The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

 David Brion Davis

Description

 David Brion Davis has long been recognized as the leading authority on slavery in the Western World. His books have won every major history award--including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award--and he has been universally praised for his prodigious research, his brilliant analytical skill, and his rich and powerful prose. Now, in Inhuman Bondage, Davis sums up a lifetime of insight in what Stanley L. Engerman calls "a monumental and magisterial book, the essential work on New World slavery for several decades to come."

 Davis begins with the dramatic Amistad case, which vividly highlights the international character of the Atlantic slave trade and the roles of the American judiciary, the presidency, the media, and of both black and white abolitionists. The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters, the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, the daily life of ordinary slaves, the highly destructive internal, long-distance slave trade, the sexual exploitation of slaves, the emergence of an African-American culture, and much more. But though centered on the United States, the book offers a global perspective spanning four continents. It is the only study of American slavery that reaches back to ancient foundations (discussing the classical and biblical justifications for chattel bondage) and also traces the long evolution of anti-black racism (as in the writings of David Hume and Emmanuel Kant, among many others). Equally important, it combines the subjects of slavery and abolitionism as very few books do, and it illuminates the meaning of nineteenth-century slave conspiracies and revolts, with a detailed comparison with 3 major revolts in the British Caribbean. It connects the actual life of slaves with the crucial place of slavery in American politics and stresses that slavery was integral to America's success as a nation--not a marginal enterprise.

 A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage offers a compelling narrative that links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism. It is the ultimate portrait of the dark side of the American dream. Yet it offers an inspiring example as well--the story of how abolitionists, barely a fringe group in the 1770s, successfully fought, in the space of a hundred years, to defeat one of human history's greatest evils.

About the Author(s)

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and Director Emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, also at Yale. Best known for his highly acclaimed books The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823, Slavery and Human Progress, and most recently, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery, Davis has won a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award for History and Biography, the Bancroft Prize, the Albert J. Beveridge Award, and the Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement, among other honors.

Product Details

352 pages;  40 b/w illus;  6-1/8 x 9-1/4;  0-19-514073-7
hardback,  352 pages

 Britain, India, and America c.1750-1783

 P. J. Marshall

Description

 In The Making and Unmaking of Empires P. J. Marshall, distinguished author of numerous books on the British Empire and former Rhodes Professor of Imperial History, provides a unified interpretation of British imperial history in the later eighteenth century. He brings together into a common focus Britain's loss of empire in North America and the winning of territorial dominion in parts of India and argues that these developments were part of a single phase of Britain's imperial history, rather than marking the closing of a 'first' Atlantic empire and the rise of a 'second' eastern one.

 In both India and North America Britain pursued similar objectives in this period. Fearful of the apparent enmity of France, Britain sought to secure the interests overseas which were thought to contribute so much to her wealth and power. This involved imposing a greater degree of control over colonies in America and over the East India Company and its new possessions in India. Aspirations to greater control also reflected an increasing confidence in Britain's capacity to regulate the affairs of subject peoples, especially through parliament.

 If British objectives throughout the world were generally similar, whether they could be achieved depended on the support or at least acquiescence of those they tried to rule. Much of this book is concerned with bringing together the findings of the rich historical writing on both post-Mughal India and late colonial America to assess the strengths and weaknesses of empire in different parts of the world. In North America potential allies who were closely linked to Britain in beliefs, culture and economic interest were ultimately alienated by Britain's political pretensions. Empire was extremely fragile in two out of the three main Indian settlements. In Bengal, however, the British achieved a modus vivendi with important groups which enabled them to build a secure base for the future subjugation of the subcontinent.

 With the authority of one who has made the study of empire his life's work, Marshall provides a valuable resource for scholar and student alike.

About the Author(s)

P. J. Marshall completed a D.Phil at Oxford in 1962. He was a lecturer in history at King's College, London, and became Rhodes Professor of Imperial History in 1981. From 1997 to 2001 he was President of the Royal Historical Society.

