Mercy Otis Warren
Selected Letters
Edited by Jeffrey H. Richards and Sharon M. Harris
The first major collection of letters by the Revolutionary-era woman writer
This volume gathers more than one hundred letters-most of them previously unpublished-written by Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814). Warren, whose works include a three-volume history of the American Revolution as well as plays and poems, was a major literary figure of her era and one of the most important American women writers of the eighteenth century. Her correspondents included Martha and George Washington, Abigail and John Adams, and Catharine Macaulay.
Until now, Warren's letters have been published sporadically, in small numbers, and mainly to help complete the collected correspondence of some of the famous men to whom she wrote. This volume addresses that imbalance by focusing on Warren's letters to her family members and other women. As they flesh out our view of Warren and correct some misconceptions about her, the letters offer a wealth of insights into eighteenth-century American culture, including social customs, women's concerns, political and economic conditions, medical issues, and attitude s on child rearing.
Letters Warren sent to other women who had lost family members (Warren herself lost three children) reveal her sympathies; letters to a favorite son, Winslow, show her sharing her ambitions with a child who resisted her advice. What readers of other Warren letters may have only sensed about her is now revealed more fully: she was a woman of considerable intellect, religious faith, compassion, literary intelligence, and acute sensitivity to the historical moment of even everyday events in the new American republic.
"Warren's letters offer a rich source of information about many larger issues of the time, including the status of women, the nature and extent of kinship ties, and changing political conditions and economic circumstances in revolutionary Massachusetts. This edition represents a valuable resource not just for those who study Mercy Otis Warren but for all students of revolutionary America." —Rosemarie Zagarri, author of Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic
Jeffrey H. Richards is a professor of English at Old Dominion University and author of a literary biography of Mercy Otis Warren among other books. Sharon M. Harris is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut. The author or editor of numerous books, she is founder of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers.
February 2009
ISBN 0820326801 cloth • $44.95368 pp. • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 in. • 4 b&w photos
Pioneering American Wine
Writings of Nicholas Herbemont, Master Viticulturist
Edited by David S. Shields
Important writings on viticulture by a pioneering American winemaker
This volume collects the most important writings on viticulture by Nicholas Herbemont (1771-1839), who is widely considered the finest practicing winemaker of the early United States. Included are his two major treatises on viticulture, thirty-one other published pieces on vine growing and wine making, and essays that outline his agrarian philosophy. Over the course of his career, Herbemont cultivated more than three hundred varieties of grapes in a garden the size of a city block in Columbia, South Carolina, and in a vineyard at his plantation, Palmyra, just outside the city.
Born in France, Herbemont carefully tested the most widely held methods of growing, pruning, processing, and fermentation in use in Europe to see which proved effective in the southern environment. His treatise "Wine Making," first published in the American Farmer in 1833, became for a generation the most widely read and reliable American guide to the art of producing potable vintage.
David S. Shields, in his introductory essay, positions Herbemont not only as important to the history of viticulture in America but also as a notable proponent of agricultural reform in the South. Herbemont advocated such practices as crop rotation and soil replenishment and was an outspoken critic of slave-based cotton culture.
David S. Shields is McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina. He edits the journal Early American Literature and also serves as general editor of the Publications of the Southern Texts Society series. Shields's books include Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America and Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690-1750.
"A welcome addition to our knowledge of the history of American wine."
—Thomas Pinney, author of A History of Wine in America
"A Vision of Wine presents a definitive account of the original ideas of a true pioneer of American viticulture. It is a pleasure to read."
—John R. Hailman, author of Thomas Jefferson on Wine
February 2009
ISBN 082033233X cloth • $29.95
344 pp. • 6 x 9 in. • 4 figures
Fathers of Conscience
Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South
Bernie D. Jones
How the courts dealt with wills bequeathing property or freedom to mixed race children
Fathers of Conscience examines high-court decisions in the antebellum South that involved wills in which white male planters bequeathed property, freedom, or both to women of color and their mixed-race children. These men, whose wills were contested by their white relatives, had used trusts and estates law to give their slave partners and children official recognition and thus circumvent the law of slavery. The will contests that followed determined whether that elevated status would be approved or denied by courts of law.
Bernie D. Jones argues that these will contests indicated a struggle within the elite over race, gender, and class issues-over questions of social mores and who was truly family. Judges thus acted as umpires after a man's death, deciding whether to permit his attempts to provide for his slave partner and family. Her analysis of these differing judicial opinions on inheritance rights for slave partners makes an important contribution to the literature on the law of slavery in the United States.
"An outstanding work that will be an important contribution to the monographic literature on the law of slavery in the United States."
—Mark Tushnet, Cromwell Professor of Law, Harvard University, and author of Slave Law in the American South: State V. Mann in History and Literature
Bernie D. Jones is an assistant professor in the Legal Studies department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
February 2009
ISBN 0820332518 paper • $24.95
ISBN 0820329800 cloth • $59.95
192 pp. • 6 x 9 in.
Shades of Green
Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770-1860
Ian Frederick Finseth
An examination of early and antebellum American literary culture that explores the relationships linking racial thought to natural science and natural imagery.
Shades of Green offers a creative reimagining of early and antebellum American literary culture by exploring the complex web of relationships linking racial thought to natural science and natural imagery. The book charts a dynamic shift in both polemical and imaginative literature during the century before the Civil War, as scientific, artistic, and spiritual vocabularies regarding "nature" became increasingly important for authors seeking to mobilize public opinion against slavery or to redefine racial identity. Finseth argues that these vocabularies both liberated and constrained antislavery philosophy and, more broadly, that our understanding of race in early American literature must take the natural world into account. In doing this, Finseth fuses a cultural history of the period with fresh readings of such major figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass.
Drawing on a range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, including aesthetics, anthropology, phenomenology, and ecocriticism, Shades of Green demonstrates the agility with which human thought about the natural and the racial leapt across formal epistemological, professional, and artistic boundaries. In this innovative account, the politics of race and slavery are shown to have been deeply intertwined with putatively apolitical cultural understandings of the natural world. The book will be of value to scholars in a variety of disciplines, including American studies, African American literary history, and environmental philosophy.
"This is a rich and insightful study that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of debates on slavery and race, particularly in relation to historically shifting conceptions of 'nature' and the human."
