Invasion and Insurrection: Security, Defense, and War in the Delaware Valley, 1621-1815
Jeffrey M. Dorwart
This book seeks to discover when, why, and how Delaware Valley communities, between 1621, when the Dutch West India Company issued instructions for the security and defense of the Delaware River until 1815, as the region abandoned its Committee of Defense of the Delaware at the end of the War of 1812, first used military force to repel invasion in times of war and suppress insurrection in peacetime. It traces how these mid-Atlantic communities confronted constant threats from real or imagined enemies, invasion and insurrection from earliest seventeenth-century settlement and articulated ideas and built institutions for security, defense, and war. It argues that from the beginning these Delaware Valley communities failed to differentiate between their concern for defense against external attacks or invasion in wartime with that of providing security for their home communities against internal enemies during peacetime. Though conflicted about using force both to defend against invasion and suppress insurrection, over time as the Delaware Valley communities moved to the center of colonial wars, revolution, and establishment of a republic and constitutional government, their long experience with security, defense, and war that blurred the lines between military defense in wartime and preserving peacetime security eventually fused into Article 1, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution to "empower the congress to use the militia to repel invasion and suppress insurrection."
Jeffery M. Dorwart is professor of military, naval, and New Jersey history at Rutgers University.
2009 ISBN 978-0-87413-036-2 $57.50
American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900
Editors: Martin Brückner and Hsuan L. Hsu
This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores intersections between geography and American literary history from the earliest geographic chronicles of the New World to the massive geopolitical imaginings of the 1890s. By foregrounding the unsteady nature of geographical boundaries, the physical and imaginary migrations that coexisted with literary nationalism, and the changing attitudes toward geographical settings, the essays in American Literary Geographies present textual, theoretical, and contextual alternatives to existing exceptionalist accounts of U.S. culture. Beginning with studies of the establishment of names, borders, and jurisdictions, the collection builds toward materialist readings of literary settings illuminated by maps, surveying tracts, travelogues, sailors' epitaphs, and various forms of racialized or gendered mobility. The focus on the literary and geographical discourse addresses more than social and political developments like imperialism, regionalism, and tourism; rather, this volume seeks to supplement literary histories by emphasizing spatial over temporal strategies as the organizing principle for telling the story of American literature.
Martin Brückner is Associate Professor of English and Material Culture studies at the University of Delaware. Hsuan L. Hsu teaches American literature at Yale University.
2007 ISBN: 978-0-87413-980-8 $55.00From Sacred to Secular: Visual Images in Early American Publications
Barbara E. Lacey
This examination of illustrations in early American books, pamphlets, magazines, almanacs, and broadsides provides a new perspective on the social, cultural, and political environment of the late colonial period and the early republic. American printers and engravers drew upon a rich tradition of Christian visual imagery. Used first to inculcate Protestant doctrines, regional symbolism later served to promote reverence for the new republic. Chapters are devoted to momento mori imagery, children's readers, visionary literature, and illustrated Bibles. One chapter shows the demonization of the Indians even as the Indian was being adopted as a symbol of America. Other chapters deal with propaganda for the American Revolution, canonization of leaders, secularized roles for women, and socialization of sites in the new nation. Throughout, analysis of image and text shows how the religious and the secular contrasted, coexisted, and intermingled in eighteenth-century American illustrated imprints.
Barbara E. Lacey is a Professor of History at St. Joseph College.
Includes more than 110 illustrations.2007 ISBN: 978-0-87413-961-7 $50.00
History of Delaware,
Fifth Edition
John A. Munroe
Originally undertaken by the author as a Bicentennial project in 1975, and now the standard history of the state, this volume chronicles the history of Delaware from the early 1600s to the present. John A. Munroe was H. Rodney Sharp Professor of History at the University of Delaware.
ISBN: 0-87413-947-3$34.50
May 13, 2008