Product Details

408 pages;  2 maps;  0-19-927895-4
hardback,  408 pages

 The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America

 Saul Cornell

Description

 Americans are deeply divided over the Second Amendment. Some passionately assert that the Amendment protects an individual's right to own guns. Others, that it does no more than protect the right of states to maintain militias. Now, in the first and only comprehensive history of this bitter controversy, Saul Cornell proves conclusively that both sides are wrong.

 Cornell, a leading constitutional historian, shows that the Founders understood the right to bear arms as neither an individual nor a collective right, but as a civic right--an obligation citizens owed to the state to arm themselves so that they could participate in a well regulated militia. He shows how the modern "collective right" view of the Second Amendment, the one federal courts have accepted for over a hundred years, owes more to the Anti-Federalists than the Founders. Likewise, the modern "individual right" view emerged only in the nineteenth century. The modern debate, Cornell reveals, has its roots in the nineteenth century, during America's first and now largely forgotten gun violence crisis, when the earliest gun control laws were passed and the first cases on the right to bear arms came before the courts. Equally important, he describes how the gun control battle took on a new urgency during Reconstruction, when Republicans and Democrats clashed over the meaning of the right to bear arms and its connection to the Fourteenth Amendment. When the Democrats defeated the Republicans, it elevated the "collective rights" theory to preeminence and set the terms for constitutional debate over this issue for the next century.

A Well Regulated Militia not only restores the lost meaning of the original Second Amendment, but it provides a clear historical road map that charts how we have arrived at our current impasse over guns. For anyone interested in understanding the great American gun debate, this is a must read.

About the Author(s)

Saul Cornell is Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University and Director of the Second Amendment Research Center at the John Glenn Institute. An authority on constitutional history and especially on the Second Amendment, he is the author of The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America and editor of Whose Right to Bear Arms Did the Second Amendment Protect.

Product Details

336 pages;  6-1/8 x 9-1/4;  0-19-514786-3
hardback,  336 pages

 1763 and the Transformation of North America

 Colin Calloway

Description

 In February 1763, Britain, Spain, and France signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the French and Indian War. In this one document, more American territory changed hands than in any treaty before or since. As the great historian Francis Parkman wrote, "half a continent...changed hands at the scratch of a pen."

 As Colin Calloway reveals in this superb history, the Treaty set in motion a cascade of unexpected consequences. Indians and Europeans, settlers and frontiersmen, all struggled to adapt to new boundaries, new alignments, and new relationships. Britain now possessed a vast American empire stretching from Canada to the Florida Keys, yet the crushing costs of maintaining it would push its colonies toward rebellion. White settlers, free to pour into the West, clashed as never before with Indian tribes struggling to defend their way of life. In the Northwest, Pontiac's War brought racial conflict to its bitterest level so far. Whole ethnic groups migrated, sometimes across the continent: it was 1763 that saw many exiled settlers from Acadia in French Canada move again to Louisiana, where they would become Cajuns. Calloway unfurls this panoramic canvas with vibrant narrative skill, peopling his tale with memorable characters such as William Johnson, the Irish baronet who moved between Indian campfires and British barracks; Pontiac, the charismatic Ottawa chieftain whose warriors, for a time, chased the Europeans from Indian country; and James Murray, Britain's first governor in Quebec, who fought to protect the religious rights of his French Catholic subjects.

 Most Americans know the significance of the Declaration of Independence or the Emancipation Proclamation, but not the Treaty of Paris. Yet 1763 was a year that shaped our history just as decisively as 1776 or 1862. This captivating book shows why.

About the Author(s)

Colin G. Calloway is Professor of History and Samson Occom Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. His many books on early American history include New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America and The American Revolution in Indian Country. His most recent work, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark (2003), received the Ray Allen Billington Prize, the Merle Curti Award, and many other prizes, and was named one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year.