—Robert S. Levine, Associate General Editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature
"Finseth's attention to the convergence of antebellum views of slavery and rising appreciation of the sociopolitical import of the natural world (what we have come nowadays to call 'ecocriticism') provides a unique and welcome new departure in the study of slavery and abolitionism."
—Eric J. Sundquist, UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature at the University of California-Los Angeles
Ian Frederick Finseth is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Texas. He is the editor of The American Civil War: An Anthology of Essential Writings.
January 2009
ISBN 0820328650 cloth • $39.95320 pp. • 6 x 9 in. • 8 color photos
Here, George Washington Was Born
Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument
Seth C. Bruggeman
A lively and engaging look at patriotism and collective memory
In Here, George Washington Was Born, Seth C. Bruggeman examines the broader history of commemoration in the United States by focusing on the George Washington Birthplace National Monument in Virginia's Northern Neck, where contests of public memory have unfolded with particular vigor for nearly eighty years.
Washington left the birthplace with his family at a young age and rarely returned. The house burned in 1779 and would likely have passed from memory but for George Washington Parke Custis, who erected a stone marker on the site in 1815, creating the first birthplace monument in America. Both Virginia and the U.S. War Department later commemorated the site, but neither matched the work of a Virginia ladies association that in 1923 resolved to build a replica of the home. The National Park Service permitted construction of the "replica house" until a shocking archeological discovery sparked protracted battles between the two organizations over the building's appearance, purpose, and claims to historical authenticity.
Bruggeman sifts through years of correspondence, superintendent logs, and other park records to reconstruct delicate negotiations of power among a host of often unexpected claimants on Washington's memory. By paying close attention to costumes, furnishings, and other material culture, he reveals the centrality of race and gender in the construction of Washington's public memory and reminds us that national parks have not always welcomed all Americans. What's more, Bruggeman offers the story of Washington's birthplace as a cautionary tale about the perils and possibilities of public history by asking why we care about famous birthplaces at all.
"Bruggeman skillfully relates the story of Washington's birthplace to the growing literature on memory, commemoration, and public history. Here, George Washington Was Born is a very well informed, well researched, and effective case study that also serves as a broader introduction to cultural resource management."
—Theodore Karamanski, author of Rally 'Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War
"Students of public history and the National Park Service will learn much from Bruggeman's in-depth exploration of the decades-long conflict between popular veneration and historical analysis at Washington's birthplace. A fascinating tale of the elusive quest for authenticity at a modern American tourist site."
—David Glassberg, author of Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life
Seth C. Bruggeman is an assistant professor of history and American studies at Temple University.
November 2008
ISBN 0820331783 paper • $24.95ISBN 0820331775 cloth • $59.95
• 6 x 9 in. • 19 b&w photos • 1 map
Redeeming the Southern Family
Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in the Antebellum South
Scott Stephan
An examination of the day-to-day experiences of spirituality in the lives of southern women
In the years leading up to the Civil War, southern evangelical denominations moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the American South. Scott Stephan argues that female Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians played a crucial role in this transformation. While other scholars have pursued studies regarding southern evangelicalism in the context of churches, meetinghouses, and revivals, Stephan looks at the domestic rituals over which southern women had increasing authority-from consecrating newborns to God's care to ushering dying kin through life's final stages. Laymen and clergymen alike celebrated the contributions of these pious women to the experience and expansion of evangelicalism across the South.
This acknowledged domestic authority allowed some women to take on more public roles in the conversion and education of southern youth within churches and academies, although always in the name of family and always cloaked in the language of Christian self-abnegation. At the same time, however, women's work in the name of domestic devotion often put them at odds with slaves, children, or husbands in their households who failed to meet their religious expectations, and thereby jeopardized evangelical hopes of heavenly reunification of the family.
Stephan uses the journals and correspondence of evangelical women from across the South to understand the interconnectedness of women's personal, family, and public piety. Rather than seeing evangelical women as entirely oppressed or resigned to the limits of their position in a patriarchal slave society, Stephan seeks to capture a sense of what agency was available to women through their moral authority.
"This freshly researched and well-written book offers a nuanced interpretation of the ways in which evangelicalism both empowered and constrained elite white women in the Old South."
—Anya Jabour, author of Scarlett's Sisters: Young Women in the Old South
“Stephan’s graceful writing style and deep research in particular case studies enable him to present the ways in which women’s religious authority enhanced yet also complicated their family relationships and their lives. This book is an important contribution and among the first to focus solely on evangelical women across denominational lines.”
—Cynthia A. Kierner, author of Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700-1835
Scott Stephan is an assistant professor of history at Ball State University.
November 2008
ISBN 0820332224 cloth • $44.95336 pp. • 6 x 9 in.
Vanished Gardens
Finding Nature in Philadelphia
Sharon White
Encountering an urban landscape through the eye of a gardener
New to living and gardening in Philadelphia, Sharon White begins a journey through the landscape of the city, past and present, in Vanished Gardens. In prose now as precise and considered as the paths in a parterre, now as flowing and lyrical as an Olmsted vista, White explores Philadelphia's gardens as a part of the city's ecosystem and animates the lives of individual gardeners and naturalists working in the area around her home.
In one section of the book, White tours the gardens of colonial botanist John Bartram; his wife, Ann; and their son, writer and naturalist William. Other chapters focus on Deborah Logan, who kept a record of her life on a large farm in the late eighteenth century, and Mary Gibson Henry, twentieth-century botanist, plant collector, and namesake of the lily Hymenocallis henryae. Throughout White weaves passages from diaries, letters, and memoirs from significant Philadephia gardeners into her own striking prose, transforming each place she examines into a palimpsest of the underlying earth and the human landscapes layered over it.
White gives a surprising portrait of the resilience and richness of the natural world in Philadelphia and of the ways that gardening can connect nature to urban space. She shows that although gardens may vanish forever, the meaning and solace inherent in the act of gardening is always waiting to be discovered anew.
Sharon White is the author of a collection of poetry, Bone House. Her memoir, Field Notes, A Geography of Mourning, received the Julia Ward Howe Prize, Honorable Mention, from the Boston Author's Club. Some of her other awards include a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, the Leeway Foundation Award for Achievement, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared in many magazines and journals including Isotope, House Beautiful, Appalachia, Kalliope, and North American Review. She teaches writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.
