 95-50148
[S]
Studies in Rural Culture
September 1996
The University of North Carolina Press,
800-848-6224
Southern Slavery
and the Law, 1619-1860
Thomas D. Morris
592 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, notes, bibl., index
ISBN: 0-8078-2238-8 Cloth $49.95
ISBN: 0-8078-4817-4 Paper $24.95
Winner of the 1997 Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley
Award, Southern Historical Association
Winner of the 1996 Book Award, Society for Historians of the
Early American Republic
This volume is the first comprehensive history of the
evolving relationship between American slavery and the law from
colonial times to the Civil War. As Thomas Morris clearly shows,
racial slavery came to the English colonies as an
institution without strict legal definitions or guidelines.
Specifically, he demonstrates that there was no coherent body of
law that dealt solely with slaves. Instead, more general legal
rules concerning inheritance, mortgages, and transfers of
property coexisted with laws pertaining only to slaves. According
to Morris, southern lawmakers and judges struggled to
reconcile a social order based on slavery with existing English
common law (or, in Louisiana, with continental civil law.)
Because much was left to local interpretation, laws varied
between and even within states. In addition, legal doctrine often
differed from local practice. And, as Morris reveals, in the
decades leading up to the Civil War, tensions mounted between
the legal culture of racial slavery and the competing demands of
capitalism and evangelical Christianity.
Thomas D. Morris, professor of history at Portland
State University, is author of Free Men All: The Personal Liberty
Laws of the North, 1780-1861.
Subjects:
Law & Legal
History
African-American/African
Studies
History/United States:
General
Series:
Studies in Legal History
The University of North Carolina Press
Good
Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs
Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
by Kathleen M. Brown
"Kathleen Brown has written an important book that is going to revolutionize our understanding of colonial Virginia, of the origins of slavery, and of the role of gender in the evolution of early American society. . . . An admirable combination of sophisticated conceptual design and richly textured and original data . . . that will have a major intellectual impact across the fields of American history."--Drew Gilpin Faust, author of Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the A merican Civil War
Kathleen Brown reexamines debates about the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Arguing that gender was both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, she assesses its role in the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia. She also considers how the rise of racial slavery, in turn, transformed gender relations, including ideals of masculinity.
In response to the challenges of early Virginia--the presence of Indians, the shortage of labor, and insecurity of social rank--the colonial government tried to reinforce its authority by regulating the labor and sexuality of English servants and by making legal distinctions between English and African women. This practice, along with making slavery hereditary through the mother, contributed to a change in usage of the English term "wench." Originally applied to any lower-class woman who was not a "good wife," it came to refer only to women of African descent, who had assumed from lower-class English women both the burden of field work and the stigma of moral corruption.
Brown's analysis extends through Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, which she establishes as an important juncture in consolidating the colony's white male public culture, and into the eighteenth century. She concludes that despite elite planters' dominance, wives, children, free people of color, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia.
Kathleen M. Brown is assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.
ISBN 0-8078-2307-4, $49.95x Cloth
ISBN 0-8078-4623-6, $19.95s Paper
Approx. 584 pp., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 10 illus., 2 maps, notes, bibl.,
index
Published for the Institute of Early American History and
Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
November 1996
The University of North Carolina Press,
800-848-6224
The Yankee West
Community Life on the Michigan Frontier
by Susan E. Gray
Susan Gray explores community formation among New England migrants to the Upper Midwest in the generation before the Civil War. Focusing on Kalamazoo County in southwestern Michigan, she examines how "Yankees" moving west reconstructed familiar communal institutions on the frontier while confronting forces of profound socioeconomic change, particularly the rise of the market economy and the commercialization of agriculture. Gray argues that Yankee culture was a type of ethnic identity that was transplanted to the Midwest and reshaped there into a new regional identity.
In chapters on settlement patterns, economic exchange, the family, religion, and politics, Gray traces the culture that the migrants established through their institutions as a defense against the uncertainty of the frontier. She demonstrates that although settlers sought rapid economic development, they remained wary of the threat that the resulting spirit of competition posed to their communal ideals. As isolated settlements developed into flourishing communities linked to eastern markets, however, Yankee culture was transformed. What was once a communal culture became a class culture, appropriated by a newly formed rural bourgeoisie to explain their success as the triumphant emergence of the Midwest and to identify their region as true America.
