Routledge Press


Over the Threshold Intimate Violence in Early America

Ed: Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy



A fascinating and disturbing collection offering a new angle of vision on relations
between men and women in early America. I predict a wide readership for this book.
Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to be Ladies


Like the classic study, Albion's Fatal Tree, Over the Threshold combines
first-rate scholarship with fascinating reading. Ranging from spousal murders in
Northern New England to domestic slave abuses in Mississippi, these essays
persuasively show how subtly interwoven were early American social conventions,
applications of justice, and the never-ending complications of gender, race, class, and
rapid social change. Often as gripping as a novel, this book richly deserves a large and
appreciative audience.. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South


A first-rate collection on the history of 'intimate violence' in colonial America and
the United States from the second half of the seventeenth century to the eve of the
Civil War, convincingly demonstrating both the historical context and the nature and
patterns of change in the levels of violence over time. The essays, both extremely
readable and uniformly of high quality, tell fascinating, often riveting, stories of love,
lust and general mayhem.. William Shade, author of Democratizing the Old Dominion


The articles in this anthology cover a wide range of environments, from not so
peace-loving Quaker Philadelphia to brutal slave plantations in Jamaica. The authors
investigate both patterns familiar to our own times, such as wife and child abuse and
infanticide, as well as ones peculiar to those times, such as routine violence directed at
servants and slaves. The articles are fresh, eye-opening, and bring to light the extent of
routine violence and the extensive communal and legal means available to end
it.. Elizabeth Pleck, author of Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial
Times to Present


Over the Threshold is the first in-depth work to explore the topic of intimate
violence in the American colonies and the early Republic. The essays examine
domestic violence in both urban and frontier environments, between husbands
and wives, parents and children, and masters and slaves. This compelling
collection puts commonly held notions about intimate violence under strict
historical scrutiny, often producing surprising results.Historywomen's studies
Sociology

Routledge
08/1999

288 pages
6 x 9

Cloth
ISBN: 0415918049

Paper
ISBN: 0415918057


Women and Religion in Early America, 1600-1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions

Marilyn J. Westerkamp

Women and Religion in Early America, 1600-1850 explores the first two
centuries of America's religious history, examining the relationship between the
socio-political environment, gender politics and religion.

Drawing its background from women's religious roles and experiences in England
during the Reformation, the book follows them through colonial settlement, the rise
of evangelicalism with the "great awakening," the American Revolution and
the second flowering of popular religion in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Marilyn J. Westerkamp traces the female spiritual tradition through the Puritans,
Baptists and Shakers, arguing that it was a strong empowering force for women in
early America.

Women's Studies

Routledge
05/1999

240 pages
N-1/4 x 9-1/4
Christianity and Society in the
Modern World

Cloth
ISBN: 0415098149
$85.00 (US)
$128.00 (Canada)

Paper
ISBN: 0415194482
$22.99 (US)
$34.99 (Canada)


October 3, 2000