James Madison
Philosopher, Founder, and Statesman
Edited by John R. Vile, William D. Pederson and Frank J. Williams
James Madison: Philosopher, Founder, and Statesman presents fresh scholarship on the philosophical statesman who served as the nation’s fourth president and who is often called both the father of the U.S. Constitution and the father of the Bill of Rights.
These essays by historians and political scientists from the United States and abroad focus on six distinct aspects of Madison’s life and work: his personality and development as a statesman; his work at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and contributions to larger constitutional design; his advocacy for the adoption of the Bill of Rights; his controversial role as a party leader; his presidency; and his life after leaving office.
James Madison continues to be regarded as one of America’s great political theorists, a man who devoted his life to, and who found fulfillment in, public service. His philosophical contributions remain vital to any understanding of the modern American polity. This book will be of great interest to political scientists and theorists, as well as to historians of early American history and politics
John R. Vile is a professor of political science and chair of the Department of Political Science at Middle Tennessee State University.
William D. Pederson is a professor of political science at Louisiana State University in Shreveport.
Frank J. Williams is chief justice of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island. He is one of the world’s most eminent scholars of Abraham Lincoln and has published widely.
Available November 2008 (est.)
$55 – hardcover
ISBN 13: 978-0-8214-1831-4
$26.95 – paperback
ISBN 13: 978-0-8214-1832-1
368 pages
6 × 9 in.
Gibbons v. Ogden, Law, and Society in the Early Republic
By Thomas H. Cox
“A highly original and much-needed book that puts Gibbons v. Ogden in historical context…[A] major contribution to our understanding of a landmark case.”
Daniel W. Hamilton, author of The Limits of Sovereignty
“The scholarship is very deep and broad…The tale is important enough and the treatment so well balanced that general readers of American history will find much of use in the work.”
Richard F. Hamm, author of Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment
Gibbons v. Ogden, Law, and Society in the Early Republic examines a landmark decision in American jurisprudence, the first Supreme Court case to deal with the thorny legal issue of interstate commerce.
Decided in 1824, Gibbons v. Ogden arose out of litigation between owners of rival steamboat lines over passenger and freight routes between the neighboring states of New York and New Jersey. But what began as a local dispute over the right to ferry the paying public from the New Jersey shore to New York City soon found its way into John Marshall’s court and constitutional history. The case is consistently ranked as one of the twenty most significant Supreme Court decisions and is still taught in constitutional law courses, cited in state and federal cases, and quoted in articles on constitutional, business, and technological history.
Gibbons v. Ogden initially attracted enormous public attention because it involved the development of a new and sensational form of technology. To early Americans, steamboats were floating symbols of progress—cheaper and quicker transportation that could bring goods to market and refinement to the backcountry. A product of the rough-and-tumble world of nascent capitalism and legal innovation, the case became a landmark decision that established the supremacy of federal regulation of interstate trade, curtailed states’ rights, and promoted a national market economy. The case has been invoked by prohibitionists, New Dealers, civil rights activists, and social conservatives alike in debates over federal regulation of issues ranging from labor standards to gun control. This lively study fills in the social and political context in which the case was decided—the colorful and fascinating personalities, the entrepreneurial spirit of the early republic, and the technological breakthroughs that brought modernity to the masses.
Thomas H. Cox is an assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University.
Available February 2009 (est.)
$44.95 – hardcover
ISBN 13: 978-0-8214-1845-1
$26.95 – paperback
ISBN 13: 978-0-8214-1846-8
264 pages
6 x 9 in.
Women and Slavery
Volume 2: The Modern Atlantic
Edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller
The literature on women enslaved around the world has grown rapidly in the last ten years, evidencing strong interest in the subject across a range of academic disciplines. Until Women and Slavery, no single collection has focused on female slaves who—as these two volumes reveal—probably constituted the considerable majority of those enslaved in Africa, Asia, and Europe over several millennia and who accounted for a greater proportion of the enslaved in the Americas than is customarily acknowledged.
Women enslaved in the Americas came to bear highly gendered reputations among whites—as “scheming Jezebels,” ample and devoted “mammies,” or suffering victims of white male brutality and sexual abuse—that revealed more about the psychology of enslaving than about the courage and creativity of the women enslaved. These strong images of modern New World slavery contrast with the equally expressive virtual invisibility of the women enslaved in the Old—concealed in harems, represented to meddling colonial rulers as “wives” and “nieces,” taken into African families and kin-groups in subtlely nuanced fashion.
Volume 2 Contributors
Henrice Altink
Laurence Brown
Myriam Cottias
Laura F. Edwards
Richard Follett
Tara Inniss
Barbara Krauthamer
Joseph C. Miller
Bernard Moitt
Kenneth Morgan
Claire Robertson
Marsha Robinson
Felipe Smith
Mariza de Carvalho Soares
Suzanne Miers is professor emerita of history at Ohio University. She is the author of Slavery in the Twentieth Century and coeditor of The End of Slavery and other books.
Joseph C. Miller is the T. Cary Johnson, Jr. Professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Kings and Kinsmen, Way of Death, and works on the world history of slavery.
Available December 2007 (est.)$55 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-8214-1725-6
ISBN: 0-8214-1725-8
$30 (paper)
ISBN: 978-0-8214-1726-3
ISBN: 0-8214-1726-6
illus., maps, 6¹⁄? × 9¼
Colonial Rosary
The Spanish and Indian Missions of California
By Alison Lake
California would be a different place today without the imprint of Spanish culture and the legacy of Indian civilization. The colonial Spanish missions that dot the coast and foothills between Sonoma and San Diego are relics of a past that transformed California’s landscape and its people.In a spare and accessible style, Colonial Rosary looks at the complexity of California’s Indian civilization and the social effects of missionary control. While oppressive institutions lasted in California for almost eighty years under the tight reins of royal Spain, the Catholic Church, and the government of Mexico, letters and government documents reveal the missionaries’ genuine concern for the Indian communities they oversaw for their health, spiritual upbringing, and material needs.