Susan E. Gray is assistant professor of history at Arizona State University.
ISBN 0-8078-2301-5, $39.95x Cloth
ISBN 0-8078-4610-4, $18.95s Paper
Approx. 288 pp., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 1 map, 14 tables, notes, append.,
index, LC 96-7269 [F]
November 1996
The University of North Carolina Press,
800-848-6224
Now in paperback
The Intellectual
Construction of America
Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800
by Jack P. Greene
"Greene's important book, in reminding us of the ways in which contemporaries identified America as an exceptional place promising opportunity unattainable in the Old World, has shifted the terms of debate for those who are interested in the relationship between colony and metropolis in the early modern period."--Journal of Southern History
"This beautifully produced volume is topical, readable and provocative. It will fuel debate over which master narrative, if any, best explains American identity."--American Studies
Jack Greene explores the changing definitions of America from the time of Europe's first contact with the New World through the establishment of the American republic. Challenging historians who have argued that colonial American societies differed little from those of early modern Europe, he shows that virtually all contemporary observers emphasized the distinctiveness of the new worlds being created in America. This concept of American societies' exceptionalism, suggests Greene, was a central component in their emerging identity.
Jack P. Greene is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. He is author of several books, including Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture.
ISBN 0-8078-4631-7, $16.95 t Paper
ISBN 0-8078-2097-0, $34.95 t Cloth (1993)
228 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 46 illus., notes, index, LC 92-4607 [E]
NOW IN PAPERBACK
The Strength of a
People
The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870
by Richard D. Brown
Thomas Jefferson's conviction that the health of the nation's democracy would depend on the existence of an informed citizenry has been a cornerstone of our political culture since the inception of the American republic. Richard Brown traces the development of this ideal from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century and assesses its continuing influence and changing meaning. According to Brown, many of the fundamental institutions of American democracy and society--including political parties, public education, the media, and even the postal system--have enjoyed wide government support precisely because they have been identified as vital for the creation and maintenance of an informed populace.
"A rich exploration of the connections among ideas of education, citizenship, and political participation in American thought. . . . Will be of great usefulness not only to historians interested in the tensions over democratization in the early American republic but also to those interested in the roots of problems of democracy we still face."--Journal of the Early Republic
"I have read [the book] with both pleasure and admiration. It is a fine piece of work, very provocative."--David McCullough
"A superb intellectual history of a subject that, unlike the principle of freedom of the press, has never been explored in a thoroughgoing and systematic way."--College and Research Libraries
Richard D. Brown is professor of history at the University of Connecticut. His books include Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865, and Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865.
ISBN 0-8078-4663-5, $16.95t Paper
ISBN 0-8078-2261-2, $29.95s Cloth (1996)
272 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 16 illus., notes, index, LC 95-35013 [JA]
September 1997
The University of North Carolina Press, 800-848-6224
Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 by Daniel H. Usner, Jr. John H. Dunning Prize, American Historical Association, cowinner "This detailed and nuanced account represents the most exciting of historical endeavors. Studying at once the establishment of European empires and the economics of everyday life, Usner delineates with insight and sympathy a common world of African slaves, Indian peoples, and European immigrants in the lower Mississippi valley."--Richard White 314 pp., 2014-8 $34.95 cl; 4358-X $13.95 pa Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
Seeds of Extinction Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian by Bernard W. Sheehan This powerful book presents the paradoxical story of how the Jeffersonian generation with the best of goodwill toward the American Indian destroyed him with its benevolence, literally killed him with kindness. 313 pp., 1203-X $37.50 cl
Women before the Bar Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 BY CORNELIA HUGHES DAYTON 400 pp., 2244-2 $49.95 cl 4561-2 $18.95 pa Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
White Over Black American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 BY WINTHROP D. JORDAN 671 pp., 1055-X $50.00 cl 4550-7 $16.95 pa
Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 BY DANIEL H. USNER, JR. 314 pp., -2014-8 $37.50 cl 4358-X $15.95 pa Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 by Thomas D. Morris Approx. 608 pp., 2238-8 $49.95 cl A Selection of the History Book Club Available February '96
Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775 by Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary 424 pp., 2197-7 $45.00 cl A Selection of the History Book Club
White Over Black American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 by Winthrop D. Jordan 671 pp., 1055-X $50.00 cl; 4550-7 $16.95 pa Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture by Joseph A. Conforti 288 pp., 2224-8 $29.95 cl; 4535-3 $13.95 pa
The Papers of General Nathanael Greene Volume VIII: 30 March-10 July 1781 Edited by Dennis M. Conrad, Roger N. Parks, Senior Associate Editor. Martha J. King, Assistant Editor. Richard K. Showman, Editor Emeritus. 624 pp., 2212-4 $70.00 cl Published in collaboration with the Rhode Island Historical Society
The Strength of a People The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870 by Richard D. Brown Approx. 304 pp., 2261-2 $29.95 cl Available March '96
Lafayette in Two Worlds Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions by Lloyd S. Kramer Approx. 416 pp., 2258-2 $39.95 cl Available April '96
Laboratories of Virtue Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835 by Michael Meranze Approx. 424 pp., 2277-9 $47.50 cl Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia Available April '96
Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order by Steven C. Bullock Approx. 512 pp., 2282-5, $55.00 cl Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia Available June '96
The Papers of John Marshall Volume VIII: Correspondence, Papers, and Selected Judicial Opinions, March 1814-December 1819 Edited by Charles F. Hobson 460 pp., 2221-3 $50.00 cl Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
FORTHCOMING FOR YOUR COURSES IN EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY Now in paperback from UNC Press Notes on the State of Virginia Edited by William Peden 342 pp., 4588-4 $13.95 pa Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia Available February '96
Between Authority and Liberty State Constitution Making in Revolutionary America by Marc W. Kruman
In a major reinterpretation of American political thought in the revolutionary era, Marc Kruman explores the process of constitution making in each of the thirteen original states and shows that the framers created a distinctively American science of politics well before the end of the Confederation era.
Suspicious of all government power, state constitution makers greatly feared arbitrary power and mistrusted legislators' ability to represent the people's interests. For these reasons, they broadened the suffrage and introduced frequent elections as a check against legislative self-interest. This analysis challenges Gordon Wood's now-classic argument that, at the beginning of the Revolution, the founders placed great faith in legislators as representatives of the people. According to Kruman, revolutionaries entrusted state constitution making only to members of temporary provincial congresses or constitutional conventions whose task it was to restrict legislative power. At the same time, Americans maintained a belief in the existence of a public good that legislators and magistrates, when properly curbed by one another and by a politically active citizenry, might pursue.
Marc W. Kruman, professor and chair of history at Wayne State University, is author of Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1836-1865.
ISBN 0-8078-2302-3, $39.95s Cloth
Approx. 240 pp., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, notes, bibl., index, LC 96-11615
[JK]
January 1997
A Revolutionary People
at War
The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783
by Charles Royster
Winner of the 1981 Francis Parkman Prize,
Society of American Historians
Winner of the 1979 John D. Rockefeller III
Award
Winner of the 1980 Silver Medal, Nonfiction,
Commonwealth Club of California
Winner of the 1980 Fraunces Tavern Museum
Book Award, Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York
Winner of the 1981 National Historical
Society Book Prize
In this highly acclaimed book, Charles Royster explores the mental processes and emotional crises that Americans faced in their first national war. He ranges imaginatively outside the traditional techniques of analytical historical exposition to build his portrait of how individuals and a populace at large faced the Revolution and its implications. The book was originally published by UNC Press in 1980.
"Represents a quantum leap in understanding of the Revolution. . . . [The book] is social history, intellectual history, institutional history, political history, and not any single one of them, which is to say that it is good history."--Edmund S. Morgan, New Republic
"To a far greater extent than is true of most historical monographs, it is a work of art. . . . No student of early American history should miss it."--Journal of Southern History
Charles Royster, Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State University, is the author of Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution and The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans, which received the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, and the Charles S. Sydnor Award in Southern History.