Product Details

256 pages;  15 halftones;  6-1/8 x 9-1/4;  0-19-530071-8
hardback,  256 pages

Edwin S. Gaustad

Description

  The founder of Rhode Island and of the first Baptist Church in America, an original and passionate advocate for religious freedom, a rare New England colonist who befriended Native Americans and took seriously their culture and their legal rights, Roger Williams is the forgotten giant among the first English colonists.

  Now, Edwin S. Gaustad, a leading expert on the life of Roger Williams, offers a vividly written and authoritative biography of the most far-seeing of the early settlers--the first such biography written for a general audience. Readers follow Roger and Mary Williams on their 1631 journey to Boston, where he soon became embroiled in many controversies, most notably, his claim that the colonists had unjustly taken Native American lands and his argument that civil authorities could not enforce religious duties. Soon banished for these troubling (if farsighted) views, Williams wandered for fourteen weeks in bitter snow until he bought land from the Narragansett Indians and founded Providence, which soon became a sanctuary for religious freedom and a refuge for dissenters of all stripes. The book discusses Williams' journey back to London, where he sought legal recognition of his colony, spread his enlightened views on Native Americans, and (alongside John Milton) fought passionately for religious freedom. Gaustad also describes how the royal charter of Rhode Island, obtained by Williams in 1663, would become the blueprint of religious freedom for many other colonies and a foundation stone for the First Amendment.

  Here then is a vibrant portrait of a great American who is truly worthy of remembrance.

Features
The first biography of Roger Williams written for general readers, by one of the leading authorities on Williams' life and work

About the Author(s)

Edwin S. Gaustad is Professor of History and Religious Studies Emeritus at the University of California at Riverside. An authority on Roger Williams and on the subject of religious freedom, he is the author of Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America and Church and State in America , and is co-author of the award-winning The New Historical Atlas of Religion in America .

Product Details

144 pages;   10 halftones;   5-1/2 x 8-1/4;   0-19-518369-X
019518369X,   hardback,   144 pages   May 2005,   

The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life

Steven Deyle

Description

  Originating with the birth of the nation itself, the story of the domestic slave trade is also the story of the early United States. After the importation of slaves from abroad was outlawed in 1808, it was replaced by a far more vibrant internal trade that moved slaves from the Upper South to the Lower South and the Old Southwest, as well as a vast local trade among neighbors. Most importantly, this new interregional commerce in slaves turned human property into one of the most valuable forms of investment in the country, second only to land. Not only did this trade make slave property too valuable to ever give up, but it also raised tensions within the southern states that contributed to their fateful decision to leave the Union. Therefore, while the interregional trade produced great wealth for many people, and the nation, it also helped to tear the country apart. The domestic slave trade likewise played a fundamental role in antebellum American society. Led by professional traders, who greatly resembled northern entrepreneurs, this traffic was a central component in the market revolution of the early nineteenth century. In addition, the development of an extensive local trade meant that the domestic trade, in all its configurations, was a prominent and visible feature of southern life, with public markets and slave coffles being marched down country roads. Yet, this indispensable part of the slave system also raised many troubling questions. For those outside the South, it profoundly shaped their impression of both the region and the new nation. For slaveholders, it proved increasingly indefensible. And their dilemma paled beside the experiences of the men, women, and children who found themselves commodities in this trade. Drawing together the voices of professional slave traders and abolitionists, buyers and overseers, politicians and enslaved peoples, Carry Me Back restores the domestic slave trade to the prominent place that it deserves in early American history. In so doing, this far-reaching study exposes the many complexities of southern slavery and antebellum American life.

  Reviews

" Carry Me Back is a book we have long needed--a synthetic, region-wide treatment of the domestic slave trade. Deyle's deep research and lucid writing convincingly show that the sale and transport of human property from the upper to lower South was a national tragedy of epic proportions, a grand economic enterprise that both forged the Cotton Kingdom and was the root of its undoing. Behold! The story of how the largest source of wealth in antebellum America belongs at the center of our national narrative, and how it haunts us still."--David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory and Director, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale University

About the Author(s)

Steven Deyle is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Davis.

