Robert S. Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation:Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism
Elizabeth R. Varon. Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859
The Beauty of Holiness
Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina
By Louis P. Nelson
Intermingling architectural, cultural, and religious history, Louis Nelson reads Anglican architecture and decorative arts as documents of eighteenth-century religious practice and belief. In The Beauty of Holiness, he tells the story of the Church of England in colonial South Carolina, revealing how the colony's Anglicans negotiated the tensions between the persistence of seventeenth-century religious practice and the rising tide of Enlightenment thought and sentimentality.
Nelson begins with a careful examination of the buildings, grave markers, and communion silver fashioned and used by early Anglicans. Turning to the religious functions of local churches, he uses these objects and artifacts to explore Anglican belief and practice in South Carolina. Chapters focus on the role of the senses in religious understanding, the practice of the sacraments, and the place of beauty, regularity, and order in eighteenth-century Anglicanism. The final section of the book considers the ways church architecture and material culture reinforced social and political hierarchies.
Richly illustrated with more than 250 architectural images and photographs of religious objects, The Beauty of Holiness depends on exhaustive fieldwork to track changes in historical architecture. Nelson imaginatively reconstructs the history of the Church of England in colonial South Carolina and its role in public life, from its early years of ambivalent standing within the colony through the second wave of Anglicanism beginning in the early 1750s.
About the Author
Louis P. Nelson is associate professor and chair of the Department of Architectural History at the University of Virginia.
Reviews
"Bringing together architectural, social, and religious history with equal fluency, Nelson reconstructs the life of the Church of England in colonial South Carolina. His scholarship is remarkable. He has mined archives in the American South, the West Indies, and Great Britain, and illustrates his analysis with an extensive array of his own high quality photographs. The Beauty of Holiness is a work of both historical value and captivating visual interest."
--Peter W. Williams, author of Houses of God: Region, Religion, and Architecture in the United States
Approx. 516 pp., 71/2 x 101/2, 255 illus., 6 tables, appends., notes, bibl., index
Cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3233-2
Available: January 2009
Hearthside Cooking
Early American Southern Cuisine Updated for Today’s Hearth and Cookstove
By Nancy Carter Crump
For cooks who want to experience a link to culinary history, Hearthside Cooking is a treasure trove of early American delights. First published in 1986, it has become a standard guide for museum interpreters and guides, culinary historians, historical re-enactors, campers, scouts, and home cooks interested in foodways and experimenting with new recipes and techniques.
Hearthside Cooking contains recipes for more than 250 historic dishes, including breads, soups, entrées, cakes, custards, sauces, and more. For each dish, Nancy Carter Crump provides two sets of instructions, so dishes can be prepared over the open fire or using modern kitchen appliances. For novice hearthside cooks, Crump offers specific tips for proper hearth cooking, including fire construction, safety, tools, utensils, and methods.
More than just a cookbook, Hearthside Cooking also includes information about the men and women who wrote the original recipes, which Crump discovered by scouring old Virginia cookbooks, hand-written receipt books, and other primary sources in archival collections. With this new edition, Crump includes additional information on African American foodways, how the Civil War affected traditional southern food customs, and the late-nineteenth-century transition from hearth to stove cooking. Hearthside Cooking offers twenty-first-century cooks an enjoyable, informative resource for traditional cooking.
About the Author
Nancy Carter Crump is a culinary historian and founder of the Culinary Historians of Virginia. A frequent lecturer at historic sites and other venues throughout the South, she lives in Staunton, Virginia.
Reviews
"Nancy Carter Crump is a pioneer in American food history, or at least one of the earliest settlers in the field. . . . While you will learn about traditional Virginia cuisine and its history, you will also find in this book an infectious enthusiasm for fireplace cookery."
--Sandra Oliver, from the Foreword
"Anyone fascinated with early American history has a treat in store. To sample any of these delicious recipes--whether cooked on the hearth or on the stove--is to literally taste the past. A delightful resource for historians and cooks alike."
--Patricia Brady, author of Nelly Custis Lewis's Housekeeping Book and Martha Washington: An American Life
Approx. 352 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 55 illus., notes, bibl., index
Cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3246-2
Available: November 2008
The Gulf Stream
Tiny Plankton, Giant Bluefin, and the Amazing Story of the Powerful River in the Atlantic
By Stan Ulanski
Coursing through the Atlantic Ocean is a powerful current with a force 300 times that of the mighty Amazon. First discovered by Ponce de León in 1513, it sped ships laden with fortunes in spices, sugar, and rum from the New World back to Spain and also guided the ships of the buccaneers who preyed on them. Later, the current was essential to the development of the transatlantic slave trade. So important were the economic benefits of this ocean conveyor belt to American traders that early maps of it--charted with the help of Benjamin Franklin--were kept as closely guarded secrets.
Stan Ulanski explores the fascinating science and history of this sea highway known as the Gulf Stream, one of the last vestiges of wilderness on Earth. Spanning both distance and time, Ulanski's investigation reveals how the Gulf Stream affects and is affected by every living thing that encounters it--from tiny planktonic organisms to giant bluefin tuna, from ancient mariners to big game anglers. He examines the scientific discovery of ocean circulation, the biological life teeming in the stream, and the role of ocean currents in the settlement of the New World. The Gulf Stream continues to be important today for trade and sport, for the irreplaceable habitat it provides for plant and animal species, and for its key part in changing weather patterns and the climate of the North Atlantic region. The Gulf Stream is an essential introduction to this vital natural wonder.
About the Author
Stan Ulanski is professor of geology and environmental science at James Madison University and author of The Science of Fly-Fishing.
Reviews
"Ulanski takes readers on a dizzying trip within, afloat and around the Gulf Stream. . . . This multifaceted treatment of 'the blue god' offers something for almost every kind of ocean lover."
--Publishers Weekly
"The book's strength is its versatility. It can be used in an introductory oceanography or environmental science class, and is also geared to nature and outdoor enthusiasts with its section on marine life and fishing. History buffs will appreciate the power of the Gulf Stream in setting the stage for settlement in the Americas.--ForeWord Magazine
"Here is the amazing story of the ocean river we know as the Gulf Stream, told in a manner the layman can understand." --David Stick, author of Graveyard of the Atlantic: Shipwrecks of the North Carolina Coast
--The Gulf Stream is a blend of science and history that tells the story of one of the world's most powerful natural forces that has heavily influenced the exploration and development of the New World. It is packed full of details about the oceans and the people who explored the seas over the past 500 years, helping readers understand the connections between natural and human ecologies.
232 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 34 illus., 4 maps, bibl., index
Cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3217-2
Published: September 2008
The View from the Masthead
Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives
by Hester Blum
With long, solitary periods at sea, far from literary and cultural centers, sailors comprise a remarkable population of readers and writers. Although their contributions have been little recognized in literary history, seamen were important figures in the nineteenth-century American literary sphere. In the first book to explore their unique contribution to literary culture, Hester Blum examines the first-person narratives of working sailors, from little-known sea tales to more famous works by Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Richard Henry Dana.
In their narratives, sailors wrote about how their working lives coexisted with--indeed, mutually drove--their imaginative lives. Even at leisure, they were always on the job site. Blum analyzes seamen's libraries, Barbary captivity narratives, naval memoirs, writings about the Galapagos Islands, Melville's sea vision, and the crisis of death and burial at sea. She argues that the extent of sailors' literacy and the range of their reading were unusual for a laboring class, belying the popular image of Jack Tar as merely a swaggering, profane, or marginal figure. As Blum demonstrates, seamen's narratives propose a method for aligning labor and contemplation that has broader applications for the study of American literature and history.
“Blum traces the rise of the sea narrative as a popular and nationalist literary form but also investigates the reading and writing practices of sailors themselves. Her attention to sailors’ ‘cultures of letters,’ especially to issues of literacy, reading practices, and book making, is particularly valuable. This is an impressive, substantial, well-written book that engages a wide range of criticism and makes an important contribution to many fields in American studies.”--Shelley S. Streeby, University of California, San Diego
"Blum argues persuasively for seamen as both producers and consumers of literature, and she makes vivid the self-conscious ways in which they participated in a tradition of writing about shipboard life and about the nature of experience itself. She renews interest in the narratives of Nathaniel Ames, William Leggett, David Porter, and John Sherburne Sleeper and transforms our understanding of the maritime writings of Cooper, Poe, and Melville."--Samuel Otter, University of California, Berkeley
About the author
Hester Blum is assistant professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.
