Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority

by Holly Brewer  

In mid-sixteenth-century England, people were born into authority and responsibility based on their social status. Thus elite children could designate property or serve in Parliament, while children of the poorer sort might be forced to sign labor contracts or be hanged for arson or picking pockets. By the late eighteenth century, however, English and American law began to emphasize contractual relations based on informed consent rather than on birth status. In By Birth or Consent , Holly Brewer explores how the changing legal status of children illuminates the struggle over consent and status in England and America. As it emerged through religious, political, and legal debates, the concept of meaningful consent challenged the older order of birthright and became central to the development of democratic political theory.

  The struggle over meaningful consent had tremendous political and social consequences, affecting the whole order of society. It granted new powers to fathers and guardians at the same time that it challenged those of masters and kings. Brewer's analysis reshapes the debate about the origins of modern political ideology and makes connections between Reformation religious debates, Enlightenment philosophy, and democratic political theory.

About the author

Holly Brewer is associate professor of history at North Carolina State University.

Series:  Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Related subjects:  History/United States: Colonial, Revolutionary Era, & Early American; History/British Isles & British Empire; Law & Legal History  

408 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 2 illus., appends., notes, index

The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century

by Peter Pope

Combining innovative archaeological analysis with historical research, Peter E. Pope examines the way of life that developed in seventeenth-century Newfoundland, where settlement was sustained by seasonal migration to North America's oldest industry, the cod fishery.

The unregulated English settlements that grew up around the exchange of fish for wine served the fishery by catering to nascent consumer demand. The English Shore became a hub of transatlantic trade, linking Newfoundland with the Chesapeake, New and old England, southern Europe, and the Atlantic islands. Pope gives special attention to Ferryland, the proprietary colony founded by Sir George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, in 1621, but later taken over by the London merchant Sir David Kirke and his remarkable family. The saga of the Kirkes provides a narrative line connecting social and economic developments on the English Shore with metropolitan merchants, proprietary rivalries, and international competition.

Employing a rich variety of evidence to place the fisheries in the context of transatlantic commerce, Pope makes Newfoundland a fresh point of view for understanding the demographic, economic, and cultural history of the expanding North Atlantic world.

About the author

Peter E. Pope teaches anthropology and history at Memorial University of Newfoundland and is director of the Newfoundland Archaeological Heritage Outreach Program. He is author of The Many Landfalls of John Cabot.

Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Related subjects: History/United States: Colonial, Revolutionary Era, & Early American; Anthropology & U.S. Archaeology; History/British Isles & British Empire; MARI

496 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 25 illus., 38 tables, 15 maps, 3 figs., glossary, notes, index

In pursuit of a more sophisticated and inclusive American history, the contributors to Beyond the Founders propose new directions for the study of the political history of the republic before the Civil War. In ways formal and informal, symbolic and tactile, this political world encompassed blacks, women, entrepreneurs, and Native Americans, as well as the Adamses, Jeffersons, and Jacksons, all struggling in their own ways to shape the new nation and express their ideas of American democracy.

Taking inspiration from the new cultural and social histories, these political historians show that the early history of the United States was not just the product of a few "founding fathers," but was also marked by widespread and passionate popular involvement; print media more politically potent than that of later eras; and political conflicts and influences that crossed lines of race, gender, and class.

Contributors:
John L. Brooke, The Ohio State University
Andrew R. L. Cayton, Miami University (Ohio)
Saul Cornell, The Ohio State University
Seth Cotlar, Willamette University
Reeve Huston, Duke University
Nancy Isenberg, University of Tulsa
Richard R. John, University of Illinois at Chicago
Albrecht Koschnik, Florida State University
Rich Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology
Jeffrey L. Pasley, University of Missouri, Columbia
Andrew W. Robertson, City University of New York
William G. Shade, Lehigh University
David Waldstreicher, Temple University
Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University

About the author
Jeffrey L. Pasley is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and author of "The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic. Andrew W. Robertson is associate professor of history at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and author of The Language of Democracy: Political Rhetoric in the U.S. and Britain, 1790-1900. David Waldstreicher is professor of history at Temple University and author of Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution.