From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

Mark A. Noll

Historical Society's 2004 Eugene Genovese Best Book in American History Prize

  Description

  Religious life in early America is often equated with the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism best embodied by the theology of Cotton Mather. Yet, by the nineteenth century, American theology had shifted dramatically away from the severe European traditions directly descended from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was in the United States the most influential. In its place arose a singularly American set of beliefs. In America's God, Mark Noll has written a biography of this new American ethos. In the 125 years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, theology played an extraordinarily important role in American public and private life. Its evolution had a profound impact on America's self-definition. The changes taking place in American theology during this period were marked by heightened spiritual inwardness, a new confidence in individual reason, and an attentiveness to the economic and market realities of Western life. Vividly set in the social and political events of the age, America's God is replete with the figures who made up the early American intellectual landscape, from theologians such as Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel W. Taylor, William Ellery Channing, and Charles Hodge and religiously inspired writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Stowe to dominant political leaders of the day like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The contributions of these thinkers combined with the religious revival of the 1740s, colonial warfare with France, the consuming struggle for independence, and the rise of evangelical Protestantism to form a common intellectual coinage based on a rising republicanism and commonsense principles. As this Christian republicanism affirmed itself, it imbued in dedicated Christians a conviction that the Bible supported their beliefs over those of all others. Tragically, this sense of religious purpose set the stage for the Civil War, as the conviction of Christians both North and South that God was on their side served to deepen a schism that would soon rend the young nation asunder. Mark Noll has given us the definitive history of Christian theology in America from the time of Jonathan Edwards to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. It is a story of a flexible and creative theological energy that over time forged a guiding national ideology the legacies of which remain with us to this day.

About the Author(s)

  Mark A. Noll, McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College, Illinois

  Product Details

640 pages;   6-1/8 x 9-1/4;   0-19-518299-5 paper,   640 pages

Also   available hardback

New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850

Twentieth Anniversary Edition

 Sean Wilentz

  Description

  Since its publication in 1984, Chants Democratic has endured as a classic narrative on labor and the rise of American democracy. In it, Sean Wilentz explores the dramatic social and intellectual changes that accompanied early industrialization in New York. He provides a panoramic chronicle of New York City's labor strife, social movements, and political turmoil in the eras of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Twenty years after its initial publication, Wilentz has added a new preface that takes stock of his own thinking, then and now, about New York City and the rise of the American working class.

About the Author(s)

Sean Wilentz is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University.

Product Details

480 pages;   29 maps, halftones & line illus.;   5-1/2 x 8-1/4; 0-19-517450-X
hardback,   480 pages

Paper
Oct 2004,  In Stock

MAX M. EDLING, Uppsala University, Sweden

What were the intentions of the Founders? Was the American constitution designed to protect individual rights? To limit the powers of government? To curb the excesses of democracy? Or to create a robust democratic nation-state? These questions echo through today's most heated legal and political debates.

In this powerful new interpretation of America's origins, Max Edling argues that the Federalists were primarily concerned with building a government that could act vigorously in defense of American interests. The Constitution transferred the powers of war making and resource extraction from the states to the national government thereby creating a nation-state invested with all the important powers of Europe's eighteenth-century "fiscal-military states." A strong centralized government, however, challenged the American people's deeply ingrained distrust of unduly concentrated authority. To secure the Constitution's adoption the Federalists had to accommodate the formation of a powerful national government to the strong current of anti-statism in the American political tradition. They did so by designing a government that would be powerful in times of crisis, but which would make only limited demands on the citizenry and have a sharply restricted presence in society. The Constitution promised the American people the benefit of government without its costs.