288 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 13 illus., notes, bibl., index
$59.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3169-4
$22.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5855-4
February 2008
Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century
by Alejandro de la Fuente
With the collaboration of César García del Pino and Bernardo Iglesias Delgado
Havana in the 1550s was a small coastal village with a very limited population that was vulnerable to attack. By 1610, however, under Spanish rule it had become one of the best-fortified port cities in the world and an Atlantic center of shipping, commerce, and shipbuilding. Using all available local Cuban sources, including parish registries and notary, town council, and treasury records, Alejandro de la Fuente provides the first examination of the transformation of Havana into a vibrant Atlantic port city and the fastest-growing urban center in the Americas in the late sixteenth century.
De la Fuente argues that Havana was much more than a port servicing the Spanish imperial powers. Analyzing how slaves, soldiers, merchants, householders, and transient sailors and workers participated socially, economically, and institutionally in the city, he shows how local ambitions took advantage of the imperial design and how, in the process, Havana was turned into a Caribbean trading center with a distinctly Mediterranean flavor. By situating Havana within the slavery and economic systems of the colonial Atlantic, de la Fuente also contributes to the growing focus on port cities as contexts for understanding the early development of global networks for economic and cultural exchange.
About the author
Alejandro de la Fuente is associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (from the University of North Carolina Press).
304 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 11 illus., 18 tables, 9 figs., notes, bibl., index
$40.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3192-2
May 2008
Passion Is the Gale
Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution
by Nicole Eustace
At the outset of the eighteenth century, many British Americans accepted the notion that virtuous sociable feelings occurred primarily among the genteel, while sinful and selfish passions remained the reflexive emotions of the masses, from lower-class whites to Indians to enslaved Africans. Yet by 1776 radicals would propose a new universal model of human nature that attributed the same feelings and passions to all humankind and made common emotions the basis of natural rights. In Passion Is the Gale, Nicole Eustace describes the promise and the problems of this crucial social and political transition by charting changes in emotional expression among countless ordinary men and women of British America.
From Pennsylvania newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, correspondence, commonplace books, and literary texts, Eustace identifies the explicit vocabulary of emotion as a medium of human exchange. Alternating between explorations of particular emotions in daily social interactions and assessments of emotional rhetoric's functions in specific moments of historical crisis (from the Seven Years War to the rise of the patriot movement), she makes a convincing case for the pivotal role of emotion in reshaping power relations and reordering society in the critical decades leading up to the Revolution. As Eustace demonstrates, passion was the gale that impelled Anglo-Americans forward to declare their independence--collectively at first, and then, finally, as individuals.
About the author
Nicole Eustace is assistant professor of history at New York University.
624 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 20 illus., 1 fig., 1 table, notes, index
$45.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3168-7
May 2008
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
The Origins of Proslavery Christianity
White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia
by Charles F. Irons
In the colonial and antebellum South, black and white evangelicals frequently prayed, sang, and worshipped together. Even though white evangelicals claimed spiritual fellowship with those of African descent, they nonetheless emerged as the most effective defenders of race-based slavery.
As Charles Irons persuasively argues, white evangelicals' ideas about slavery grew directly out of their interactions with black evangelicals. Set in Virginia, the largest slaveholding state and the hearth of the southern evangelical movement, this book draws from church records, denominational newspapers, slave narratives, and private letters and diaries to illuminate the dynamic relationship between whites and blacks within the evangelical fold. Irons reveals that when whites theorized about their moral responsibilities toward slaves, they thought first of their relationships with bondmen in their own churches. Thus, African American evangelicals inadvertently shaped the nature of the proslavery argument. When they chose which churches to join, used the procedures set up for church discipline, rejected colonization, or built quasi-independent congregations, for example, black churchgoers spurred their white coreligionists to further develop the religious defense of slavery.
About the author
Charles F. Irons is assistant professor of history at Elon University.
Approx. 392 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 3 illus., 5 tables, 2 maps, appends., notes, bibl., index
$59.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3194-6
$24.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5877-6
May 2008
Men of Letters in the Early Republic
Cultivating Forums of Citizenship
by Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan
In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, after decades of intense upheaval and debate, the role of the citizen was seen as largely political. But as Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan reveals, some Americans saw a need for a realm of public men outside politics. They believed that neither the nation nor they themselves could achieve virtue and happiness through politics alone. Imagining a different kind of citizenship, they founded periodicals, circulated manuscripts, and conversed about poetry, art, and the nature of man. They pondered William Godwin and Edmund Burke more carefully than they did candidates for local elections and insisted other Americans should do so as well.
Kaplan looks at three groups in particular: the Friendly Club in New York City, which revolved around Elihu Hubbard Smith, with collaborators such as William Dunlap and Charles Brockden Brown; the circle around Joseph Dennie, editor of two highly successful periodicals; and the Anthologists of the Boston Athenaeum. Through these groups, Kaplan demonstrates, an enduring and influential model of the man of letters emerged in the first decade of the nineteenth century.
About the author
Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan is assistant professor of history at Arizona State University.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
256 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 5 illus., notes, index
$59.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3164-9
$24.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5853-0
March 2008
Prodigal Daughters
Susanna Rowson's Early American Women
by Marion Rust
Susanna Rowson--novelist, actress, playwright, poet, school founder, and early national celebrity--bears little resemblance to the title character in her most famous creation, Charlotte Temple. Yet this best-selling novel has long been perceived as the prime exemplar of female passivity and subjugation in the early Republic. Marion Rust disrupts this view by placing the novel in the context of Rowson's life and other writings. Rust shows how an early form of American sentimentalism mediated the constantly shifting balance between autonomy and submission that is key to understanding both Rowson's work and the lives of early American women.
Rust proposes that Rowson found a wide female audience in the young Republic because she articulated meaningful female agency without sacrificing accountability to authority, a particularly useful skill in a nation that idealized womanhood while denying women the most basic rights. Rowson, herself an expert at personal reinvention, invited her readers, theatrical audiences, and students to value carefully crafted female self-presentation as an instrument for the attainment of greater influence. Prodigal Daughters demonstrates some of the ways in which literature and lived experience overlapped, especially for women trying to find room for themselves in an increasingly hostile public arena.
About the author
Marion Rust is assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
328 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 24 illus., notes, index
$59.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3140-3
$24.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5892-9
March 2008
The King's Three Faces
The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776
by Brendan McConville
Reinterpreting the first century of American history, Brendan McConville argues that colonial society developed a political culture marked by strong attachment to Great Britain's monarchs. This intense allegiance continued almost until the moment of independence, an event defined by an emotional break with the king. By reading American history forward from the seventeenth century rather than backward from the Revolution, McConville shows that political conflicts long assumed to foreshadow the events of 1776 were in fact fought out by factions who invoked competing visions of the king and appropriated royal rites rather than used abstract republican rights or pro-democratic proclamations. The American Revolution, McConville contends, emerged out of the fissure caused by the unstable mix of affective attachments to the king and a weak imperial government. Sure to provoke debate, The King's Three Faces offers a powerful counterthesis to dominant American historiography.
About the author
Brendan McConville is professor of history at Boston University and author of These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace: The Struggle for Property and Power in Early New Jersey.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
Related subjects: History/United States: Colonial, Revolutionary Era, & Early American;
344 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 18 illus., notes, index
$39.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3065-9
$21.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5866-0
August 2007
Caribbean Exchanges
Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700
by Susan Dwyer Amussen
English colonial expansion in the Caribbean was more than a matter of migration and trade. It was also a source of social and cultural change within England. Finding evidence of cultural exchange between England and the Caribbean as early as the seventeenth century, Susan Dwyer Amussen uncovers the learned practice of slaveholding.