Related subjects: History/United States: Colonial, Revolutionary Era, & Early American; History/United States: General; Political Science/Political History/International Affairs

Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press; (October 27, 2004)
ISBN: 0807855588

Foul Means
The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740

by Anthony S. Parent, Jr.

by Jane T. Merritt

Examining interactions between native Americans and whites in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, Jane Merritt traces the emergence of race as the defining difference between these neighbors on the frontier.

Before 1755, Indian and white communities in Pennsylvania shared a certain amount of interdependence. They traded skills and resources and found a common enemy in the colonial authorities, including the powerful Six Nations, who attempted to control them and the land they inhabited. Using innovative research in German Moravian records, among other sources, Merritt explores the cultural practices, social needs, gender dynamics, economic exigencies, and political forces that brought native Americans and Euramericans together in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Preface by Donald Fleming

Though we most often think of Thomas Jefferson as president and statesman, he is also recognized, in the words of the late Dumas Malone, "as an American pioneer in numerous branches of science, notably paleontology, ethnology, geography, and botany." In this fascinating book, Silvio Bedini explores his wide-ranging mathematical and scientific pursuits.

Taught surveying by his map-making father, Jefferson developed an interest in measurement and observation at an early age. He was captivated not only by the topography around him, but also by the stars and planets in the heavens above and by the minerals, fossils, artifacts, and plants in the soil below. Known internationally as a man of learning and as the long-serving president of the American Philosophical Society, Jefferson read widely, corresponded with other science enthusiasts worldwide, promoted scientific exploration--most notably, the Lewis and Clark expedition--and performed his own diverse experiments. Painting a broad picture of Jefferson as scientist, this book offers a captivating new look at one of America's great Renaissance men. About the author

Silvio A. Bedini is Historian Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and has written extensively on the history of science and technology. Well known for his classic Thomas Jefferson: Statesman of Science, he also organized the 1981 exhibition "Thomas Jefferson and Science" at the National Museum of American History.

Series: Monticello Monograph Series, Distributed for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation

by Anne M. Boylan

Tracing the deep roots of women's activism in America, Anne Boylan explores the flourishing of women's volunteer associations in the decades following the Revolution. She examines the entire spectrum of early nineteenth-century women's groups--Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish; African American and white; middle and working class--to illuminate the ways in which race, religion, and class could bring women together in pursuit of common goals or drive them apart.

Boylan interweaves analyses of more than seventy organizations in New York and Boston with the stories of the women who founded and led them. In so doing, she provides a new understanding of how these groups actually worked and how women's associations, especially those with evangelical Protestant leanings, helped define the gender system of the new republic. She also demonstrates as never before how women in leadership positions combined volunteer work with their family responsibilities, how they raised and invested the money their organizations needed, and how they gained and used political influence in an era when women's citizenship rights were tightly circumscribed.

About the author
Anne M. Boylan is professor of history and women's studies at the University of Delaware. She is author of Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790-1880.

by Thomas E. Buckley, S.J.

From the end of the Revolution until 1851, the Virginia legislature granted most divorces in the state. It granted divorces rarely, however, turning down two-thirds of those who petitioned for them. Men and women who sought release from unhappy marriages faced a harsh legal system buttressed by the political, religious, and communal cultures of southern life. Through the lens of this hostile environment, Thomas Buckley explores with sympathy the lives and legal struggles of those who challenged it.
Based on research in almost 500 divorce files, The Great Catastrophe of My Life involves a wide cross-section of Virginians. Their stories expose southern attitudes and practices involving a spectrum of issues from marriage and family life to gender relations, interracial sex, adultery, desertion, and domestic violence. Although the oppressive legal regime these husbands and wives battled has passed away, the emotions behind their efforts to dissolve the bonds of marriage still resonate strongly.

About the author
Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., is professor of American religious history at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and a member of the doctoral faculty at the Graduate Theological Union. He is editor of If You Love That Lady Don't Marry Her: The Courtship Letters of Sally McDowell and John Miller, 1854-1856.

by Andrew Burstein

Preface by Peter S. Onuf

"The letters of a person . . . form the only full and genuine journal of his life," wrote Thomas Jefferson, whose own correspondence approached nearly 20,000 letters. Andrew Burstein invites readers to rediscover Jefferson through an exploration of his most enduring public and private writings.