Taking advantage of a newly published letterpress edition of the constitutional debates, A Revolution in Favor of Government recovers a neglected strand of the Federalist argument, making a persuasive case for rethinking the formation of the federal American state.

336 pp.; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; 0-19-514870-3
$35.00 (01) Tentative
0195148703
August 2003

Edited by TONY HORWITZ

A fresh voyage of discovery through the uncharted waters of American history

Stripped naked and pursued across cactus-studded plains by a band of armed Blackfoot Indians, John Colter escaped certain death to become the one of the most durable characters in western American history. But Colter's harrowing tale was not beyond the ordinary when compared to the adventures of other American explorers. In The Devil May Care, popular historian and travel writer Tony Horwitz has culled through the American National Biography and selected fifty stirring biographies of adventurers who had no one's footsteps to follow in--and yet contributed enormously to our understanding of the world.

Horwitz introduces us to fascinating individuals such as John Ledyard, the first American to see what would become the Pacific Northwest, and Elisha Kent Kane, America's first arctic hero, who stumbled upon an extremely strange remedy for scurvy while icebound off of Ellesmere Island. Having set off into the unknown many times himself as a foreign correspondent, Horwitz brings a subtle sense of humor and a reporter's eye for detail to a collection that offers a glimpse inside the lives of historic Americans who brazenly challenged danger as they pursued their wanderlust to extreme climates and forbidding environments.

Beginning with a short essay, Horwitz seeks his own definition of exploration, drawing on some of his research into the voyages of Captain James Cook and considering its larger implications throughout history. Archival photographs as well as a lively and personal introduction to each story by Horwitz further enhance the appeal of a volume that winds its way through several centuries of American exploration, affirming that the best adventure stories are the true ones.

Tony Horwitz is the best-selling author of Blue Latitudes, Confederates in the Attic, Baghdad Without a Map, and One for the Road. He is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has worked as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and a staff writer for The New Yorker. He lives in Virginia with his wife, novelist Geraldine Brooks, and their son, Nathaniel.

288 pp.; 50 line illus; 5-1/2 x 8-1/4; 0-19-516922-0
$26.00 (02) Tentative
0195169220
October 2003

LINDA K. KERBER, University of Iowa, and JANE SHERRON DEHART, University of California, Santa Barbara

JOANNA BROOKS

The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, "the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust." This book explores the means by which the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early Black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions.
While shedding fresh light on the pioneering figures of African-American and Native American cultural history--including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant--this work also explores a powerful set of little-known Black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals, and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how eighteenth-century Black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion.

American Lazarus offers a bold new vision of a foundational moment in American literature. It reveals the depth of early Black and Indian intellectual history and reassesses the political, literary, and cultural powers of religion in America.

Joanna Brooks is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.

MICHAEL T. GILMORE

A provocative interpretation of the unity of American culture

The idea of a common American culture has been in retreat for a generation or more. Arguments emphasizing difference have discredited the grand synthetic studies that marginalized groups and perspectives at odds with the master narrative.

Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture is a fresh attempt to revitalize an interpretive overview. It seeks to recuperate a central tradition while simultaneously recognizing how much that tradition has occluded. The book focuses on the American zeal for knowing or making accessible. This compulsion has a long history stretching back to Puritan anti-monasticism; to the organization of the landscape into clearly delineated gridwork sections; and to the creation of a national government predicted on popular vigilance. It can be observed in the unmatched American receptivity to the motion pictures and to psychoanalysis: the first a technology of visual surfaces, the second a technique for plumbing interior depths.

Popular literature, especially the Western and the detective story, has reinscribed the cult of legibility. Each genre features a plot that drives through impediments to transparent resolution. Elite literature has adopted a more contradictory stance. The landmarks of the American canon typically embark on journeys of discovery while simultaneously renouncing the possibility of full disclosure (as in Ahab's doomed pursuit of the "inscrutable" white whale). The notorious modernism of American literature, its precocious attraction to obscurity and multiple meaning, evolved as an effort to block the intrusions of a hegemonic cultural dynamic.