As English colonists in the Caribbean quickly became large-scale slaveholders, they established new organizations of labor, new uses of authority, new laws, and new modes of violence, punishment, and repression in order to manage slaves. Concentrating on Barbados and Jamaica, England's two most important colonies, Amussen looks at cultural exports that affected the development of race, gender, labor, and class as categories of legal and social identity in England. Concepts of law and punishment in the Caribbean provided a model for expanded definitions of crime in England; the organization of sugar factories served as a model for early industrialization; and the construction of the "white woman" in the Caribbean contributed to changing notions of "ladyhood" in England. As Amussen demonstrates, the cultural changes necessary for settling the Caribbean became an important, though uncounted, colonial export.
About the author
Susan Dwyer Amussen is professor of interdisciplinary studies at the Graduate College of the Union Institute and University. She is author or editor of three books, including An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England.
cloth $59.95 ISBN 978-0-8078-3165-6
paper $22.50 ISBN 978-0-8078-5854-7
Approx. 320 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 20 illus., 3 maps, notes, bibl., index
$59.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3165-6
$22.50 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5854-7
September 2007
The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624
Edited by Peter C. Mancall
In response to the global turn in scholarship on colonial and early modern history, the eighteen essays in this volume provide a fresh and much-needed perspective on the wider context of the encounter between the inhabitants of precolonial Virginia and the English. This collection offers an interdisciplinary consideration of developments in Native America, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Chesapeake, highlighting the mosaic of regions and influences that formed the context and impetus for the English settlement at Jamestown in 1607. The volume reflects an understanding of Jamestown not as the birthplace of democracy in America but as the creation of a European outpost in a neighborhood that included Africans, Native Americans, and other Europeans.
With contributions from both prominent and rising scholars, this volume offers far-ranging and compelling studies of peoples, texts, places, and conditions that influenced the making of New World societies. As Jamestown marks its four-hundredth anniversary, this collection provides provocative material for teaching and launching new research.
Contributors:
Philip P. Boucher, University of Alabama, Huntsville
Peter Cook, Nipissing University
J. H. Elliott, University of Oxford
Andrew Fitzmaurice, University of Sydney
Joseph Hall, Bates College
Linda Heywood, Boston University
James Horn, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
E. Ann McDougall, University of Alberta
Peter C. Mancall, University of Southern California
Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University
David Northrup, Boston College
Marcy Norton, The George Washington University
James D. Rice, State University of New York, Plattsburgh
Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania
David Harris Sacks, Reed College
Benjamin Schmidt, University of Washington
Stuart B. Schwartz, Yale University
David S. Shields, University of South Carolina
Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, McGill University
James H. Sweet, University of Wisconsin, Madison}
John Thornton, Boston University
About the author
Peter C. Mancall is professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California and director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. He is author of Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America and editor of Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
Related subjects: History/United States: Colonial, Revolutionary Era, & Early American
608 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 25 illus., 6 maps, notes, index
$65.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3159-5
$27.50 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5848-6
September 2007
Separate Peoples, One Land
The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier
by Cynthia Cumfer
Exploring the mental worlds of the major groups interacting in a borderland setting, Cynthia Cumfer offers a broad, multiracial intellectual and cultural history of the Tennessee frontier in the Revolutionary and early national periods, leading up to the era of rapid westward expansion and Cherokee removal. Attentive to the complexities of race, gender, class, and spirituality, Cumfer offers a rare glimpse into the cultural logic of Native American, African American, and Euro-American men and women as contact with one another powerfully transformed their ideas about themselves and the territory they came to share.
The Tennessee frontier shaped both Cherokee and white assumptions about diplomacy and nationhood. After contact, both groups moved away from local and personal notions about polity to embrace nationhood. Excluded from the nationalization process, slaves revived and modified African and American premises about patronage and community, while free blacks fashioned an African American doctrine of freedom that was both communal and individual. Paying particular attention to the influence of older European concepts of civilization, Cumfer shows how Tennesseans, along with other Americans and Europeans, modified European assumptions to contribute to a discourse about civilization, one both dynamic and destructive, which has profoundly shaped world history.
About the author
Cynthia Cumfer is an attorney and independent scholar in Portland, Oregon.
Related subjects: History/United States: Colonial, Revolutionary Era, & Early American
Approx. 328 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 2 illus., 2 maps, notes, index
$59.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3151-9
$22.50 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5844-8
October 2007
The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century
A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1700
Edited by Warren M. Billings
Revised Edition
Since its original publication in 1975, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century has become an important teaching tool and research volume. Warren Billings brings together more than 200 period documents, organized topically, with each chapter introduced by an interpretive essay. Topics include the settlement of Jamestown, the evolution of government and the structure of society, forced labor, the economy, Indian-Anglo relations, and Bacon's Rebellion. This revised, expanded, and updated edition adds approximately 30 additional documents, extending the chronological reach to 1700. Freshly rethought chapter introductions and suggested readings incorporate the vast scholarship of the past 30 years. New illustrations of seventeenth-century artifacts and buildings enrich the texts with recent archaeological findings. With these enhancements, and a full index, students, scholars, and those interested in early Virginia will find these documents even more enlightening.
About the author
Warren M. Billings is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of New Orleans. He has written extensively about seventeenth-century Virginia and early Louisiana law. He is editor of The Papers of Sir William Berkeley, historian of the Supreme Court of Louisiana, a member of the Federal Jamestown 400th Commemoration Commission, and chair of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project Advisory Board.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
Related subjects: History/United States: Colonial, Revolutionary Era, & Early American
432 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 20 illus., 3 maps, bibl., index
$65.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3161-8
$24.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5852-3
August 2007
Peace Came in the Form of a Woman
Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands
by Juliana Barr
Revising the standard narrative of European-Indian relations in America, Juliana Barr reconstructs a world in which Indians were the dominant power and Europeans were the ones forced to accommodate, resist, and persevere. She demonstrates that between the 1690s and 1780s, Indian peoples including Caddos, Apaches, Payayas, Karankawas, Wichitas, and Comanches formed relationships with Spaniards in Texas that refuted European claims of imperial control.
Barr argues that Indians not only retained control over their territories but also imposed control over Spaniards. Instead of being defined in racial terms, as was often the case with European constructions of power, diplomatic relations between the Indians and Spaniards in the region were dictated by Indian expressions of power, grounded in gendered terms of kinship. By examining six realms of encounter--first contact, settlement and intermarriage, mission life, warfare, diplomacy, and captivity--Barr shows that native categories of gender provided the political structure of Indian-Spanish relations by defining people's identity, status, and obligations vis-à-vis others. Because native systems of kin-based social and political order predominated, argues Barr, Indian concepts of gender cut across European perceptions of racial difference.
About the author
Juliana Barr is assistant professor of history at the University of Florida.
416 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 24 illus., 4 maps, notes, bibl., index
$59.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3082-6
$19.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5790-8
Published
March 2007
Restoring the Links
by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
Enslaved peoples were brought to the Americas from many places in Africa, but a large majority came from relatively few ethnic groups. Drawing on a wide range of materials in four languages as well as on her lifetime study of slave groups in the New World, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall explores the persistence of African ethnic identities among the enslaved over four hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade.
Hall traces the linguistic, economic, and cultural ties shared by large numbers of enslaved Africans, showing that despite the fragmentation of the diaspora many ethnic groups retained enough cohesion to communicate and to transmit elements of their shared culture. Hall concludes that recognition of the survival and persistence of African ethnic identities can fundamentally reshape how people think about the emergence of identities among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas, about the ways shared identity gave rise to resistance movements, and about the elements of common African ethnic traditions that influenced regional creole cultures throughout the Americas.
About the author
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall is senior research fellow at Tulane University, professor emerita of history at Rutgers University, and International Advisory Board Member of the Harriet Tubman Resource Center on the African Diaspora at York University, Toronto. She is author of several books as well as a CD and website database on Afro-Louisiana history and genealogy.
Related subjects: African-American/African Studies; Anthropology & U.S. Archaeology; AFRICA; History/United States: General; Latin American & Caribbean Studies
248 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 24 illus., 6 figs., 23 tables, 7 maps, append., notes, bibl., index
$34.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-2973-8
$19.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5862-2
Not for sale in the Caribbean.