"Vanished Gardens, like the gardens of Philadelphia it plots so brilliantly in its pages, presents itself as both highly formal and completely natural in its composition and its fruition. It is a book that saturates space, horizontal and vertical, as well as exhausts time. As with all excellent gardens, everywhere one looks one is delighted, surprised, awed, and restored. And as with all excellent writing about landscape, Vanished Gardens transforms the world before our eyes so that the reader, held in its thrall, begins to see to see."
—Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone
September 2008
ISBN 0820331562 cloth • $28.95
240 pp. • 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 in. • 1 photo
From Mounds to Megachurches
Georgia's Religious Heritage
David S. Williams
A sweeping overview of the role religion has played in Georgia's history
In From Mounds to Megachurches David S. Williams offers a sweeping overview of the role religion has played in Georgia's history, from precolonial days to the modern era.
Williams shows that colonial Georgia was a remarkably diverse place, populated by mainline colonial congregations that included Anglicans, Roman Catholics, German- and Spanish-speaking Jews, Salzburg Lutherans, and Scottish Presbyterians. It wasn't until much later that evangelicalism triumphed and Baptists became the overwhelmingly dominant denomination. Williams uses the stories of such important figures as Tomochichi, John Wesley, Jesse Mercer, Henry McNeal Turner, Lillian Smith, Martin Luther King Jr., and Clarence Jordan to portray larger historical narratives and denominational battles.
Race and religion were intertwined not only in such key movements as abolition and civil rights but also throughout Georgia's history. "In order to fully grasp the religious heritage of Georgia," Williams says, "we must return again and again to racial matters." Recently, Georgians have seen racial, ethnic, and religious diversity grow as Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Baha'i, and other communities have settled in the state. Williams explores how Georgians have dealt with contemporary issues of tolerance and how, at times, the state has taken center stage in our nation's culture wars.
Firmly rooting religious history in a social, cultural, and political context, Williams presents a representative and balanced account of Georgia's religious heritage. From Mounds to Megachurches sheds new light on what it means to be a Georgian by exploring an issue that remains central to life in the Sunbelt South.
"I know no other book that covers such a range of material, with such chronological sweep, in such short compass, for any southern state. Georgia and its citizens will be privileged to have such an accessible survey of their religious heritage available."
—John Boles, William P. Hobby Professor of History, Rice University, and author of The Great Revival: Beginnings of the Bible Belt
"David Williams has written a masterful and remarkably concise synthesis of Georgia's religious odyssey. His title is no mere artifice of alliteration, for he does indeed take us from thousand-year old moundbuilders to modern megachurches, and from Moravians to Muslims as well, reminding us of a persistent strain of religious diversity while placing the emergence and evolution of a Protestant evangelical ethos at the center of Georgia's historical experience."
—James C. Cobb, author of Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity
David S. Williams is director of the Honors Program and Meigs Professor of Religion at the University of Georgia, where he has taught since 1989. He is the author of two previous books in religious studies.
October 2008
ISBN 0820331759 cloth • $26.95240 pp. • 6 x 9 in. • 16 b&w photos
Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760-1835
Cedrick May
A literary and intellectual history of early black Christians who evangelized for freedom
This study focuses on the role of early African American Christianity in the formation of American egalitarian religion and politics. It also provides a new context for understanding how black Christianity and evangelism developed, spread, and interacted with transatlantic religious cultures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Cedrick May looks at the work of a group of pivotal African American writers who helped set the stage for the popularization of African American evangelical texts and the introduction of black intellectualism into American political culture: Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, John Marrant, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, and Maria Stewart.
Religion gave these writers agency and credibility, says May, and they appropriated the language of Christianity to establish a common ground on which to speak about social and political rights. In the process, these writers spread the principles that enabled slaves and free blacks to form communities, a fundamental step in resisting oppression. Moreover, says May, this institution building was overtly political, leading to a liberal shift in mainstream Christianity and secular politics as black churches and the organizations they launched became central to local communities and increasingly influenced public welfare and policy.
This important new study restores a sense of the complex challenges faced by early black intellectuals as they sought a path to freedom through Christianity.
"May's book is an important achievement that corrects the tendency to dismiss or marginalize religion in the discussion of black resistance, while advancing the understanding of the intimate connection between the religious and the political. It offers an exceptional combination of historical, literary, political, and theological readings of canonical and virtually unknown writers. Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Transatlantic is a very significant contribution to the fields of African American studies, transatlantic studies, religious studies as well as the larger disciplines of literary studies, history and theology."
—Katherine Clay Bassard, author of Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing
"Cedrick May skillfully advances our knowledge of 18th- and 19th-century African and African American writers and institution builders. Cogently contending that these writers have been ignored largely because their Black Christian piety has been discounted or misread, May shows how each spearheaded decisive movements for black liberation, education, and religious equality. May tells an engrossing story of these authors' intertextuality, underscoring that the 'black transatlantic' formed a small world and a powerful network."
—Joycelyn Moody, Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio
Cedrick May is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington.
168 pp. • 6 x 9 in.
The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth
Nationalism and Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784-1860
Eileen Ka-May Cheng
Early national historians in cultural context
American historians of the early national period, argues Eileen Ka-May Cheng, grappled with objectivity, professionalism, and other "modern" issues to a greater degree than their successors in later generations acknowledge. Her extensive readings of antebellum historians show that, by the 1820s, a small but influential group of practitioners had begun to develop many of the doctrines and concerns that undergird contemporary historical practice. The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth challenges the entrenched notion that America's first generations of historians were romantics or propagandists for a struggling young nation.
Cheng engages with the works of well-known early national historians like George Bancroft, William Prescott, and David Ramsay; such lesser-known figures as Jared Sparks and Lorenzo Sabine; and leading political and intellectual elites of the day, including Francis Bowen and Charles Francis Adams. She shows that their work, which was focused on the American Revolution, was often nuanced and surprisingly sympathetic in its treatment of American Indians and loyalists. She also demonstrates how the rise of the novel contributed to the emergence of history as an autonomous discipline, arguing that paradoxically "early national historians at once described truth in opposition to the novel and were influenced by the novel in their understanding of truth."
Modern historians should recognize that the discipline of history is itself a product of history, says Cheng. By taking seriously a group of too-often dismissed historians, she challenges contemporary historians to examine some ahistorical aspects of the way they understand their own discipline.