The American passion for knowability has been prolific of casualties. Acts of making visible have always entailed the erasure and invisibility of racial minorities. American society has also routinely trespassed on customary areas of reserve. A nation intolerant of the hidden paradoxically pioneered the legal concept of privacy, but it did so in reaction to its own invasive excesses.
* Offers original readings of classic American fiction, from Cooper to Philip Roth

Michael T. Gilmore is Paul Prosswimmer Professor of American Literature at Brandeis University.

JON BUTLER, GRANT WACKER, and RANDALL BALMER

Accessible and wide-ranging, A Short History of Religion in America illuminates the rich spiritual heritage central to nearly every event in American history. Jon Butler begins by describing the state of religious affairs in both the Old and New Worlds on the eve of colonization. He traces the progress of religion in the colonies through the time of the American Revolution, covering all the religious groups in the colonies: Protestants, Jews, Catholics, as well as the unique religious experiences of Native Americans and African Americans.
Grant Wacker continues the story with a fascinating look at the ever-shifting religious landscape of 19th-century America. He focuses on the rapid growth of evangelical Protestants-Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and others-and their competition for dominance over religions such as Catholicism and Judaism, which continued to increase with large immigrant arrivals from Ireland, Eastern Europe, and other countries.

The 20th century saw massive cultural changes. Randall Balmer discusses the effects industrialization, modernization, and secularization had on new and established religions. He examines Protestants, Hindus, Jews, New Age believers, Mormons, Buddhists, Roman Catholics, and many more, providing a clear look into the kaleidoscope of religious belief in modern-day America.Jon Butler is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History and professor of religion and chair of the history department at Yale University. His books include Becoming America: the Revolution Before 1776, Religion in Colonial America (OUP, 2000), and Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Grant Wacker is Associate Professor of the History of Religion in America at Duke University Divinity School. He is the author of Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture, Religion in Nineteenth Century America (OUP, 2000), and Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism. Randall Balmer is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at Barnard College. He is the author of Religion in Twentieth Century America (OUP, 2001), Grant Us Courage: Travels Along the Mainline of American Protestantism (OUP, 1996), Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (OUP, 1993), and A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (OUP, 1989). In addition, Randall Balmer has worked in TV media. His credits include: "In the Beginning": The Creationist Controversy (writer and presenter, two 60-minute programs for PBS), Crusade: The Life of Billy Graham (executive producer, writer, and presenter, 60-minute documentary for PBS), Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (writer and presenter, three-part documentary for PBS).

GREGORY A. WILLS, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

No American denomination identified itself more closely with the nation's democratic ideal than the Baptists. Most antebellum southern Baptist churches allowed women and slaves to vote on membership matters and preferred populists preachers who addressed their appeals to the common person. Paradoxically no denomination could wield religious authority as zealously as the Baptists. Between 1785 and 1860 they ritually excommunicated forty to fifty thousand church members in Georgia alone. Wills demonstrates how a denomination of freedom-loving individualists came to embrace an exclusivist spirituality--a spirituality that continues to shape Southern Baptist churches in contemporary conflicts between moderates who urge tolerance and conservatives who require belief in scriptural inerrancy. Wills's analysis advances our understanding of the interaction between democracy and religious authority, and will appeal to scholars of American religion, culture, and history, as well as to Baptist observers.

STEVEN C. BULLOCK, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

The American Revolution vividly illustrates through a collection of fascinating primary documents how, in the space of a few hundred years, contented colonists -- the majority of whom were transplanted English citizens -- would form an independent country that could challenge the greatest world power of the time -- and win. The American Revolution explores the colonies' break with Great Britain, the resulting war to gain independence, and the struggle to create a successful government for the new United States. Steven C. Bullock turns to such documents as Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, diaries, newspaper debates, slave petitions, and a pictorial essay on Paul Revere, showing that the words and actions of common men as well as great men played important roles in making the Revolution not just a coup d'État, but a genuine change that shook the foundations of authority and dramatically changed American society.