ISBN 0-8078-4606-6, $17.95t Paper
ISBN 0-8078-1385-0, $37.50s Cloth (1980)
463 pp., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 29 illus., append., notes, index, LC
79-10152 [E]
Published for the Institute of Early American History and
Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
September 1996
The Negro in the
American Revolution
by Benjamin Quarles
New Introduction by Gary Nash
New Foreword by Thad W. Tate
Originally published by UNC Press in 1961, this classic work remains the most comprehensive history of the many and important roles played by African Americans during the American Revolution. With this book, Benjamin Quarles added a new dimension to the military history of the Revolution and addressed for the first time the diplomatic repercussions created by the British evacuation of African Americans at the close of the war. The compelling narrative brings the Revolution to life by portraying how those tumultuous years were experienced by Americans at all levels of society.
"One of the major virtues of Quarles's book is that it does not confine itself merely to [its] principal theme of Negroes as revolutionaries, but deals also with the Negroes who served with the British (mostly as laborers and a few as spies) and with those who were 'carried off' at the end of the war."--New England Quarterly
"Quarles sheds some light on a shadowy and esoteric corner of the history of the Revolution. . . . He has done impressive and thorough research."--American Historical Review
Benjamin Quarles is professor emeritus of history at Morgan State College in Baltimore. His many authored or edited books include The Negro in the Civil War and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
ISBN 0-8078-4603-1, $12.95t Paper
6 x 9, approx. 260 pp., notes, bibl., index
Published for the Institute of Early American History and
Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
September 1996
The Elusive Republic
Political Economy in Jeffersonian America
by Drew R. McCoy
By investigating eighteenth-century social and economic thought--an intellectual world with its own vocabulary, concepts, and assumptions--Drew McCoy smoothly integrates the history of ideas and the history of public policy in the Jeffersonian era. The book was originally published by UNC Press in 1980.
"McCoy has both enlarged our understanding of early American history and given us a perspective from which to see the deficiencies of the republic today."--Virginia Quarterly Review
"This superbly crafted book is both a literary treat and necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand America's Revolutionary era. . . . Filled with insights that a summary cannot begin to mention and argued with uncommon force, economy, and grace, this volume adds a new dimension to the evolving reinterpretation of the revolutionary vision of the 1770s."--Journal of American History
"An imaginative and well-written book that will be necessary reading for all American historians concerned with the post-Revolutionary period."--Journal of Economic History
"McCoy's study of the contradictions and ambivalence of republican economic thought makes an important contribution to our understanding the Revolutionary era. But its significance is much wider, for The Elusive Republic offers insights into the complex relationships between ideology and social change, between tradition and modernity."--Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Drew R. McCoy, Jacob and Frances Hiatt Professor of History at Clark University, is author of The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy.
ISBN 0-8078-4616-3, $11.95t Paper
278 pp., 6 x 9, notes, index, LC 79-20952 [HC]
Published for the Institute of Early American History and
Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
September 1996
New in paperback
Adapting to a New World
English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake
by James Horn
Cowinner of the 1995 Maryland
Historical Society Book Prize
Often compared unfavorably with colonial New England, the early Chesapeake has been portrayed as irreligious, unstable, and violent. In this important new study, James Horn challenges this conventional view and looks across the Atlantic to assess the enduring influence of English attitudes, values, and behavior on the social and cultural evolution of the early Chesapeake.
"A work of exceptional breadth, extensive research and reading, and skillful analysis."--William and Mary Quarterly
"A splendid volume."--Journal of American History
"This is an important book, one of the few that examines the transfer of culture from Europe to America in a comparative way. The research is both wide and deep; the book is well-edited and beautifully produced."--Virginia Quarterly Review
"James Horn's Adapting to a New World is the most important general study of seventeenth-century Chesapeake society in the twenty years since Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom."--Jack P. Greene, The Johns Hopkins University
James Horn, head of the School of Historical and Critical Studies at the University of Brighton, England, is coeditor of "To Make America": European Emigration in the Early Modern Period.
ISBN 0-8078-4614-7, $19.95s Paper
ISBN 0-8078-2137-3, $55.00s Cloth (1994)
480 pp., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 23 illus., 34 tables, index, LC 93-38421
[F]
Published for the Institute of Early American History and
Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
September 1996
March 12, 2001