Theda Perdue
An enlightening look at issues of race, "blood,"
and kinship in the American South from a Native perspective
On the southern frontier in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European
men--including traders, soldiers, and government agents--sometimes married Native
women. Children of these unions were known by whites as "half-breeds."
The Indian societies into which they were born, however, had no corresponding
concepts of race or "blood." Moreover, counter to European customs
and laws, Native lineage was traced through the mother only. No familial status
or rights stemmed from the father. "Mixed Blood" Indians looks at
a fascinating array of such birth- and kin-related issues as they were alternately
misunderstood and astutely exploited by both Native and European cultures. Theda
Perdue discusses the assimilation of non-Indians into Native societies, their
descendants' participation in tribal life, and the white cultural assumptions
conveyed in the designation "mixed blood." In addition to unions between
European men and Native women, Perdue also considers the special cases arising
from the presence of white women and African men and women in Indian society.
From the colonial through the early national era, "mixed bloods" were
often in the middle of struggles between white expansionism and Native cultural
survival. That these "half-breeds" often resisted appeals to their
"civilized" blood helped foster an enduring image of Natives as fickle
allies of white politicians, missionaries, and entrepreneurs. "Mixed Blood"
Indians rereads a number of early writings to show us the Native outlook on
these misperceptions and to make clear that race is too simple a measure of
their--or any peoples'--motives.
Theda Perdue is a professor of history at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has written or edited ten books,
including Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 and Slavery and
the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866.
"A useful addition to our store of knowledge
of Highlanders in eighteenth-century America."
--Journal of American History
"Very well written and informative . . . Parker succeeds in establishing
the importance of the Highland Scots at Darien in relation to their impact on
other colonies, as well as the state of Georgia's history."
--Journal of Southern History
History, U.S. • Social Science
5.5 x 8.25 • pp. • 4 photos 1 map
To be published in January 2003
Hardcover
ISBN 0-8203-2453-1 (cl.) • $24.95
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Scottish Highlanders in Colonial Georgia
The Recruitment, Emigration, and Settlement at Darien, 1735-1748
Anthony W. Parker
The Scottish Highlands meet the Georgia Coast
Between 1735 and 1748 hundreds of young men
and their families emigrated from the Scottish Highlands to the Georgia coast
to settle and protect the new British colony. The trustees of the colony and
military governor James Oglethorpe wanted settlers who were accustomed to hardship,
militant in nature, and willing to become frontier farmer-soldiers. In this
respect, the Highlanders fit the bill perfectly through training and tradition.
In Scottish Highlanders in Colonial Georgia, Anthony W. Parker explains what
factors motivated the Highlanders to leave their native glens of Scotland for
the pine barrens of Georgia. He considers how their cultural distinctiveness
and "old world" experience prepared the Scots to play a vital role
in the survival of Georgia in this early and precarious moment in its history.
Anthony W. Parker is a lecturer in the School
of American Studies and the Department of Modern History at the University of
Dundee in Dundee, Scotland.
"This book is a triumph of research. .
. . The author takes us by the hand and leads us into the world of the 18th
century French minor aristocracy . . . The result is that readers will gain
an understanding of the French settlements in Georgia that they never had before."
--Edward Cashin
History, U.S.
6 x 9 • 200 pp.
Published: September 2002
Paperback
ISBN 0-8203-2456-6 (pa.) • $19.95
Martha L. Keber
A fresh look at the French communities of the
Georgia coast--and their transatlantic ties
This detailed biography of a man who flourished in two very different worlds
opens a new doorway into the societies of prerevolutionary France and postrevolutionary
Georgia. Christophe Poulain DuBignon (1739-1825) was the son of an impoverished
Bréton aristocrat. Breaking social convention to engage in trade, he
began his long career first as a cabin boy in the navy of the French India Company
and later as a sea captain and privateer. After retiring from the sea, DuBignon
lived in France as a "bourgeois noble" with income from land, moneylending,
and manufacturing. Uprooted by the French Revolution, DuBignon fled to Georgia
late in 1790, settling among other refugees from France and the Caribbean. A
community long overlooked by historians of the American South, this circle of
planters, nobles, and bourgeois was bound together by language, a shared faith,
and the émigré experience. On his Jekyll Island slave plantation,
DuBignon learned to cultivate cotton. However, he underwrote his new life through
investments on both sides of the Atlantic, extending his business ties to Charleston,
Liverpool, and Nantes. None of his ventures, Martha L. Keber notes, compelled
DuBignon to dwell long on the inconsistencies between his entrepreneurial drive
and his noble heritage. His worldview always remained aristocratic, patriarchal,
and conservative. DuBignon's passage of eighty-six years took him from a tradition-bound
Europe to the entrepôts of the Indian Ocean to the plantation culture
of a Georgia barrier island. Wherever he went, commerce was the constant. Based
on Keber's exhaustive research in European, African, and American archives,
Seas of Gold, Seas of Cotton portrays a resilient nobleman so well schooled
in the principles of the marketplace that he prospered in the Old World and
the New.