PublishedAugust 2007
The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath
Slavery and the Meaning of America
by Robert Pierce Forbes
Robert Pierce Forbes goes behind the scenes of the crucial Missouri Compromise, the most important sectional crisis before the Civil War, to reveal the high-level deal-making, diplomacy, and deception that defused the crisis, including the central, unexpected role of President James Monroe. Although Missouri was allowed to join the union with slavery, the compromise in fact closed off nearly all remaining federal territories to slavery.
When Congressman James Tallmadge of New York proposed barring slavery from the new state of Missouri, he sparked the most candid discussion of slavery ever held in Congress. The southern response quenched the surge of nationalism and confidence following the War of 1812 and inaugurated a new politics of racism and reaction. The South's rigidity on slavery made it an alluring electoral target for master political strategist Martin Van Buren, who emerged as the key architect of a new Democratic Party explicitly designed to mobilize southern unity and neutralize antislavery sentiment. Forbes's analysis reveals a surprising national consensus against slavery a generation before the Civil War, which was fractured by the controversy over Missouri.
About the author
Robert Pierce Forbes is lecturer in history at Yale University. He is coauthor of Francis Kernan, Esq.: The Life and Times of a Nineteenth-Century Politician from Upstate New York.
384 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 1 map, notes, index
$45.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3105-2
PublishedMay 2007
Masterless Mistresses
The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834
by Emily Clark
During French colonial rule in Louisiana, nuns from the French Company of Saint Ursula came to New Orleans, where they educated women and girls of European, Indian, and African descent, enslaved and free, in literacy, numeracy, and the Catholic faith. Although religious women had gained acceptance and authority in seventeenth-century France, the New World was less welcoming. Emily Clark explores the transformations required of the Ursulines as their distinctive female piety collided with slave society, Spanish colonial rule, and Protestant hostility.
The Ursulines gained prominence in New Orleans through the social services they provided--schooling, an orphanage, and refuge for abused and widowed women--which also allowed them a self-sustaining level of corporate wealth. Clark traces the conflicts the Ursulines encountered through Spanish colonial rule (1767-1803) and after the Louisiana Purchase, as Protestants poured into Louisiana and were dismayed to find a powerful community of self-supporting women and a church congregation dominated by African Americans. The unmarried nuns contravened both the patriarchal order of the slaveholding American South and the Protestant construction of femininity that supported it. By incorporating their story into the history of early America, Masterless Mistresses exposes the limits of the republican model of national unity.
About the author
Emily Clark is assistant professor of history at Tulane University.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
304 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 19 illus., 15 tables, appends., notes, index
$59.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3122-9
$22.50 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5822-6
April 2007
The Religious History of American Women
Reimagining the Past
Edited by Catherine A. Brekus
More than a generation after the rise of women's history alongside the feminist movement, it is still difficult, observes Catherine Brekus, to locate women in histories of American religion. Mary Dyer, a Quaker who was hanged for heresy; Lizzie Robinson, a former slave and laundress who sold Bibles door to door; Sally Priesand, a Reform rabbi; Estela Ruiz, who saw a vision of the Virgin Mary--how do these women's stories change our understanding of American religious history and American women's history?
In this provocative collection of twelve essays, contributors explore how considering the religious history of American women can transform our dominant historical narratives. Covering a variety of topics--including Mormonism, the women's rights movement, Judaism, witchcraft trials, the civil rights movement, Catholicism, everyday religious life, Puritanism, African American women’s activism, and the Enlightenment--the volume enhances our understanding of both religious history and women’s history. Taken together, these essays sound the call for a new, more inclusive history.
Contributors:
Ann Braude, Harvard Divinity School
Catherine A. Brekus, University of Chicago Divinity School
Anthea D. Butler, University of Rochester
Emily Clark, Tulane University
Kathleen Sprows Cummings, University of Notre Dame
Amy Koehlinger, Florida State University
Janet Moore Lindman, Rowan University
Susanna Morrill, Lewis and Clark College
Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Augustana College
Pamela S. Nadell, American University
Elizabeth Reis, University of Oregon
Marilyn J. Westerkamp, University of California, Santa Cruz
About the author
Catherine A. Brekus is associate professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School and author of Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 (from the University of North Carolina Press).
352 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 9 illus., notes, bibl., index
$59.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3102-1
$19.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5800-4
April 2007
Builders of Empire
Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717-1927
by Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs
They built some of the first communal structures on the empire’s frontiers. The empire's most powerful proconsuls sought entrance into their lodges. Their public rituals drew dense crowds from Montreal to Madras. The Ancient Free and Accepted Masons were quintessential builders of empire, argues Jessica Harland-Jacobs. In this first study of the relationship between Freemasonry and British imperialism, Harland-Jacobs takes readers on a journey across two centuries and five continents, demonstrating that from the moment it left Britain’s shores, Freemasonry proved central to the building and cohesion of the British Empire.
The organization formally emerged in 1717 as a fraternity identified with the ideals of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, such as universal brotherhood, sociability, tolerance, and benevolence. As Freemasonry spread to Europe, the Americas, Asia, Australasia, and Africa, the group’s claims of cosmopolitan brotherhood were put to the test. Harland-Jacobs examines the brotherhood’s role in diverse colonial settings and the impact of the empire on the brotherhood; in the process, she addresses issues of globalization, supranational identities, imperial power, fraternalism, and masculinity. By tracking an important, identifiable institution across the wide chronological and geographical expanse of the British Empire, Builders of Empire makes a significant contribution to transnational history as well as the history of the Freemasons and imperial Britain.
About the author
Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs is assistant professor of history at the University of Florida.
400 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 25 illus., 6 tables, 1 map, 1 fig., append., notes, bibl., index
$39.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3088-8
April 2007
The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake
The Story of a Soldier, Adventurer, and Emissary to the Cherokees, 1756-1765
Edited by Duane H. King
Lt. Henry Timberlake's Memoirs provide the most detailed account of Cherokee life in the eighteenth century. Timberlake visited the Cherokee Overhill towns for three months in 1761-62 and accompanied three Cherokee leaders to London to meet with King George III and other political figures. He died in September 1765, around the time the Memoirs were originally published.
This first modern edition of Timberlake's Memoirs is abundantly illustrated with portraits, maps, and photographs of historical, archaeological, and reproduced artifacts, bringing a new dimension to Timberlake's rich portrayal. Assembled for an exhibit produced by the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, this collection of period artifacts, artwork, and traditional items made by contemporary Cherokee artists is a stunning representation of the material culture--both native and British--of the French and Indian War period. A detailed introduction and extensive editorial notes help interpret this 250-year-old chronicle for the modern reader, drawing heavily from historical research and archaeological investigations of the last half-century while still including insights offered by Samuel Cole Williams in the original American version published in 1927.
About the author
Duane H. King is the Director of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles.
Distributed for the Museum of the Cherokee Indian Press
216 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 24 color and 80 b&w illus., appends., notes, bibl, index
$45.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3126-7
$19.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5827-1
April 2007
A New World
England's First View of America
by Kim Sloan
This beautifully illustrated book reproduces in full the famous and rarely seen British Museum collection of drawings and watercolors made by John White, who in 1585 accompanied a group of English settlers sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to found a colony on Roanoke Island, North Carolina. White’s duties included making visual records of everything he encountered that was then unknown in England, including plants, animals, and birds, as well as the human inhabitants, especially their dress, weapons, tools, and ceremonies. The collection also includes White’s watercolors of Florida and Brazilian Indians and of the Inuit encountered by Martin Frobisher. Here each work is reproduced in color and supplemented by engravings by Theodor de Bry and other comparable works.
Kim Sloan’s introduction sets the scene, followed by chapters placing John White and his work in their historical, cultural, and artistic contexts. Joyce Chaplin explores how White’s contemporaries viewed his work and Christian Feest assesses its accuracy as historical documentation. Ute Kuhlemann examines the role of de Bry, White’s Frankfurt publisher and engraver. The book explores John White’s role as a colonist, surveyor, and artist who not only recorded plants and animals but also provided Elizabethan England with its first glimpse of a now-lost American Indian culture and way of life.
About the author
Kim Sloan is curator of British drawings and watercolors and Francis Finlay Curator of the Enlightenment Gallery in the British Museum. Her three previous books include "A Noble Art": Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters, c. 1600-1800.