With its balanced attention to the variety of sources on the mission period, Colonial Rosary illuminates ongoing debates over the role of the Franciscan missions in the settlement of California.
By sharing the missions’ stories of tragedy and triumph, author Alison Lake underlines the importance of preserving these vestiges of California’s prestatehood period. An illustrated tour of the missions as well as a sensitive record of their impact on California history and culture, Colonial Rosary brings the story of the Spanish missions of California alive.
Alison Lake writes for magazines and newspapers on a variety of topics, including history, culture, travel, and parenting. Her work has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Washington Woman, and The World & I Magazine, among others. She lives in Herndon, Virginia.
$39.95 (hardcover)ISBN: 0-8040-1084-6
$19.95 (paper)
ISBN: 0-8040-1085-4
illus., 6 3/4 x 9 1/2
Traveling Women
Narrative Visions of Early America
By Susan Clair Imbarrato
Women's travel narratives recording journeys north and south along the eastern seaboard and west onto the Ohio frontier enhance our historical understanding of early America. Drawing extensively from primary sources, Traveling Women documents women's roles in westward settlement and emphasizes travel as a culture-building event.
Susan Clair Imbarrato closely examines women's accounts of their journeys from 1700 to 1830, including Sarah Kemble Knight's well-known journal of her trip from Boston to New York in 1704 and many lesser-known accounts, such as Sarah Beavis's 1779 journal of her travel to Ohio via Kentucky and Susan Edwards Johnson's account or her 1801-2 journey from Connecticut to North Carolina.
In the women's keen observations and entertaining wit, readers will find bravado mixed with hesitation, as women set forth on business, to relocate, and for pleasure. These travelers wrote compellingly of crossing rivers and mountains, facing hunger, encountering native Americans, sleeping in taverns, and confronting slavery, expressing themselves in voices that differed in sensibility from male explorers and travelers.
These accounts, as Imbarrato shows, challenge assumptions that such travel was predominately a male enterprise. In addition, Traveling Women provides a more balanced portrait of westward settlement by affirming women's importance in the settling of early America.
Susan Clair Imbarrato is an associate professor of English at Minnesota State University Moorhead. She is the author of Declarations of Independency in Eighteenth-Century American Autobiography.June 2006
$42.95 (hardcover)
ISBN: 0-8214-1674-X
256 pages
6 x 9
Reworlding America
Myth, History, and Narrative
By John Muthyala
“Muthyala reimagines the literatures of Americas in the transborder and hemispheric dimension.”
Donald E. Pease — coeditor of The Future of American Studies
John Muthyala's Reworlding America moves beyond the U.S.-centered approach of traditional American literary criticism. In this groundbreaking book, Muthyala argues for a transgeographical perspective from which to study the literary and cultural histories of the Americas.
By emphasizing transnational migration, border crossing, and colonial modernity, Reworlding America exposes how national, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural boundaries have been continually created and transgressed---with profound consequences for the peoples of the Americas.
Drawing from cultural studies, anthropology, literature, and history, Muthyala examines the literatures of the Americas in terms of their intimate relationship to questions of cultural survival, identity formation, and social power. He goes beyond nationalist, ethnocentric, and religious frameworks used to conceptualize American literary history and examines the connection between modernity and colonialism.
Reworlding America's significance extends into the realm of education, history, ethnography, and literary and cultural studies and contributes to the larger project of refashioning the role of English and American studies in a transborder, postnational global culture.
John Muthyala is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Maine.$39.95 (hardcover)
ISBN: 0-8214-1675-8
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
The Center of a Great Empire
The Ohio Country in the Early Republic
Edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs
"The people who lived in what became the seventeenth state in the American Union in 1803 were not only at the center of a great empire, they were at the center of the most important historical developments in the revolutionary Atlantic World."
Nowhere did the revolutions in politics, commerce, and society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries occur more quickly or more thoroughly than in the Ohio country. A forested borderland dominated by American Indians in 1780, Ohio was a landscape of farms and towns inhabited by people from all over the world by 1830. The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early Republic chronicles this dramatic and all-encompassing change.
Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs have assembled an impressive collection of articles by established and rising scholars. They address the conquest of Native Americans, the emergence of a democratic political culture, the origins of capitalism, the formation of public culture, the growth of evangelical Protestantism, the ambiguous status of African Americans, and social life in a place that most regarded as the cutting edge of human history.
For The Center of a Great Empire, distinguished historians of the American nation in its first decades question conventional wisdom. They emphasize contingency rather than inevitability and contention rather than progress. Downplaying the frontier character of Ohio, they offer new interpretations and open new paths of inquiry through investigations of race, education, politics, religion, family, commerce, colonialism, and conquest. As it underscores key themes in the history of the United States, The Center of a Great Empire pursues issues that have fascinated people for two centuries.
Andrew R. L. Cayton, distinguished professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is the author of several books, including Ohio: The History of a People and, with Fred Anderson, The Dominion of War: Liberty and Empire in North America, 1500–2000.
Stuart D. Hobbs is the program director for History in the Heartland, a professional development program for middle and high school teachers of history. Hobbs is the author of The End of the American Avant Garde.
$34.95 (hardcover)ISBN: 0-8214-1620-0
$19.95 (paper)
ISBN: 0-8214-1648-0
6 x 9 in.
July 31, 2008