JIM CULLEN

The first narrative history of The American Dream uncovers a plurality of aspirations that unites all Americans
"The American Dream" is one of the most familiar and resonant phrases in our national lexicon, so familiar that we seldom pause to ask its origin, its history, or what it actually means.
In this fascinating short history, Jim Cullen explores the meaning of the American Dream, or rather the several American Dreams that have both reflected and shaped American identity from the Pilgrims to the present. Cullen begins by noting that the United States, unlike most other nations, defines itself not on the facts of blood, religion, language, geography, or shared history, but on a set of ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and consolidated in the Constitution. At the core of these ideals lies the ambiguous but galvanizing concept of the American Dream, a concept that for better and worse has proven to be amazingly elastic and durable for hundreds of years and across racial, class, and other demographic lines. Cullen then traces a series of overlapping American dreams: the quest for of religious freedom that brought the Pilgrims to the "New World"; the political freedom promised in the Declaration; the dream of upward mobility, embodied most fully in the figure of Abraham Lincoln; the dream of home ownership, from homestead to suburb; the intensely idealistic--and largely unrealized--dream of equality articulated most vividly by Martin Luther King, Jr. The version of the American Dream that dominates our own time--what Cullen calls "the Dream of the Coast"--is one of personal fulfillment, of fame and fortune all the more alluring if achieved without obvious effort, which finds its most insidious expression in the culture of Hollywood.

For anyone seeking to understand a shifting but central idea in American history, The American Dream is an interpretive tour de force.

Jim Cullen holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University and teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, in New York City. He is the author of Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition and The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past, among other books.

JOHN FERLING

A major new history of the birth of our nation--a fast-paced narrative filled with sharp-eyed portraits and telling insight into the politics of the revolutionary period

It was an age of fascinating leaders and difficult choices, of grand ideas eloquently expressed and of epic conflicts bitterly fought. Now comes a brilliant portrait of the American Revolution, one that is compelling in its prose, fascinating in its details, and provocative in its fresh interpretations.
In A Leap in the Dark, John Ferling offers a magisterial new history that surges from the first rumblings of colonial protest to the volcanic election of 1800. Ferling's swift-moving narrative teems with fascinating details. We see Benjamin Franklin trying to decide if his loyalty was to Great Britain or to America, and we meet George Washington when he was a shrewd planter-businessman who discovered personal economic advantages to American independence. We encounter those who supported the war against Great Britain in 1776, but opposed independence because it was a "leap in the dark." Following the war, we hear talk in the North of secession from the United States. The author offers a gripping account of the most dramatic events of our history, showing just how closely fought were the struggle for independence, the adoption of the Constitution, and the later battle between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. Yet, without slowing the flow of events, he has also produced a landmark study of leadership and ideas. Here is all the erratic brilliance of Hamilton and Jefferson battling to shape the new nation, and here too is the passion and political shrewdness of revolutionaries, such as Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, and their Loyalist counterparts, Joseph Galloway and Thomas Hutchinson. Here as well are activists who are not so well known today, men like Abraham Yates, who battled for democratic change, and Theodore Sedgwick, who fought to preserve the political and social system of the colonial past. Ferling shows that throughout this period the epic political battles often resembled today's politics and the politicians--the founders--played a political hardball attendant with enmities, selfish motivations, and bitterness. The political stakes, this book demonstrates, were extraordinary: first to secure independence, then to determine the meaning of the American Revolution.

John Ferling has shown himself to be an insightful historian of our Revolution, and an unusually skillful writer. A Leap in the Dark is his masterpiece, work that provokes, enlightens, and entertains in full measure.

John Ferling is a Professor of History at the State University of West Georgia. A familiar face in history documentaries on television, he has written numerous books, including John Adams: A Life, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington, and Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, and Jefferson in the American Revolution.