"Eileen Cheng's thorough and persuasive account of our nation's first historians will remind today's historians and their readers of how much we owe to the founding fathers of our profession. Writing before university seminars and graduate degrees became initiation rites of scholars, the first historians nevertheless displayed the hallmarks of professionalism: a concern for accuracy, a demand that history begin with documentary sources, and perhaps a quality which many academic historians have forgotten-the desire that their histories speak to all educated Americans. Cheng proves that we can still learn about and from these historians."
—Peter Charles Hoffer, author of Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and Fraud in the Writing of American History
"Those interested in the history of American historical writing-or nineteenth-century American intellectual history in general-will want to read this extremely well-written book."
—Peter Novick, author of That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession
August 2008; ISBN 0820330736 cloth • $44.95 • 6 x 9 in.
The Hanging of Angélique
The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal
Afua Cooper
Revealing a previously hidden chapter in the history of North American slavery
During the night of April 10, 1734, Montréal burned. Marie-Joseph Angélique, a twenty-nine-year-old slave, was arrested, tried, and found guilty of starting the blaze that consumed forty-six buildings. Suspecting that she had not acted alone and angered that she had maintained her innocence, Angélique's condemners tortured her after the trial. She confessed but named no accomplices. Before Angélique was hanged, she was paraded through the city. Afterward, her corpse was burned. Angélique, who had been born in Portugal, faded into the shadows of Canadian history, vaguely remembered as the alleged arsonist behind an early catastrophic fire.
The result of fifteen years of research, The Hanging of Angélique vividly tells the story of this strong-willed woman. Afua Cooper draws on extensive trial records that offer, in Angélique's own words, a detailed portrait of her life and a sense of what slavery was like in Canada at the time. Predating other first-person accounts by more than forty years, these records constitute what is arguably the oldest slave narrative in the New World.
Cooper sheds new light on the largely misunderstood or ignored history of slavery in Canada. She refutes the myth that Canada was a haven at the end of the Underground Railroad. Cooper also provides a context for Canada in the larger picture of transatlantic slavery while re-creating the tragic life of one woman who refused to accept bondage.
Afua Cooper is a leading scholar of the African diaspora in Canada. Her many publications include the coauthored collection We're Rooted Here and They Can't Pull Us Up, which won the Joseph Brant History Prize. She has also curated three exhibits on black Canadian history. Cooper taught history and Canadian studies at the University of Toronto and Caribbean studies at Ryerson University. She is a celebrated dub poet, whose work is available in print and audio. Essence has listed Cooper as one of the twenty-five notable international women who have "put themselves on the line to change the world."
April 2007; 360 pp.; 5.5 x 8 in.
ISBN 0820329398 cloth
$59.95
$19.95
Mary Telfair, Mary Telfair to Mary Few: Selected Letters, 1802-1844
Edited by Betty Wood
A friendship in letters that bridged distance and ideology
This volume gathers 142 of some 300 letters written by Mary Telfair of Savannah to her best friend Mary Few of New York. Telfair was born in 1791 to a wealthy, prominent, slaveholding Savannah family. Few, born in 1790 into equally affluent circumstances, moved with her family from Savannah to New York in 1799. Self-exiled because of their strong antislavery views, the Fews never returned to Georgia yet remained close to the Telfairs.
The close friendship between Telfair and Few ended only with their deaths in the 1870s. Regular travelers, they met on many occasions. Chiefly, however, they kept in touch through frequent correspondence (Few's letters to Telfair remain undiscovered, and may not have not survived). Wherever Telfair happened to be—in Savannah, the northern states, or Europe—she wrote to her friend at least two or three times a month.
Telfair's letters offer unique insights into the daily life of her family and the changes wrought by the deaths of so many of its members. The letters also reveal the shared interests and imperatives at the base of her various relationships with elite women, but especially with Mary Few, whom Telfair memorably described as her "Siamese Twin." The two women, neither of whom ever wed, nonetheless discussed the rights and obligations of marriage as well as their own state of "single blessedness." They also conversed about shared intellectual interests—literature, lecture topics, women's education—as well as the foibles of common acquaintances. Here is a fascinating, unfamiliar world as revealed in what editor Betty Wood calls "one of the most remarkable literary exchanges between women of high social rank in the early national and antebellum United States."
Betty Wood is a reader in American history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Girton College, Cambridge. She is the author of several books, including Gender, Race, and Rank in a Revolutionary Age (Georgia), Women's Work, Men's Work (Georgia), and Slavery in Colonial America, 1619-1776.
July 2007
360 pp.
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 in.
2 figures
$44.95
The Other War of 1812
The Patriot War and the American Invasion of Spanish East Florida
James G. Cusick
"A superb, highly readable history."—American Historical Review
Resurrecting a forgotten chapter in transatlantic history, James G. Cusick tells how, just before the United States went to war against Great Britain in 1812, an ill-advised invasion of a Spanish colony became a stage on which the young republic clumsily acted out its imperial ambitions and racial fears. With the halfhearted backing of President James Madison and Secretary of State James Monroe, a party of Georgians invaded East Florida, confident that partisans there would help them swiftly wrest the colony away from Spain. The raid was a strategic and political disaster. Few sympathizers materialized, official U.S. support dissolved, and an extended guerrilla war ensued.
This was the "other war of 1812," or the Patriot War. Cusick, a lively storyteller as well as a meticulous scholar, conveys the savagery of the borderlands conflict that pitted American adventurers and anti-Spanish partisans against Spanish loyalists and their allies, who included Seminole Indians and escaped slaves. At the same time, Cusick looks at the American motivations behind the invasion, including apprehensions about Florida's growing population of unregulated blacks and geopolitical intrigues involving Spain, Britain, and France.
"A carefully researched history of Spanish East Florida's Patriot War, a complicated conflict that involved covert action by American forces, greedy border marauders from Georgia, rebels inside the province, Spanish troops and provincial white militia, free black militia, and Seminole warriors (both Indian and African American). The result of the war was devastation of the province's plantations and an end to a remarkable period of economic expansion."
—Daniel L. Schafer, University of North Florida
"Greatly expands our understanding of how the Patriot War of 1812-13, a truly forgotten conflict, was interwoven with the War of 1812, American expansion, and developing ideas about free armed blacks living in the Spanish-American borderlands of Florida. Ultimately, the acquisition of Florida--a process that began with the Patriot War--would be the only way to satisfy American territorial ambitions and racial fears."