Related subjects: Architecture/Fine Arts/Photography
256 pp., 8 3/4 x 11, 250 color illus., bibl., index
$60.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-3125-0
$29.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5825-7
March 2007
Self-Taught
African American Education in Slavery and Freedom
by Heather Andrea Williams
Awards & Distinctions:
2006 New Scholar Book Award, American Educational Research Association, Division F
2006 Lillian Smith Book Award, Southern Regional Council
2005 George A. and Jeanne S. DeLong Book Prize, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing
2006 Honor Book, Black Caucus of the American Library Association
In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. Self-Taught traces the historical antecedents to freedpeople's intense desire to become literate and demonstrates how the visions of enslaved African Americans emerged into plans and action once slavery ended.
Enslaved people, Williams contends, placed great value in the practical power of literacy, whether it was to enable them to read the Bible for themselves or to keep informed of the abolition movement and later the progress of the Civil War. Some slaves devised creative and subversive means to acquire literacy, and when slavery ended, they became the first teachers of other freedpeople. Soon overwhelmed by the demands for education, they called on northern missionaries to come to their aid. Williams argues that by teaching, building schools, supporting teachers, resisting violence, and claiming education as a civil right, African Americans transformed the face of education in the South to the great benefit of both black and white southerners.
About the author
Heather Andrea Williams, a former attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice and the New York State Attorney General's Office, is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Series: The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture
Related subjects: African-American/African Studies; Education/History of Education; History/United States: Southern
320 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 7 illus., 1 table, append., notes, bibl., index
$34.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-2920-2
ISBN 978-0-8078-5821-9
Published February 2007
The Politics of War
Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia
by Michael A. McDonnell
War often unites a society behind a common cause, but the notion of diverse populations all rallying together to fight on the same side disguises the complex social forces that come into play in the midst of perceived unity. Michael A. McDonnell uses the Revolution in Virginia to examine the political and social struggles of a revolutionary society at war--with itself as much as with Great Britain.
McDonnell documents the numerous contests within Virginia over mobilizing for war--struggles between ordinary Virginians and patriot leaders, between the lower and middle classes, and between blacks and whites. From these conflicts emerged a republican polity rife with racial and class tensions. The Battle of Yorktown did not resolve Virginia’s internal conflicts.
Looking at the Revolution in Virginia from the bottom up, The Politics of War demonstrates how contests over waging war in turn shaped society and the emerging new political settlement. With its insights into the mobilization of popular support, the exposure of social rifts, and the inversion of power relations, McDonnell’s analysis is relevant to any society at war.
About the author
Michael A. McDonnell lectures in the Department of History at the University of Sydney.
568 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 3 maps, notes, index $45.00 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3108-5
Rape and Sexual Power in Early America
by Sharon Block
In a comprehensive examination of rape and its prosecution in British America between 1700 and 1820, Sharon Block exposes the dynamics of sexual power on which colonial and early republican Anglo-American society was based.
Block analyzes the legal, social, and cultural implications of more than nine hundred documented incidents of sexual coercion and hundreds more extralegal commentaries found in almanacs, newspapers, broadsides, and other print and manuscript sources. Highlighting the gap between reports of coerced sex and incidents that were publicly classified as rape, Block demonstrates that public definitions of rape were based less on what actually happened than on who was involved. She challenges conventional narratives that claim sexual relations between white women and black men became racially charged only in the late nineteenth century. Her analysis extends racial ties to rape back into the colonial period and beyond the boundaries of the southern slave-labor system. Early Americans’ treatment of rape, Block argues, both enacted and helped to sustain the social, racial, gender, and political hierarchies of a New World and a new nation.
About the author
Sharon Block is associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
296 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 3 illus., 2 tables, append., notes, index
$45.00 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3045-3
ISBN 0-8078-5761-0
George Mason, Forgotten Founder
by Jeff Broadwater
George Mason (1725-92) is often omitted from the small circle of founding fathers celebrated today, but in his service to America he was, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “of the first order of greatness.” Jeff Broadwater provides a comprehensive account of Mason’s life at the center of the momentous events of eighteenth-century America.
Mason played a key role in the Stamp Act Crisis, the American Revolution, and the drafting of Virginia’s first state constitution. He is perhaps best known as author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, a document often hailed as the model for the Bill of Rights.
As a Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Mason influenced the emerging Constitution on point after point. Yet when he was rebuffed in his efforts to add a bill of rights and concluded the document did too little to protect the interests of the South, he refused to sign the final draft. Broadwater argues that Mason’s recalcitrance was not the act of an isolated dissenter; rather, it emerged from the ideology of the American Revolution. Mason’s concerns about the abuse of political power, Broadwater shows, went to the essence of the American experience.
About the author
Jeff Broadwater is associate professor of history at Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina. He is author of Eisenhower and the Anti-Communist Crusade and Adlai Stevenson and American Politics: The Odyssey of a Cold War Liberal.
$34.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3053-4
Published Fall/Winter 2006
The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery
by Matt D. Childs
In 1812 a series of revolts known collectively as the Aponte Rebellion erupted across the island of Cuba, comprising one of the largest and most important slave insurrections in Caribbean history. Matt Childs provides the first in-depth analysis of the rebellion, situating it in local, colonial, imperial, and Atlantic World contexts.
Childs explains how slaves and free people of color responded to the nineteenth-century “sugar boom” in the Spanish colony by planning a rebellion against racial slavery and plantation agriculture. Striking alliances among free people of color and slaves, blacks and mulattoes, Africans and Creoles, and rural and urban populations, rebels were prompted to act by a widespread belief in rumors promising that emancipation was near. Taking further inspiration from the 1791 Haitian Revolution, rebels sought to destroy slavery in Cuba and perhaps even end Spanish rule. By comparing his findings to studies of slave insurrections in Brazil, Haiti, the British Caribbean, and the United States, Childs places the rebellion within the wider story of Atlantic World revolution and political change. The book also features a biographical table, constructed by Childs, of the more than 350 people investigated for their involvement in the rebellion, 34 of whom were executed.
About the author
Matt D. Childs is assistant professor of Caribbean history at Florida State University and coeditor of The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World.
Approx. 320 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 6 illus., 2 tables, append., notes, bibl., index
$55.00 clothISBN 0-8078-3058-5
$21.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5772-6
Published Fall/Winter 2006
Learning to Stand and Speak
Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic
by Mary Kelley
Education was decisive in recasting women’s subjectivity and the lived reality of their collective experience in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Asking how and why women shaped their lives anew through education, Mary Kelley measures the significant transformation in individual and social identities fostered by female academies and seminaries. Constituted in a curriculum that matched the course of study at male colleges, women’s liberal learning, Kelley argues, played a key role in one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the nation’s history: the movement of women into public life.
By the 1850s, the large majority of women deeply engaged in public life as educators, writers, editors, and reformers had been schooled at female academies and seminaries. Although most women did not enter these professions, many participated in networks of readers, literary societies, or voluntary associations that became the basis for benevolent societies, reform movements, and activism in the antebellum period. Kelley’s analysis demonstrates that female academies and seminaries taught women crucial writing, oration, and reasoning skills that prepared them to claim the rights and obligations of citizenship.
About the author
Mary Kelley is Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is author, coauthor, or editor of six books, including Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America and The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere (both from the University of North Carolina Press).
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
312 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 24 illus., notes, index$39.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3064-X
Published Fall/Winter 2006
Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic
by Matthew Mason
Giving close consideration to previously neglected debates, Matthew Mason challenges the common contention that slavery held little political significance in America until the Missouri Crisis of 1819. Mason demonstrates that slavery and politics were enmeshed in the creation of the nation, and in fact there was never a time between the Revolution and the Civil War in which slavery went uncontested.
The American Revolution set in motion the split between slave states and free states, but Mason explains that the divide took on greater importance in the early nineteenth century. He examines the partisan and geopolitical uses of slavery, the conflicts between free states and their slaveholding neighbors, and the political impact of African Americans across the country.
Offering a full picture of the politics of slavery in the crucial years of the early republic, Mason demonstrates that partisans and patriots, slave and free--and not just abolitionists and advocates of slavery--should be considered important players in the politics of slavery in the United States.
About the author
Matthew Mason is assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University. He is coeditor of The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson, by Edward Kimber.