Martha L. Keber is a professor of history at
Georgia College & State University.
History, U.S. • Biography & Autobiography
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • 328 pp. • 11 photos 5 maps
To be published in June 2002
Hardcover
ISBN 0-8203-2360-8 (cl.) • $39.95
Joseph Fichtelberg
A crucial addition to American literary criticism
on sentimental literature
Past studies have discussed antebellum and early national sentimental literature
by and about women as a retreat from, or criticism of, the burgeoning market.
In this landmark study, Joseph Fichtelberg examines how this literature actually
helped to bring market behaviors into maturity. Between 1780 and 1870, Americans
endured no fewer than seventeen economic depressions. Each one generated sentimental
outpourings in which women came to personify the travails of the marketplace.
In the early national period, novels like Martha Meredith Read's Margaretta
and Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum depicted resolute heroines who soothed national
ills with virtuous vulnerability. While men often languished in such novels,
women thrived. Antebellum fictions extend the argument: bankrupt husbands dissolved
in sentimental despair, while their wives used a different sensibility to understand,
and adapt to, the market itself. These fictions used women characters to think
through the problems of economic crisis and growth--a process completed by the
Civil War, when popular fictions began to depict merchants and clerks as feminine.
To master the market was to act like a woman--virtuous, immune to commercial
temptation, and thus pure. This notion, Fichtelberg argues, was crucial to the
onset of liberalism and the emergence of the American middle class. In addition
to his discussions of popular, though noncanonical, writers such as Read and
Mitchell, Fichtelberg also covers well-known authors such as Hector St. John
de Crèvecoeur, Olaudah Equiano, and Walt Whitman. He brings to bear neglected
sources (including the ledgers of Ralph Waldo Emerson) and interweaves best-selling
novels and pamphlets with political debates and contemporary economic analyses
to create rich descriptions of the era. A crucial addition to American literary
criticism on sentimental literature, Critical Fictions is a groundbreaking analysis
of the relations between commercial and sentimental discourses in early American
literature as well as a history of early American economics. It will appeal
to specialists as well as to the general reader interested in how American culture
has portrayed women in ways that express its deepest needs.
Joseph Fichtelberg is an associate professor
of English at Hofstra University.
Literary Criticism & Collections, American
6 x 9 • pp.
To be published in February 2003
Hardcover
ISBN 0-8203-2434-5 (cl.) • $39.95
An important work of
social history that sheds new light on cultural identity and opens a new
window on nineteenth century Richmond
As a city of the upper South intimately connected to the northeastern cities,
the southern slave
trade, and the Virginia countryside, Richmond embodied many of the contradictions
of
mid-nineteenth-century America. Gregg D. Kimball expands the usual scope of
urban studies
by depicting the Richmond community as a series of dynamic, overlapping networks
to show
how various groups of Richmonders understood themselves and their society. Drawing
on a
wealth of archival material and private letters, Kimball elicits new perspectives
regarding
people’s sense of identity. Kimball first situates the city and its residents
within the larger
American culture and Virginia countryside, especially noting the influence of
plantation society
and culture on Richmond’s upper classes. Kimball then explores four significant
groups of
Richmonders: merchant families, the city’s largest black church congregation,
ironworkers, and
militia volunteers. He describes the cultural world in which each group moved
and shows how
their perceptions were shaped by connections to and travels within larger economic,
cultural, and
ethnic spheres. Ironically, the merchant class’s firsthand knowledge of
the North confirmed and
intensified their “southernness,” while the experience of urban African
Americans and workers
promoted a more expansive sense of community. This insightful work ultimately
reveals how
Richmonders’ self-perceptions influenced the decisions they made during
the sectional crisis,
the Civil War, and Reconstruction, showing that people made rational choices
about their
allegiances based on established beliefs. American City, Southern Place is an
important work
of social history that sheds new light on cultural identity and opens a new
window on
nineteenth-century Richmond.