—Gene A. Smith, Texas Christian University
"A superb, highly readable history of events as seen in the local context."
—Paul E. Hoffman, The American Historical Review
James G. Cusick is curator of the P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History at the University of Florida. He is a research associate of the St. Augustine Historical Society and the Historic St. Augustine Research Institute and serves on the board of directors for the Seminole Wars Historic Foundation, the Gulf South History and Humanities Conference, and the Florida Historical Society.
April 2007; 6 x 9 in.; 1 photo; 9 maps
ISBN 0820329215 paper$22.95
Lowcountry Hurricanes
Three Centuries of Storms at Sea and Ashore
Walter J. Fraser Jr.
A hurricane history of the Georgia-South Carolina coastal region
At once sobering and thrilling, this illustrated history recounts how, for the past three hundred years, hurricanes have altered lives and landscapes along the Georgia-South Carolina seaboard. A prime target for the fierce storms that develop in the Atlantic, the region is especially vulnerable because of its shallow, gradually sloping sea floor and low-lying coastline.
With an eye on both natural and built environments, Fraser’s narrative ranges from the first documented storm in 1686 to recent times in describing how the lowcountry has endured some of the severest effects of wind and water. This chronology of the most notable lowcountry storms is also a useful primer on the basics of hurricane dynamics.
Fraser tells how the 800-ton Rising Sun foundered in open water near Charles Town during the hurricane of 1700. About one hundred persons were aboard. All perished. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, he describes the storm surge of an 1804 hurricane that submerged most of Tybee Island and swept over the fort on nearby Cockspur Island, drowning soldiers and civilians. Readers may have their own memories of Hurricanes Andrew, Opal, and Hugo. Although hurricanes frequently lead to significant loss of life, Fraser recounts numerous gripping instances of survival and rescue at sea and ashore.
The author smoothly weaves the lowcountry’s long social, political, and economic history with firsthand reports and data accumulated by the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Generously illustrated with contemporary and historical photographs, this is a readable and informative resource on one of nature’s most awesome forces.
Walter J. Fraser Jr. is professor emeritus in the Department of History at Georgia Southern University. His many books include Savannah in the Old South (Georgia), Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Georgia in the Civil War, and Charleston! Charleston!
A volume in the series A Wormsloe Foundation Publication
“Engaging stories and good data about bad weather, all with the long view in mind. Fraser’s book is a fine primer to lowcountry hurricanes.”
—Mart Stewart, Professor of History, Western Washington University
“Walter Fraser has assembled an intriguing record of lowcountry hurricane history. It serves as a reminder of how vulnerable our coastal communities really are.”
—Jay Barnes, author of Florida’s Hurricane History and North Carolina’s Hurricane History
September 2006360 pp. 6 x 9 1/8 in. 63 b&w photos 2 tables 1 map
ISBN 0820328669 cloth
$24.95
Georgia’s Frontier Women
Female Fortunes in a Southern Colony
Ben Marsh
A pioneering portrait of women’s involvement in the colonization and consolidation of Georgia
Ranging from Georgia’s founding in the 1730s until the American Revolution in the 1770s, Georgia’s Frontier Women explores women’s changing roles amid the developing demographic, economic, and social circumstances of the colony’s settling. Georgia was launched as a unique experiment on the borderlands of the British Atlantic world. Its female population was far more diverse than any in nearby colonies at comparable times in their formation. Ben Marsh tells a complex story of narrowing opportunities for Georgia’s women as the colony evolved from uncertainty toward stability in the face of sporadic warfare, changes in government, land speculation, and the arrival of slaves and immigrants in growing numbers.
Marsh looks at the experiences of white, black, and Native American women-old and young, married and single, working in and out of the home. Mary Musgrove, who played a crucial role in mediating colonist-Creek relations, and Marie Camuse, a leading figure in Georgia’s early silk industry, are among the figures whose life stories Marsh draws on to illustrate how some frontier women broke down economic barriers and wielded authority in exceptional ways.
Marsh also looks at how basic assumptions about courtship, marriage, and family varied over time. To early settlers, for example, the search for stability could take them across race, class, or community lines in search of a suitable partner. This would change as emerging elites enforced the regulation of traditional social norms and as white relationships with blacks and Native Americans became more exploitive and adversarial. Many of the qualities that earlier had distinguished Georgia from other southern colonies faded away.
Ben Marsh is a lecturer in history at Stirling University in Scotland.
“Ben Marsh has given us a fresh and important look not only at women’s changing economic and cultural worlds in colonial Georgia, but at the dynamic and complex nature of colonial Georgia as a whole. Given its scope and its ambitiousness, Georgia’s Frontier Women is certain to become one of the most authoritative books on colonial Georgia for some time.”
—Michele Gillespie, Professor of History, Wake Forest University
“Georgia’s Frontier Women is an important and welcome addition to the literature on Georgia’s history. Because this work addresses the critical role ofwomen in the Georgia colony, it fills a significant gap in our understanding of Georgia’s settlement.”
—Lee Ann Caldwell, Professor of History, Georgia College & State University
6 x 9 in. 10 photos 3 tables 1 map 2 figures
ISBN 0820328820 cloth
$34.95
The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism
Martin E. Marty
A lively survey of the changing face of Protestantism in America
For 350 years, Protestantism was the dominant religion in America—and its influence spilled over in many directions into the wider culture. Religious historian Martin E. Marty looks at the factors behind both the long period of Protestant ascendancy in America and the comparatively recent diffusion and diminution of its authority. Marty ranges across time, covering such things as the establishment of the Jamestown settlement in 1607, the 1955 publication of Will Herberg’s landmark book Protestant-Catholic-Jew, and the current period of American ethnic and religious pluralism.
For centuries, American Protestantism dominated in three main ways, says Marty: in the sheer numbers of its committed practitioners (spread across some two hundred denominations), in the Protestant leanings of nonadherents, and in the influence of the Protestant ethic in activities as diverse as business and art. To discover what is particularly “American” about Protestantism in this country, Marty looks at Protestant creencias, or beliefs, that complement or supplement pure doctrine. These include the notion of God as an agent of America’s destiny and the impact of the biblical credos of mission, stewardship, and vocation on innumerable nonreligious matters of daily life. Marty also discusses the vigencias, or binding (though unwritten) customs, of Protestantism. They include the tendencies to interpret matters of faith in market terms and to conflate biblical and enlightenment ideology into “civic faith.”