$45.00 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3049-6
Published Fall/Winter 2006
The King’s Three Faces
The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776
by Brendan McConville
Reinterpreting the first century of American history, Brendan McConville argues that colonial society developed a political culture marked by strong attachment to Great Britain’s monarchs. This intense allegiance continued almost until the moment of independence, an event defined by an emotional break with the king. By reading American history forward from the seventeenth century rather than backward from the Revolution, McConville shows that political conflicts long assumed to foreshadow the events of 1776 were in fact fought out by factions who invoked competing visions of the king and appropriated royal rites rather than used abstract republican rights or pro-democratic proclamations. The American Revolution, McConville contends, emerged out of the fissure caused by the unstable mix of affective attachments to the king and a weak imperial government. Sure to provoke debate, The King’s Three Faces offers a powerful counterthesis to the dominant American historiography.
About the author
Brendan McConville is professor of history at Boston University and author of These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace: The Struggle for Property and Power in Early New Jersey.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
344 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 18 illus., notes, index$39.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3065-8
Published Fall/Winter 2006
Mysteries of Sex
Tracing Women and Men through American History
by Mary P. Ryan
In a sweeping synthesis of American history, Mary Ryan demonstrates how the meaning of male and female has evolved, changed, and varied over a span of 500 years and across major social and ethnic boundaries. She traces how, at select moments in history, perceptions of sex difference were translated into complex and mutable patterns for differentiating women and men. How those distinctions were drawn and redrawn affected the course of American history more generally.
Ryan recounts the construction of a modern gender regime that sharply divided male from female and created modes of exclusion and inequity. The divide between male and female blurred in the twentieth century, as women entered the public domain, massed in the labor force, and revolutionized private life. This transformation in gender history serves as a backdrop for seven chronological chapters, each of which presents a different problem in American history as a quandary of sex. Ryan’s bold analysis raises the possibility that perhaps, if understood in their variety and mutability, the differences of sex might lose the sting of inequality.
About the author
Mary P. Ryan is John Martin Vincent Professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. Mysteries of Sex returns to--and fundamentally reinterprets--the theme of her first book, Womanhood in America (1975). Ryan’s other books include Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in Nineteenth Century America; Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880; and Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865.
$37.50 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3062-3
Published Fall/Winter 2006
Perfecting Friendship
Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature
by Ivy Schweitzer
Contemporary notions of friendship regularly place it in the private sphere, associated with feminized forms of sympathy and affection. As Ivy Schweitzer explains, however, this perception leads to a misunderstanding of American history. In an exploration of early American literature and culture, Schweitzer uncovers friendships built on a classical model that is both public and political in nature.
Schweitzer begins with Aristotle's ideal of "perfect" friendship that positions freely chosen relationships among equals as the highest realization of ethical, social, and political bonds. Evidence in works by John Winthrop, Hannah Foster, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Sedgwick confirms that this classical model shaped early American concepts of friendship and, thus, democracy. Schweitzer argues that recognizing the centrality of friendship as a cultural institution is critical to understanding the rationales for consolidating power among white males in the young nation. She also demonstrates how women, nonelite groups, and minorities have appropriated and redefined the discourse of perfect friendship, making equality its result rather than its requirement. By recovering the public nature of friendship, Schweitzer establishes discourse about affection and affiliation as a central component of American identity and democratic community.
About the authorIvy Schweitzer is professor of English at Dartmouth College. She is author and coeditor of three other books, including The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England (from the University of North Carolina Press).
Approx. 256 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 5 illus., notes, bibl., index
$49.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3069-0
$19.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5778-5
Published Fall/Winter 2006
In This Remote Country
French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780-1860
by Edward Watts
When Anglo-Americans looked west after the Revolution, they hoped to see a blank slate upon which to build their continental republic. However, French settlers had inhabited the territory stretching from Ohio to Oregon for over a century, blending into Native American networks, economies, and communities. Images of these French settlers saturated nearly every American text concerned with the West. Edward Watts argues that these representations of French colonial culture played a significant role in developing the identity of the new nation.
In regard to land, labor, gender, family, race, and religion, American interpretations of the French frontier became a means of sorting the empire builders from those with a more moderate and contained nation in mind, says Watts. Romantic nationalists such as George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, and Lyman Beecher used the French model to justify the construction of a nascent empire. Alternatively, writers such as Margaret Fuller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Hall presented a less aggressive vision of the nation based on the colonial French themselves. By examining how representations of the French shaped these conversations, Watts offers an alternative view of antebellum culture wars.
About the author
Edward Watts is professor of English at Michigan State University. He is author or coeditor of four books, including An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture.
288 pp., 51/2 x 81/2, notes, bibl., index
$59.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3046-1
ISBN 0-8078-5762-9
Published Fall/Winter 2006
The Geographic Revolution in Early America
Maps, Literacy, and National Identity
Martin Brückner
The rapid rise in popularity of maps and geography handbooks in the eighteenth century ushered in a new geographic literacy among nonelite Americans. In a pathbreaking and richly illustrated examination of this transformation, Martin Brückner argues that geographic literacy as it was played out in popular literary genres--written, for example, by William Byrd, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark--significantly influenced the formation of identity in America from the 1680s to the 1820s.
Drawing on historical geography, cartography, literary history, and material culture, Brückner recovers a vibrant culture of geography consisting of property plats and surveying manuals, decorative wall maps and school geographies, the nation's first atlases, and sentimental objects such as needlework samplers. By showing how this geographic revolution affected the production of literature, Brückner demonstrates that the internalization of geography as a kind of language helped shape the literary construction of the modern American subject. Empirically rich and provocative in its readings, The Geographic Revolution in Early America proposes a new, geographical basis for Anglo-Americans' understanding of their character and its expression in pedagogical and literary terms.
About the author
Martin Brückner is associate professor of English at the University of Delaware.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
296 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 58 illus., notes, index
ISBN 0-8078-3000-3
$22.50 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5672-X
Published: Spring/Summer 2006
To Be Useful to the World
Women in Revolutionary America, 1740-1790
by Joan R. Gundersen
Revised Edition
Offering an interpretation of the Revolutionary period that places women at the center, Joan R. Gundersen provides a synthesis of the scholarship on women's experiences during the era as well as a nuanced understanding that moves beyond a view of the war as either a "golden age" or a disaster for women. Gundersen argues that women's lives varied greatly depending on race and class, but all women had to work within shifting parameters that enabled opportunities for some while constraining opportunities for others.
Three generations of women in three households personalize these changes: Elizabeth Dutoy Porter, member of the small-planter class whose Virginia household included an African American enslaved woman named Peg; Deborah Franklin, common-law wife of the prosperous revolutionary, Benjamin; and Margaret Brant, matriarch of a prominent Mohawk family who sided with the British during the war. This edition incorporates substantial revisions in the text and the notes to take into account the scholarship that has appeared since the book's original publication in 1996.
About the author
Joan R. Gundersen is research scholar in women's studies at the University of Pittsburgh and professor emeritus of history at California State University, San Marcos. She is author or coauthor of four other books, including The Anglican Ministry in Virginia, 1723-1776: A Study of a Social Class.
344 pp., 57/8 x 91/4, 12 illus., notes, bibl., index
$24.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5697-5
Fall/Winter 2006
Moral Capital
Foundations of British Abolitionism
Christopher Leslie Brown
Revisiting the origins of the British antislavery movement of the late eighteenth century, Christopher Leslie Brown challenges prevailing scholarly arguments that locate the roots of abolitionism in economic determinism or bourgeois humanitarianism. Brown instead connects the shift from sentiment to action to changing views of empire and nation in Britain at the time, particularly the anxieties and dislocations spurred by the American Revolution.
The debate over the political rights of the North American colonies pushed slavery to the fore, Brown argues, giving antislavery organizing the moral legitimacy in Britain it had never had before. The first emancipation schemes were dependent on efforts to strengthen the role of the imperial state in an era of weakening overseas authority. By looking at the initial public contest over slavery, Brown connects disparate strands of the British Atlantic world and brings into focus shifting developments in British identity, attitudes toward Africa, definitions of imperial mission, the rise of Anglican evangelicalism, and Quaker activism.