Among the public documents examined are two of Jefferson's best-known contributions to American history, the Declaration of Independence and his first inaugural address. On a more personal level, we read the written dialogue between Jefferson and his dying wife, Martha, as well as tender letters written to his daughters and grandson. Also included are thought-provoking letters written to friends and fellow thinkers, highlighted by extracts from the famous correspondence between the aging Jefferson and John Adams. Burstein's lively analysis confirms Jefferson as a writer of both style and substance. In his letters, we see a writer whose words at once convey the eighteenth-century world in which he lived and yet still speak to the modern world with powerful relevance and wisdom.

Andrew Burstein is the Mary Frances Barnard Professor of History at the University of Tulsa. His books include The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist and Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image. He was featured in the Ken Burns production Thomas Jefferson, first aired on PBS in 1997. About the author

Andrew Burstein is the Mary Frances Barnard Professor of History at the University of Tulsa. His books include The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist and Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image. He was featured in the Ken Burns production Thomas Jefferson, first aired on PBS in 1997.

by Gladys-Marie Fry

With a New Preface by the Author

This richly illustrated book offers a glimpse into the lives and creativity of African American quilters during the era of slavery. Originally published in 1989, Stitched from the Soul was the first book to examine the history of quilting in the enslaved community and to place slave-made quilts into historical and cultural context. It remains a beautiful and moving tribute to an African American tradition.

Undertaking a national search to locate slave-crafted textiles, Gladys-Marie Fry uncovered a treasure trove of pieces. The 123 color and black and white photographs featured here highlight many of the finest and most interesting examples of the quilts, woven coverlets, counterpanes, rag rugs, and crocheted artifacts attributed to slave women and men. In a new preface, Fry reflects on the inspiration behind her original research--the desire to learn more about her enslaved great-great-grandmother, a skilled seamstress--and on the deep and often emotional chords the book has struck among readers bonded by an interest in African American artistry. About the author

Gladys-Marie Fry is Professor Emerita of Folklore and English at the University of Maryland at College Park. She has also curated more than a dozen exhibitions at institutions such as the American Folk Art Museum and the Renwick Gallery, Anacostia Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Her books and exhibition catalogs include Night Riders in Black Folk History, Man Made: African American Men and Quilting Traditions, and Black Folk Art in Cleveland.

by Mary Kelley

With a New Preface by the Author

In the decades spanning the nineteenth century, thousands of women entered the literary marketplace. Twelve of the century's most successful women writers provide the focus for Mary Kelley's landmark study: Maria Cummins, Caroline Howard Gilman, Caroline Lee Hentz, Mary Jane Holmes, Maria McIntosh, Sara Parton, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Virginia Terhune, Susan Warner, and Augusta Evans Wilson. These women shared more than commercial success. Collectively they created fictions that Kelley terms "literary domesticity," books that both embraced and called into question the complicated expectations shaping the lives of so many nineteenth-century women. Matured in a culture of domesticity and dismissed by a male writing establishment, they struggled to reconcile public recognition with the traditional roles of wife and mother.

Drawing on the 200 volumes of published prose and on the letters, diaries, and journals of these writers, Kelley explores the tensions that accompanied their unprecedented literary success. In a new preface, she discusses the explosion in the scholarship on writing women since the original 1984 publication of Private Woman, Public Stage and reflects on the book's ongoing relevance.

About the author
Mary Kelley is a Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Previously, she was the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History at Dartmouth College. Among her most recent books are The Portable Margaret Fuller and The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick.

by John Marshall

Edited by Charles F. Hobson

At the close of 1830 John Marshall (1755-1835) had completed his third decade as chief justice of the United States. The preceding four years had been among the busiest of his long and active life. Between April 1827 and December 1830, Chief Justice Marshall delivered numerous circuit court opinions as well as six Supreme Court opinions that addressed issues of constitutional law. His travels on judicial business regularly took him from his Richmond home to Washington and to Raleigh. Marshall attended a convention on internal improvements in Charlottesville in July 1828, and he served as a delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention in Richmond from October 1829 to mid-January 1830.

Continuing the acclaimed annotated edition of the papers of John Marshall, this volume sheds light not only on the great statesman and jurist's life and thought but on the evolution of American jurisprudence as well.