History, U.S.
6 1/8 x9 1/4 • pp. • 29 b&w photos
Hardcover
ISBN 0-8203-2234-2 (cl.) • $35
A study of the intricate
relationship between racial identity and social status
This definitive work thoroughly explores, for the first time, the often complicated
ways in which
ethnicity and social rank interacted to determine the relationships that were
forged among four
categories of women in the Revolutionary and early National Lowcountry. Betty
Wood
analyzes the experiences of enslaved African and African American women, free
women of
color, elite women of European ancestry, and underclass women of European descent
Studying
interactions between female slaves and free women of color, between plantation
mistresses and
their female slaves, and between the members of a "ladies" charitable
society and the young
"women" who received their help, Wood brings their diverse worlds
to life, including colorful
details of their work, religious practices, and even the hidden agendas in their
social circles. She
offers evidence of extensive family, racial, and social barriers to their awareness
and
development of a shared identity as women and concludes that although the boundaries
between
these groups were sometimes permeable, ties of gender seldom superseded considerations
of
social rank and ethnicity.
Betty Wood is a lecturer in history at Cambridge University and a Fellow of
Girton College,
Cambridge. She is the author of several books, including Slavery in Colonial
Georgia
(Georgia), Women's Work, Men's Work (Georgia), and The Origins of American Slavery.
History, U.S. • Social Science
5 x 8 • 120 pp.
Hardcover
ISBN 0-8203-2183-4 (cl.) • $25
A rich social history
illuminating the lives of both blacks and whites in antebellum Georgia
Lines in the Sand is Timothy Lockley’s finely nuanced look at the interaction
between
nonslaveholding whites and African Americans in lowcountry Georgia from the
introduction of
slavery in the state to the beginning of the Civil War. The study focuses on
poor whites living in
a society where they were dominated politically and economically by a planter
elite and
outnumbered by slaves. As the title suggests, Lockley argues that the division
between
nonslaveholding whites and African Americans was not fixed or insurmountable.
Instead,
pulling support from travel accounts, slave narratives, newspapers, and court
documents,
Lockley reveals that these groups formed myriad kinds of relationships, sometimes
out of
mutual affection, sometimes for mutual advantage, but always in spite of the
disapproving
authority of the planter class. Lockley has synthesized an impressive amount
of material to
create a rich social history that illuminates the lives of both blacks and whites.
His abundant
detail and narrative style make this first book-length examination of a complicated
and
overlooked topic both fascinating and accessible.
Timothy James Lockley is a lecturer in American history at the University of
Warwick.
History, U.S. • African American Studies
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • 328 pp.
Hardcover
ISBN 0-8203-2228-8 (cl.) • $45
A study of Enlightenment
influences on Early National women, including the complete diary of
Rachel Mordecai Lazarus
In Ways of Wisdom, Jean Friedman traces how Jacob Mordecai and his family, German
American Orthodox Jews, adopted the Anglo-Irish enlightened pedagogical system
developed
by Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his daughter Maria. In 1808 Mordecai founded
the
Warrenton Female Academy on the enlightened principles described in the Edgeworths’
guide,
Practical Education, and he enlisted family members to teach and manage the
school. Rachel
Mordecai, inspired by her father’s progressive methods, initiated an Edgeworthian
experiment
in home education on her young stepsister, Eliza. Rachel’s diary, reproduced
in full in Ways
of Wisdom, chronicles the moral instruction of Eliza. While retaining the traditional
didacticism of wisdom literature, the diary also describes Eliza’s resistance
to enlightened
discipline and method. Friedman’s case study bears particular importance
for scholars as it
qualifies and enriches our understanding of the American Enlightenment as an
amalgam of
religious and ethnic assumptions rather than a universal acceptance of Liberalism
or
Republicanism. Ways of Wisdom also offers an illuminating reinterpretation of
“Republican
Motherhood” as a culturally diverse and politically complicated domestic
paradigm.
Jean E. Friedman is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia.
Biography & Autobiography • Family & Relationships • History,
U.S.
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • 312 pp.
Hardcover
ISBN 0-8203-2252-0 (cl.) • $40
Michele Gillespie
Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Pp. xxii, 236. $40.00
Orders: 1-800-BOOK UGA
Athens, Georgia 30602
July 26, 2002