Demonstrating how challenges to the slave system could serve as a mark of virtue rather than evidence of eccentricity, Brown shows that the abolitionist movement derived its power from a profound yearning for moral worth in the aftermath of defeat and American independence. Thus abolitionism proved to be a cause for the abolitionists themselves as much as for enslaved Africans.
About the author
Christopher Leslie Brown is associate professor of history at Rutgers University and coeditor of Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age.
496 pp., 6 x 91/4, 8 illus., notes, index
$55.00 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3034-8
$22.50 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5698-3
Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830
Clare A. Lyons
Placing sexual culture at the center of power relations in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia, Clare A. Lyons uncovers a world where runaway wives challenged their husbands' patriarchal rights and where serial and casual sexual relationships were commonplace. By reading popular representations of sex against actual behavior, Lyons reveals the clash of meanings given to sex and illuminates struggles to recast sexuality in order to eliminate its subversive potential.
Sexuality became the vehicle for exploring currents of liberty, freedom, and individualism in the politics of everyday life among groups of early Americans typically excluded from formal systems of governance--women, African Americans, and poor classes of whites. Lyons shows that men and women created a vibrant urban pleasure culture, including the eroticization of print culture, as eighteenth-century readers became fascinated with stories of bastardy, prostitution, seduction, and adultery. In the post-Revolutionary reaction, white middle-class men asserted their authority, Lyons argues, by creating a gender system that simultaneously allowed them the liberty of their passions, constrained middle-class women with virtue, and projected licentiousness onto lower-class whites and African Americans.
Lyons's analysis shows how class and racial divisions fostered new constructions of sexuality that served as a foundation for gender. This gendering of sexuality in the new nation was integral to reconstituting social hierarchies and subordinating women and African Americans in the wake of the Revolution.
About the author
Clare A. Lyons is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
432 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 15 illus., 29 tables, 2 figs., 2 maps, append., notes, bibl., index
$55.00 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3004-6
$22.50 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5675-4
American Curiosity
Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World
Susan Scott Parrish
Colonial America presented a new world of natural curiosities for settlers as well as the London-based scientific community. In American Curiosity, Susan Scott Parrish examines how various peoples in the British colonies understood and represented the natural world around them from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth. Parrish shows how scientific knowledge about America, rather than flowing strictly from metropole to colony, emerged from a horizontal exchange of information across the Atlantic.
Delving into an understudied archive of letters, Parrish uncovers early descriptions of American natural phenomena as well as clues to how people in the colonies construed their own identities through the natural world. Although hierarchies of gender, class, institutional learning, place of birth or residence, and race persisted within the natural history community, the contributions of any participant were considered valuable as long as they supplied novel data or specimens from the American side of the Atlantic. Thus Anglo-American nonelites, women, Indians, and enslaved Africans all played crucial roles in gathering and relaying new information to Europe.
Recognizing a significant tradition of nature writing and representation in North America well before the Transcendentalists, American Curiosity also enlarges our notions of the scientific Enlightenment by looking beyond European centers to find a socially inclusive American base to a true transatlantic expansion of knowledge.
About the author
Susan Scott Parrish is associate professor of English at the University of Michigan.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
344 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 32 illus., notes, index$49.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3009-7
$22.50 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5678-9
The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero
Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh
by Gordon M. Sayre
The leaders of anticolonial wars of resistance--Metacom, Pontiac, Tecumseh, and Cuauhtemoc--spread fear across the frontiers of North America. Yet once defeated, these men became iconic martyrs for postcolonial national identity in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. By the early 1800s a craze arose for Indian tragedy on the U.S. stage, such as John Augustus Stone's Metamora, and for Indian biographies as national historiography, such as the writings of Benjamin Drake, Francis Parkman, and William Apess.
With chapters on seven major resistance struggles, including the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the Natchez Massacre of 1729, The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero offers an analysis of not only the tragedies and epics written about these leaders, but also their own speeches and strategies, as recorded in archival sources and narratives by adversaries including Hernán Cortés, Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, Joseph Doddridge, Robert Rogers, and William Henry Harrison.
Sayre concludes that these tragedies and epics about Native resistance laid the foundation for revolutionary culture and historiography in the three modern nations of North America, and that, at odds with the trope of the complaisant "vanishing Indian," these leaders presented colonizers with a cathartic reproof of past injustices.
About the author
Gordon M. Sayre is associate professor and director of graduate studies in English at the University of Oregon. He is author of Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature and editor of American Captivity Narratives.
Approx. 400 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 15 illus., notes, bibl., index
$55.00 clothISBN 0-8078-2970-6
$22.50 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5632-0
Fall/Winter 2005
Constituting Empire
New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830
by Daniel J. Hulsebosch
According to the traditional understanding of American constitutional law, the Revolution produced a new conception of the constitution as a set of restrictions on the power of the state rather than a mere description of governmental roles. Daniel J. Hulsebosch complicates this viewpoint by arguing that American ideas of constitutions were based on British ones and that, in New York, those ideas evolved over the long eighteenth century as New York moved from the periphery of the British Atlantic empire to the center of a new continental empire.
Hulsebosch explains how colonists and administrators reconfigured British legal sources to suit their needs in an expanding empire. In this story, familiar characters such as Alexander Hamilton and James Kent appear in a new light as among the nation's most important framers, and forgotten loyalists such as Superintendent of Indian Affairs Sir William Johnson and lawyer William Smith Jr. are rightly returned to places of prominence.
In his paradigm-shifting analysis, Hulsebosch captures the essential paradox at the heart of American constitutional history: the Revolution, which brought political independence and substituted the people for the British crown as the source of legitimate authority, also led to the establishment of a newly powerful constitution and a new postcolonial genre of constitutional law that would have been the envy of the British imperial agents who had struggled to govern the colonies before the Revolution.
About the author
Daniel J. Hulsebosch is professor of law at New York University School of Law.
Series: Studies in Legal History
Approx. 464 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, notes, bibl., index
$45.00 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-2955-2
Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis
Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850
by Steven W. Hackel
Recovering lost voices and exploring issues intimate and institutional, this sweeping examination of Spanish California illuminates Indian struggles against a confining colonial order and amidst harrowing depopulation. To capture the enormous challenges Indians confronted, Steven W. Hackel integrates textual and quantitative sources and weaves together analyses of disease and depopulation, marriage and sexuality, crime and punishment, and religious, economic, and political change.
As colonization reduced their numbers and remade California, Indians congregated in missions, where they forged communities under Franciscan oversight. Yet missions proved disastrously unhealthful and coercive, as Franciscans sought control over Indians' beliefs and instituted unfamiliar systems of labor and punishment. Even so, remnants of Indian groups still survived when Mexican officials ended Franciscan rule in the 1830s. Many regained land and found strength in ancestral cultures that predated the Spaniards' arrival.
At this study's heart are the dynamic interactions in and around Mission San Carlos Borromeo between Monterey region Indians (the Children of Coyote) and Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and settlers. Hackel places these local developments in the context of the California mission system and draws comparisons between California and other areas of the Spanish Borderlands and colonial America. Concentrating on the experiences of the Costanoan and Esselen peoples during the colonial period, Children of Coyote concludes with an epilogue that carries the story of their survival to the present day.
About the author
Steven W. Hackel is associate professor of history at Oregon State University.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
496 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 33 illus., 7 figs., 38 tables, 4 maps, appends., glossary, chronology, notes, index $59.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-2988-9
ISBN 0-8078-5654-1
Published Fall/Winter 2005
Town House
Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830
by Bernard L. Herman
In this abundantly illustrated volume, Bernard Herman provides a history of urban dwellings and the people who built and lived in them in early America. In the eighteenth century, cities were constant objects of idealization, often viewed as the outward manifestations of an organized, civil society. As the physical objects that composed the largest portion of urban settings, town houses contained and signified different aspects of city life, argues Herman.
Taking a material culture approach, Herman examines urban domestic buildings from Charleston, South Carolina, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as well as those in English cities and towns, to better understand why people built the houses they did and how their homes informed everyday city life. Working with buildings and documentary sources as diverse as court cases and recipes, Herman interprets town houses as lived experience. Chapters consider an array of domestic spaces, including the merchant family's house, the servant's quarter, and the widow's dower. Herman demonstrates that city houses served as sites of power as well as complex and often conflicted artifacts mapping the everyday negotiations of social identity and the display of sociability.