Challenges to Protestant hegemony came and went over the centuries, says Marty, but never in such force and to such effect as in the twentieth century. Among other factors contributing to the rise of pluralism and to schisms between mainstreamers and Fundamentalists, Marty lists changes in immigration laws, U.S. Supreme Court decisions on school prayer, the women’s movement, and Vatican II.
Today, our Protean spirituality is the topic of everything from sermons to bumper stickers. All in all, this is good, reassures Marty, for to debate our spirituality is to sustain the life of a functioning, thinking, believing republic. Those who pine for some golden age of Protestantism are misled by nostalgia or resentment. The real work to be done by Protestants now is to serve, partner, and cooperate where they once managed, controlled, and directed.
Martin E. Marty has taught at the University of Chicago in its Divinity School, its Department of History, and its Committee on the History of Culture. He is the author of more than forty books, including the three-volume Modern American Religion; The One and the Many; Politics, Religion, and the Common Good; and Righteous Empire, which won the National Book Award. Marty has long been associated with the Christian Century as an editor and writer, and he is a past president of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History, and the American Catholic Historical Association.
“In three delightfully witty and deceptively informal chapters, Martin Marty distills decades of research and reflection on religion in America. All who wish to understand not only the complex trajectory of American Protestantism from 1607 to the present but also the broader contours of American religious history—and indeed the nation itself—will welcome this book.”
—Paul S. Boyer, Merle Curti Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Editor-in-Chief, The Oxford Companion to United States History
“Once again, Martin Marty serves as our master guide to American Protestantism. With wonderful ease of expression, he couples a historic guide to the always plural nature of the American Protestant tradition with a provocative interpretation of efforts made by contemporary Protestant leaders to exert influence while no longer ‘running the show.’“
—R. Laurence Moore, Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies / History, Cornell University
“An extremely valuable contribution to the conversation about interpretations of U.S. religion. Not since Edwin S. Gaustad’s Religion in America: History and Historiography (1973) has there been a short volume that provides as helpful an overview of the field. This is essential reading for all scholars of American religious history.”
—Thomas A. Tweed, The Catholic Historical Review
October 2006
96 pp. 5 x 8 in.
ISBN 0820328618 paper
$16.95
Pharsalia
An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780-1880
Lynn A. Nelson, Foreword by Paul S. Sutter
A case study of the incongruous partnership of capitalism and agrarianism
Pharsalia, a plantation located in piedmont Virginia at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is one of the best-documented sites of its kind. Drawing on the exceptionally rich trove of papers left behind by the Massie family, Pharsalia’s owners, this case study demonstrates how white southern planters paradoxically relied on capitalistic methods even as they pursued an ideal of agrarian independence. Lynn A. Nelson also shows how the contradictions between these ends and means would later manifest themselves in the southern conservation movement.
Nelson follows the fortunes of Pharsalia’s owners, telling how Virginia’s traditional extensive agriculture contributed to the soil’s erosion and exhaustion. Subsequent attempts to balance independence and sustainability through a complex system of crop rotation and resource recycling ultimately gave way to an intensive, slave-based form of agricultural capitalism.
Pharsalia could not support the Massies’ aristocratic ambitions, and it was eventually parceled up and sold off by family members. The farm’s story embodies several fundamentals of modern U.S. environmental thought. Southerners’ nineteenth-century quest for financial and ecological independence provided the background for conservationists’ attempts to save family farming. At the same time, farmers’ failure to achieve independence while maximizing profits and crop yields drove them to seek government aid and regulation. These became some of the hallmarks of conservation efforts in the New Deal and beyond.
Lynn A. Nelson is an associate professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University.
“Lynn Nelson has given us a wonderful case study of southern agricultural practices during the nineteenth century. His ‘biography’ of Pharsalia, a plantation in upland Virginia, is in every sense a life story not only of planters and slaves but also of the crops, weeds, livestock, and other organisms that inhabited the land for nearly a hundred years. Exhaustively researched and quietly provocative, this important book should find a wide audience among scholars interested in the South, the environment, agriculture, or antebellum slavery.”
—Timothy Silver, author of A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1900
February 2007
6 x 9 in. 12 photos 4 maps
ISBN 0820326275 cloth
$39.95
Art of the Cherokee
Prehistory to the Present
Susan C. Power
Recognizing the aesthetic and historic importance of Cherokee art
This illustrated historical overview features some of the finest examples of Cherokee art in private, corporate, and museum collections here and abroad. As Susan C. Power ranges across the rich legacy of Cherokee artistic achievement from the sixteenth century to the present, she discusses such objects as baskets, masks, beaded and embroidered garments, jewelry, and paintings. Power draws on archival and scholarly sources and, when possible, the artists’ own words as she interprets these objects in terms of their design, craftsmanship, style, and most important, their function and meaning in Cherokee history and culture.
In addition to recognizing artistic merit and significant contributions to the development of Cherokee art, Power reveals the wide range of geographical locales from which Cherokee art has originated. This includes the Cherokee’s tribal homeland in the Southeast, the tribe’s areas of resettlement in the West, and places in the United States and beyond to which individuals subsequently moved. Intimately connected to the time and place of its creation, Cherokee art changed along with Cherokee social, political, and economic circumstances. The entry of European explorers into the Southeast, the Trail of Tears, the American Civil War, and the signing of treaties with the U.S. government are among the transforming events in Cherokee art history that Power discusses.
In the twentieth century, as Cherokee artists joined the mainstream art world, they helped shape the Native American Fine Art Movement. Today, Cherokee artists continue to create in an artistic voice that is uniquely Cherokee—a voice that is both traditional and contemporary.
Susan C. Power is a professor emerita of art at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. Her book Early Art of the Southeastern Indians (Georgia) was selected by the American Library Association as a “Best of the Best from the University Presses” title.
“Power’s work is a groundbreaking art history of North Carolina and Oklahoma Cherokees. In my opinion this is one of the most important works since that of the early ethnographers including Frank Speck and James Mooney. Meticulous research and a consistent use of direct information from living Cherokee people are reflected in this sensitive and well-documented art history of a vibrant and resilient people.”