EDWARD G. GRAY, Florida State University

Colonial America is an extraordinary collection of original documents that show what life in the American colonies was really like for colonists, Native Americans, and slaves. From Georgia to Maine, diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, posters, and a multitude of primary sources provide lively insight. Some examples include:

DT Prenuptial agreements for women, child-rearing manuals, a letter from a father to his daughter explaining why inequality was beneficial for both men and women
DT Native American land deeds, the creation story, captivity narratives
DT Laws regulating slaves, advertisements for runaways, a letter justifying a wife's harsh treatment of a house servant
DT A poem from a boy sent to the colonies for bad behavior, an expose of German immigrant indenture
From wooden spoons to imported china, from adversarial relations between Indians and whites to colonial advocacy of native land protection, and from "limb of England" to a new sense of identity, Colonial America is a fascinating, oftentimes intimate, look at life in the colonies.

GARY NASH, University of California, LA

In 1775, on the green of Lexington, Massachusetts, 2,200 British minutemen fired upon the local militia -- seventy colonial farmers and village artisans in total. The British suffered staggering losses: half of their troops died. And so began the American Revolution. In Landmarks of the American Revolution, fourteen key sites and numerous secondary locales show with rich detail and fascinating anecdotes where the War of Independence took place. In addition to the Lexington-Concord Battle Site, historian Gary Nash features Independence Hall in Philadelphia where the Declaration of Independence was signed; John Paul Jones House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the out-of-work, 28-year-old immigrant who went on to become one of the new nation's naval heroes lived; Peyton Randolph House in Williamsburg, Virginia, a place emblematic of African Americans' role in the war; and many other significant places of the American Revolution. A dynamic journey through history that reveals all sides in the war -- loyalists, patriots, African American, Native American, women, British -- Landmarks of the American Revolution brings to life how a new nation came to be.

JOHN J. PATRICK, Indiana University

The Bill of Rights is an extraordinary collection of original documents, carefully introduced and put into context by historian John Patrick, that traces the origins of the Bill of Rights back to England's Magna Carta and its legal traditions through to present day controversies over freedoms of speech, religion, bearing arms, assembling, and more. Challenges to the Bill of Rights provide a lively look at how the struggle to define governmental authority and how individual freedom has always been a part of the public debate and continues today. Examples include:
* The Sedition Act of 1798, which made it illegal to express criticism of the U.S. government and was in direct violation of the First Amendment
* The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, when the U.S. government declared that the needs of national security justified curtailing the rights of individuals on the basis of race
* The government's attempt to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times during the Vietnam War
* George W. Bush's Executive Order of November 13, 2001, expanding the government's authority against individuals when terrorism is suspected

Powerfully presented, The Bill of Rights is an engaging history of the rights that are fundamental to American life.

Edited by WILLIAM L. ANDREWS

The only one-volume collection of its kind

Classic African American Women’s Narratives offers teachers, students, and general readers a one-volume collection of the most memorable and important writing in prose by African American women before 1865. The book reproduces in one volume the canon of African American women’s fiction and autobiography during the slavery era in U.S. history. Each text in the volume represents a “first.” Maria Stewart’s Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality (1831) was the first political tract authored by an African American woman. Jarena Lee’s Life and Religious Experience (1836) was the first African American woman’s spiritual autobiography. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) was the first slave narrative to focus on the experience of a female slave in the United States. Frances E. W. Harper’s “The Two Offers” (1859) was the first short story published by an African American woman. Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) was the first novel written by an African American woman. Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) was the first autobiography authored by an African American woman. Charlotte Forten’s “Life on the Sea Islands” (1864) was the first contribution by an African American woman to a major American literary magazine (the Atlantic Monthly). Complemented with an introduction by William L. Andrews, this is the only one-volume collection to gather the most important works of the first great era of African American women’s writing.

* Provides complete, authoritative texts

William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.