About the author
Bernard L. Herman is Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of Art History at the University of Delaware. He is author of three previous books, including Architecture and Rural Life in Central Delaware, 1700-1900; The Stolen House; and, with Gabrielle M. Lanier, Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic: Looking at Buildings and Landscapes.
Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
320 pp., 81/2 x 9, 104 halftones, 83 illus., notes, index$45.00 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-2991-9
Published Fall/Winter 2005
By Birth or Consent
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
$39.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-2950-1
Spring/Summer 2005
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
Volume 1: Religion
Volume Edited by Samuel S. Hill
Charles Reagan Wilson, General Editor
Evangelical Protestant groups have dominated religious life in the South since the early nineteenth century. Even as the conservative Protestantism typically associated with the South has risen in social and political prominence throughout the United States in recent decades, however, religious culture in the South itself has grown increasingly diverse. The region has seen a surge of immigration from other parts of the United States as well as from Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, bringing increased visibility to Catholicism, Islam, and Asian religions in the once solidly Protestant Christian South.
In this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, contributors have revised entries from the original Encyclopedia on topics ranging from religious broadcasting to snake handling and added new entries on such topics as Asian religions, Latino religion, New Age religion, Islam, Native American religion, and social activism. With the contributions of more than 60 authorities in the field--including Paul Harvey, Loyal Jones, Wayne Flynt, and Samuel F. Weber--this volume is an accessibly written, up-to-date reference to religious culture in the American South.
About the author
Samuel S. Hill is professor emeritus of religion at the University of Florida. He is author of Southern Churches in Crisis and the Encyclopedia of Religion in the South. Charles Reagan Wilson is director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and coeditor of the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi
272 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 38 illus., bibl., index
$39.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3003-8
$19.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5674-6
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
Volume 2: Geography
Volume Edited by Richard Pillsbury
Charles Reagan Wilson, General Editor
The location of “the South” is hardly a settled or static geographic concept. Culturally speaking, are Florida and Arkansas really part of the same region? Is Texas considered part of the South or the West? This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture grapples with the contestable issue of where the cultural South is located, both on maps and in the minds of Americans.
Richard Pillsbury’s introductory essay explores the evolution of geographic patterns of life within the region--agricultural practices, urban patterns, residential buildings, religious preferences, foodways, and language. The entries that follow address general topics of cultural geographic interest, such as Appalachia, exiles and expatriates, Latino and Jewish populations, migration patterns, and the profound Disneyfication of central Florida. Entries with a more concentrated focus examine major cities, such as Atlanta, New Orleans, and Memphis; the influence of black and white southern migrants on northern cities; and individual subregions, such as the Piedmont, Piney Woods, Tidewater, and Delta. Putting together the disparate pieces that make up the place called “the South,” this volume sets the scene for the discussions in all the other volumes of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
About the author
Richard Pillsbury is professor emeritus of geography at Georgia State University and author or coauthor of five books, including Atlas of American Agriculture: The American Cornucopia. Charles Reagan Wilson is director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and coeditor of the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi
248 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 31 illus., 2 figs., 4 tables, 15 maps, bibl., index
$39.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3013-5
$19.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5681-9
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
Volume 3: History
Volume and Series Edited by Charles Reagan Wilson
Providing a chronological and interpretive spine to the twenty-four volumes of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, this volume broadly surveys history in the American South from the Paleoindian period (approximately 8000 B.C.E.) to the present. In 118 essays, contributors cover the turbulent past of the region that has witnessed frequent racial conflict, a bloody Civil War fought and lost on its soil, massive in- and out-migration, major economic transformations, and a civil rights movement that brought fundamental change to the social order.
Charles Reagan Wilson’s overview essay examines the evolution of southern history and the way our understanding of southern culture has unfolded over time and in response to a variety of events and social forces--not just as the opposite of the North but also in the larger context of the Atlantic World. Longer thematic essays cover major eras and events, such as early settlement, slave culture, Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the rise of the New South. Brief topical entries cover individuals--including figures from the Civil War, the civil rights movement, and twentieth-century politics--and organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Daughters of the Confederacy, and Citizens’ Councils, among others. Together, these essays offer a sweeping reference to the rich history of the region.
About the author
Charles Reagan Wilson is director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and coeditor, with William Ferris, of the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi
408 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 43 illus., 1 map, bibl., index
$39.95 clothISBN 0-8078-3028-3
$19.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5691-6
Fall/Winter 2006
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
Volume 4: Myth, Manners, and Memory
Volume and Series Edited by Charles Reagan Wilson
This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture addresses the cultural, social, and intellectual terrain of myth, manners, and historical memory in the American South. Evaluating how a distinct southern identity has been created, recreated, and performed through memories that blur the line between fact and fiction, this volume paints a broad, multihued picture of the region seen through the lenses of belief and cultural practice.
The 95 entries here represent a substantial revision and expansion of the material on historical memory and manners in the original edition. They address such matters as myths and memories surrounding the Old South and the Civil War; stereotypes and traditions related to the body, sexuality, gender, and family (such as debutante balls and beauty pageants); institutions and places associated with historical memory (such as cemeteries, monuments, and museums); and specific subjects and objects of myths, including the Confederate flag and Graceland. Together, they offer a compelling portrait of the “southern way of life” as it has been imagined, lived, and contested.
About the author
Charles Reagan Wilson is director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and coeditor, with William Ferris, of the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi
320 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 28 illus., bibl., index
$39.95 clothISBN 0-8078-3029-1
$19.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5692-4
Fall/Winter 2006
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
Volume 5: Language
Volume Edited by Michael Montgomery and Ellen Johnson
Charles Reagan Wilson, General Editor
The fifth volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture explores language and dialect in the South, including English and its numerous regional variants, Native American languages, and other non-English languages spoken over time by the region’s immigrant communities.
Among the more than sixty entries are eleven on indigenous languages and major essays on French, Spanish, and German. Each of these provides both historical and contemporary perspectives, identifying the language’s location, number of speakers, vitality, and sample distinctive features. The book acknowledges the role of immigration in spreading features of Southern English to other regions and countries and in bringing linguistic influences from Europe and Africa to Southern English. The fascinating patchwork of English dialects is also fully presented, from African American English, Gullah, and Cajun English to the English spoken in Appalachia, the Ozarks, the Outer Banks, the Chesapeake Bay Islands, Charleston, and elsewhere. Topical entries discuss ongoing changes in the pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar of English in the increasingly mobile South, as well as naming patterns, storytelling, preaching styles, and politeness, all of which deal with ways language is woven into southern culture.
About the author
Michael Montgomery is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of South Carolina. His many books include Language Variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White. Ellen Johnson is associate professor of linguistics at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, and author of Lexical Change and Variation in the Southeastern United States.
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi
Approx. 272 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 19 illus., 6 tables, 6 maps, bibl., index
$39.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3114-X
ISBN 0-8078-5806-4
Spring/Summer 2007
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
Volume 6: Ethnicity
Volume Edited by Celeste Ray
Charles Reagan Wilson, General Editor
Transcending familiar categories of “black” and “white,” this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture complicates and enriches our understanding of “southernness” by identifying the array of cultures that combined to shape the South. This exploration of southern ethnicities examines the ways people perform and maintain cultural identities through folklore, religious faith, dress, music, speech, cooking, and transgenerational tradition.
Accessibly written and informed by the most recent research that recovers the ethnic diversity of the early South and documents the more recent arrival of new cultural groups, this volume greatly expands upon the modest Ethnic Life section of the original Encyclopedia. Contributors describe 88 ethnic groups that have lived in the South from the Mississippian Period (1000-1600) to the present. They include 34 American Indian groups, as well as the many communities with European, African, and Asian cultural ties that came to the region after 1600. Southerners from all backgrounds are likely to find themselves represented here.
About the author
Celeste Ray is associate professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She has published four previous books, including Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South (from the University of North Carolina Press).
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi
Approx. 320 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 33 illus., 2 tables, 3 maps, bibl., index$39.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-3123-9
$19.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5823-4
Spring/Summer 2007
August 11, 2008