—Mary Jo Watson, Associate Dean of the College Fine Arts and Associate Professor of Native American Art History at the University of Oklahoma
“Susan Power aptly examines the role of Cherokee Indian art and offers a significant contribution to an understanding of Cherokee culture and traditions. Carefully compiling available literature and coupling it with her own extensive research, Power elicits a very approachable balance in her writing. Her study of early works and the influence these pieces have on contemporary artists is very informative. Power’s efforts to present so engaging a story will enhance our knowledge of the Cherokee’s creativity in the face of adversity and garner respect for Cherokee artists.”
—Andrew L. Strout, University of Oklahoma School of Art
February 2007
8 1/2 x 11 in. 55 color, 20 b&w photos 3 maps
ISBN 0820327662 cloth
$49.95
$24.95
Liberty's Captives
Narratives of Confinement in the Print Culture of the Early Republic
Daniel E. Williams, Associate Editors Christina Riley Brown, Salita S. Bryant, Dixon Bynum, Boyd Childress, and Randy Jasmine, eds.
An astonishing variety of captivity narratives emerged in the fifty years following the American Revolution; however, discussions about them have usually focused on accounts of Native American captivities. To most readers, then, captivity narratives are synonymous with "godless savages," the vast frontier, and the trials of kidnapped settlers. This anthology, the first to bring together various types of captivity narratives in a comparative way, broadens our view of the form as it shows how the captivity narrative, in the nation-building years from 1770 to 1820, helped to shape national debates about American liberty and self-determination.
Included here are accounts by Indian captives, but also prisoners of war, slaves, victims of pirates and Barbary corsairs, impressed sailors, and shipwreck survivors. The volume's seventeen selections have been culled from hundreds of such texts, edited according to scholarly standards, and reproduced with the highest possible degree of fidelity to the originals.
Some selections are fictional or borrow heavily from other, true narratives; all are sensational. Immensely popular with American readers, they were also a lucrative commodity that helped to catalyze the explosion of print culture in the early Republic. As Americans began to personalize the rhetoric of their recent revolution, captivity narratives textually enacted graphic scenes of defiance toward deprivation, confinement, and coercion. At a critical point in American history they helped make the ideals of nationhood real to common citizens.
Daniel E. Williams is a professor of English at Texas Christian University. He has also edited an anthology of early American criminal narratives, Pillars of Salt.
"Liberty's Captives makes a valuable and original contribution to the field of captivity narrative studies by expanding and theorizing generic boundaries and making available obscure and fascinating texts."
—Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, editor of Women's Indian Captivity Narratives
"In Liberty’s Captives Williams recovers a cache of treasure too long buried in popular print culture. Here we find the full text of prisoner-of-war narratives from the nation’s first two wars, as well as from its adventures on the Barbary Coast; pirate captivities and shipwreck narratives; and accounts of maritime impressment, among others. And as with his earlier Pillars of Salt, Williams not only proves a capable editor but places his material in the full frame of American cultural history. Finally, the book not only greatly enlarges our understanding of the term 'captivity narrative' but also raises important questions about the relation of liberty to bondage in the New Republic. From its pages come voices we are likely never to forget."
—Philip Gura, William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and author of Jonathan Edwards: America's Evangelical
June 2006; 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 in.; 28 photos
ISBN 0-8203-2800-6 cloth
$59.95
$24.95
Life of General Washington
David Humphreys, With George Washington's Remarks.
Edited and with an Introduction by Rosemarie Zagarri
This biography of George Washington—the only one authorized by the general himself--was written by his close friend and military aide David Humphreys. It offers a rare, intimate glimpse of Washington's life, from his birth in 1732 until his assumption of the presidency in 1789. After reviewing a portion of the manuscript, he added a section of "Remarks," which reveals a personal side that he seldom exposed in his letters or other writings.
In a remarkable feat of historical detective work, Rosemarie Zagarri assembled manuscripts from three separate archives to reconstruct and publish the complete biography along with Washington's "Remarks."
Rosemarie Zagarri is a professor of history at George Mason University. Her other books are The Politics of Size: Representation in the United States, 1776-1850 and A Woman's Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution.
"Lieutenant Colonel Humphreys was a minor Connecticut poet and an aide-de-camp to George Washington during the Revolution. For 18 months in 1787-88 he lived with the Washingtons at Mount Vernon. During that time he began an "authorized" biography which the general himself corrected and annotated. Only part of the work has previously been published—in 1789, anonymously. The whole was assembled from parts found in three repositories. It's a curious work, with much detail on the French and Indian War but only a page or two on the American Revolution. Washington's "Remarks" are priceless, and the long conversations with Humphreys about the presidency in 1789 are reproduced here. The book belongs on all Washington shelves."
—Library Journal
"Humphreys had an opportunity to know Washington's private opinions better than any other person who wrote an account of his early career. Humphrey's interpretation of events may therefore reflect Washington's perceptions of his role in history more faithfully than any other eighteenth-century sources, including Washington's own letters."
—Brent Tarter, Journal of Southern History
"Despite it's limitations, Humphrey's narrative will provide interesting insights for historians of the revolutionary era."
—William A. Pencak, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
April 2006 ; 6 x 9 in.; 10 photos
$19.95
Nationalism in the New World
Don H. Doyle and Marco Antonio Pamplona, eds.
Nationalism in the New World brings together work by scholars from the United States, Canada, Latin America, and Europe to discuss the common problem of how the nations of the Americas grappled with the basic questions of nationalism: Who are we? How do we imagine ourselves as a nation? Debates over the origins and meanings of nationalism have emerged at the forefront of the humanities and social sciences over the past two decades. However, these discussions have been mostly about nations in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, or Africa. In addition, their focus is usually on the violence spawned by ethnic and religious strains of nationalism, which have been largely absent in the Americas.
The contributors to this volume "Americanize" the conversation on nationalism. They ask how the Americas fit into the larger world of nations and in what ways they present distinctive forms of nationhood. Such questions are of particular importance because, as the editors write, "the American nations that came into being in the wake of revolutions that shook the Atlantic world beginning in 1776 provided models of what the modern world might become."
American nations were among the first nation-states to emerge on the world stage. As former colonies with multiethnic populations, American nations could not logically rest their claim to nationhood on ancient bonds of blood and history. Out of a world of empires and colonies the independent states of the Americas forged new nations based on a varied mix of modern civic ideals instead of primordial myths, on ethnic and religious diversity instead of common descent, and on future hopes rather than ancient roots.
Don H. Doyle is McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. His books include Nations Divided (Georgia) and Faulkner's County. Marco Antonio Pamplona is a professor of history at Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro and Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niterói, Brazil. He is the author of Riots, Republicanism, and Citizenship.
"This is a much-needed volume on the comparative history of nationalism in the Americas up to the 1930s that will bring an important American perspective to a subject studied more often in its European (and particularly Eastern European) dimensions."
—Jurgen Buchenau, Associate Professor and Director of Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at CharlotteJuly 2006 6 x 9 in.; 2 b&w photos; 1 map
ISBN 0-8203-2654-2 cloth
$59.95
$22.95
Caribbean and Southern
Transnational Perspectives on the U.S. South
Helen Regis, ed.
Moving back and forth through the colonial and postcolonial eras of the American South and the Caribbean, the six essays in this volume take a fresh look at the regions' transnational linkages. With their focus on border zones, hybridity, and creolization, the essays challenge our notions about the cultural and economic trajectories of the African diaspora in this part of the world. For instance, was the movement of slaves seeking freedom in America always south to north? Or was the movement of slaves in bondage always westward, from Africa to the Caribbean or America?
One consequence of the work discussed in the volume is an expansion of the physical borders of the Caribbean-Southern sphere to include, for example, the Chesapeake Bay area. Lesser-known populations, such as the Black Seminoles, also gain heightened visibility. Runaway slaves who first allied themselves with Florida Indians, the Black Seminoles later migrated to the Bahamas. Other topics covered include foodways, environmental justice and Caribbean tourism, and religious or celebratory traditions of vodou, Jonkonnu, and Rocks.
Helen Regis is an associate professor of geography and anthropology at Lousiana State University. She is the author of Fulbe Voices and coauthor of Charitable Choices.
August 2006
6 x 9 in., 2 photos, 6 tables, 4 maps, 4 figures
ISBN 0-8203-2831-6 cloth
$39.95
$19.95
Traveling South
Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity
John D. Cox
How travel writing about the South shaped the identity of a nation
Traveling South is the first major study of how narratives of travel through the antebellum South helped construct an American national identity during the years between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. John Cox makes his case on the basis of a broad range of texts that includes slave narratives, domestic literature, and soldiers’ diaries, as well as more traditional forms of travel writing. In the process he extends the boundaries of travel literature both as a genre and as a subject of academic study.
The writers of these intranational accounts struggled with the significance of travel through a region that was both America and “other.” In writings by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and William Bartram, for example, the narrators create personal identities and express their Americanness through travel that, Cox argues, becomes a defining aspect of the young nation. In the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup, the complex relationship between travel and slavery highlights contemporary debates over the meaning of space and movement. Both Fanny Kemble and Harriet Jacobs explore the intimate linkings of women’s travel and the construction of an ideal domestic space, whereas Frederick Law Olmsted seeks, through his travel writing, to reform the southern economy and expand a New England yeoman ideology throughout the nation. The Civil War diaries of Union soldiers, written during the years that witnessed the largest movement of travelers through the South, echo earlier themes while concluding that the South should not be transformed in order to become sufficiently “American”; rather, it was and should remain a part of the American nation, regardless of perceived differences.
John D. Cox is an assistant professor of English at Georgia College & State University. He also serves as the associate director of the Center for Georgia Studies and the assistant editor of the Flannery O’Connor Review.
"Cox's critical approach reflects an unusual and interesting combination of interests in the cognate areas of travel writing, domestic narratives, and nationalist literature. I know of no other book quite like this one, and I consider it a fresh approach to an important and timely subject."
—Michael P. Branch, editor of Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden
"Traveling South is a solid and well-conceptualized book with very smart and persuasive arguments and insights. Cox shows excellent command of the scholarship of travel, travel writing, and of the individual travelers he analyzes. Cox carves out a niche in the scholarship of the field as well as in the interpretation of texts of travel."
—Mary S. Schriber, author of Writing Home: American Women Abroad
November 2005
264 pp.
6 x 9 in.
2 photos
$39.95
Equiano, the African
Biography of a Self-Made Man
Vincent Carretta
An epic of slavery, freedom, and the will to succeed
This definitive biography tells the story of the former slave Olaudah Equiano (1745?-97), who in his day was the English-speaking world's most renowned person of African descent. Equiano's greatest legacy is his classic 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African . A key document of the early movement to ban the slave trade, it includes the earliest known firsthand description by a slave of the horrific Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas. Equiano, the African is filled with fresh revelations about this many-sided figure--most notably that Equiano may have been born not in Africa, as he claimed, but in South Carolina.
For Vincent Carretta, such disconnects between the public persona and actual life of Equiano only increase his importance as a window into a number of complex, overlapping worlds. Equiano was a sailor, adventurer, entrepreneur, and jack-of-all-trades. Carretta distills years of scholarly detective work on Equiano's life and writings into a richly textured portrait of the man whose many transformations took him from slave to slave trader to anti-slave-trade advocate, and from pagan to Christian.
This is "life and times" history at its best. Throughout, Carretta relates The Interesting Narrative to the historical record on Equiano, as well as to the century's economic, political, and religious undercurrents. Carretta argues that Equiano may have fabricated his African roots and his survival of the Middle Passage not only to sell more copies of his book but also to help advance the movement against the slave trade. Equiano, the African will leave readers with a fuller appreciation of the man's achievements and a deeper understanding of race and slavery in the Atlantic world.
"A remarkable man has been blessed with a superbly qualified biographer. Vincent Carretta knows more about Equiano than anyone alive, has carefully and respectfully edited his work, has boldly raised tantalizing questions about his origins, and has meticulously tracked down information about him that no one else has found. This book will be the authoritative source about Equiano's life for many years to come."--Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
"This biography provides an accurate, fair-minded, reliable, and engagingly written account of the life of the man whom Carretta describes justifiably as 'the most famous person of African descent in the Atlantic world.' In this rewarding study, Carretta invests the large store of erudition he has amassed from many years of assiduous study of Equiano's life and times. I know of no scholar who is as steeped in Equiano and no one who has done more to restore Equiano and his literary work to serious scholarly consideration."--William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Vincent Carretta, professor of English at the University of Maryland, is currently a senior fellow at Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. His books include scholarly editions of the works of Equiano and of Equiano's contemporaries Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Phillis Wheatley.
ISBN 0-8203-2571-6 cloth
$29.95
August 6, 2008