University
of Massachusetts Press
One Shaker Life
Isaac Newton Youngs, 1793–1865
Glendyne R. Wergland
A rare inside look at the life of an ordinary Shaker
A member of the United Society of Believers, better known as the Shakers, Isaac Newton Youngs spent most of his life in New Lebanon, New York, home of the society’s central Ministry. As both a private diarist and the official village scribe, he kept meticulous records throughout those years of both his own experience and that of the community. All told, more than four thousand pages of Brother Isaac’s journals have survived, documenting the history of the Shakers during the period of their greatest success and providing a revealing view of the daily life of a rank-and-file Believer.
In this deeply researched biography, Glendyne R. Wergland draws on Youngs’s writings to tell his story and to explore “the tension between desire and discipline” at the center of his life. She follows Youngs from childhood and adolescence to maturity, through years of demanding responsibility into his fatal decline. In each of these stages, he remained a talented and committed yet independent Shaker, one who chose to stay with the community but often struggled to abide by its stringent rules, including the vow of celibacy. Perhaps above all, he was a man who spent most of his waking hours working diligently at a succession of tasks, making clocks, sewing clothes, fixing roofs, writing poetry, chronicling his daily acts and thoughts.
In his journals, Brother Isaac writes at length of his efforts to control his lust as a young man, and he complains repeatedly about overwork as he grows older. He defines the rules of his community and identifies transgressors, while enciphering his critical entries (and those chronicling his own sexual desires) to avoid detection and uphold the demand for conformity. At times he admits doubt, but without ever relinquishing the belief that he is on the straight and narrow path to salvation. What emerges in the end is the complex portrait of an ordinary man striving to live up to the imperatives of his faith.
“We know very little about the lived experience of Shakerism from the individual’s point of view. Youngs’s numerous writings, both public and private, make it possible for Wergland to reconstruct a nuanced and detailed story of dedication mixed with occasional doubt.”
Priscilla J. Brewer, author of
Shaker Communities, Shaker Lives
“The documentary base of this study is outstanding. Glendyne Wergland has immersed herself in the rich body of manuscripts produced by Isaac Youngs and also by his contemporaries as well as in the scholarly and popular literature concerning the Shakers. She has written a book that is accessible, clear, and full of details and commentary.”
Stephen J. Stein, author of The Shaker Experience
in America: A History of the United Society of Believers
An independent scholar, Glendyne R. Wergland lives in Dalton, Massachusetts.
American History / Religion
320 pp., 24 illus.
$24.95s paper, ISBN 1-55849-522-3
$80.00s library cloth edition, ISBN 1-55849-523-1
February 2006
Learning to Read and Write
in Colonial America
E. Jennifer Monaghan
Explores how people in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America
acquired the ability to read and write
An experienced teacher of reading and writing and an award-winning historian, E. Jennifer Monaghan brings to vibrant life the process of learning to read and write in colonial America. Ranging throughout the colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia, she examines the instruction of girls and boys, Native Americans and enslaved Africans, the privileged and the poor, revealing the sometimes wrenching impact of literacy acquisition on the lives of learners.
For the most part, religious motives underlay reading instruction in colonial America, while secular motives led to writing instruction. Monaghan illuminates the history of these activities through a series of deeply researched and readable case studies. An Anglican missionary battles mosquitoes and loneliness to teach the New York Mohawks to write in their own tongue. Puritan fathers model scriptural reading for their children as they struggle with bereavement. Boys in writing schools, preparing for careers in counting houses, wield their quill pens in the difficult task of mastering a "good hand." Benjamin Franklin learns how to compose essays with no teacher but himself. Young orphans in Georgia write precocious letters to their benefactor, George Whitefield, while schools in South Carolina teach enslaved black children to read but never to write.
As she tells these stories, Monaghan clears new pathways in the analysis of colonial literacy. She pioneers in exploring the implications of the separation of reading and writing instruction, a topic that still resonates in today's classrooms.
Monaghan argues that major improvements occurred in literacy instruction and acquisition after about 1750, visible in rising rates of signature literacy. Spelling books were widely adopted as they key text for teaching young children to read; prosperity, commercialism, and a parental urge for gentility aided writing instruction, benefiting girls in particular. And a gentler vision of childhood arose, portraying children as more malleable than sinful. It promoted and even commercialized a new kind of children's book designed to amuse instead of convert, laying the groundwork for the "reading revolution" of the new republic.
"This book fills a significant gap in the scholarship of early America as well as in the scholarship of the history of reading and writing . . . . It will become an essential reference text for any scholar or student of American book history, the history of pedagogy, and the history of literacy." Patricia Crain, author of The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter
"Unique in its scope and in several of the questions being asked, this wide-ranging book will be important to early Americanists as well as to historians of reading." David D. Hall, general editor of the five-volume History of the Book in America
"While much has been written on the history of literacy, the subject of learning to read and write during America 's Colonial era has not received in-depth treatment. Monaghan (English, emerita, Brooklyn Coll., CUNY) seeks to remedy that situation with this truly impressive treatise, which has been exhaustively researched over the last 20 years. Following a chronological progression from 1620 through 1776, Monaghan offers a comprehensive analysis of Colonial literacy instruction that ranges throughout the Colonies and covers a broad variety of demographic groups and educational settings. She describes the separate motives behind the teaching of reading (largely meant to facilitate religious education) and of writing (which had more practical and secular purposes). In a refreshingly readable style for such a scholarly work, Monaghan studies the relationships between rates of literacy and other measures of Colonial culture, making rich use of primary sources to offer accessible and enlightening case histories. Illustrated with contemporary portraits and writing samples, this volume will no doubt become indispensable to those studying the history of literacy education. While covering the past, it is relevant to current debates about literacy. Highly recommended for academic libraries."
Tessa L.H. Minchew, Georgia Perimeter Coll. Lib.
Library Journal
E. JENNIFER MONAGHAN is professor emerita of English, Brooklyn College, The City University of New York.
American History
504 pp., 17 illus.
$49.95s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-486-3
July 2005
Stephen Decatur
American Naval Hero, 1779-1820
Robert J. Allison
An engaging biography of a popular, flamboyant naval captain
Born to a prominent Philadelphia family in 1779, Stephen Decatur at age twenty-five became the youngest man ever to serve as a captain in the U.S. Navy. His intrepid heroism, leadership, and devotion to duty made him a perfect symbol of the aspirations of the growing nation. Leading men to victory in Tripoli, the War of 1812, and the Algerian war of 1815, and coining the phrase "Our country, right or wrong," Decatur created an enduring legend of bravery, celebrated in poetry, song, paintings, and the naming of dozens of towns--from Georgia to Alabama to Illinois.
After the War of 1812, Decatur moved to Washington to help direct naval policy. His close friendships with James Madison, John Quincy Adams, and other political leaders soon made him a rising star in national politics. He and his wife Susan made their elegant home on Lafayette Square near the White House a center of Washington society. The capital and the entire nation were shocked in 1820 when Decatur died at the age of forty-one in a duel with a rival navy captain.
In this carefully researched and well-written biography, historian Robert Allison tells the story of Decatur's eventful life at a time when the young republic was developing its own identity--when the American people were deciding what kind of nation they would become. Although he died prematurely, Decatur played a significant role in the shaping of that national identity.
Robert J. Allison is professor of history at Suffolk University and author of The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 .
288 pp., 12 illus. $34.95s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-492-8
August 2005
Revolutionary
Generation
Harvard Men and the Consequences of Independence
Conrad Edick Wright
An investigation of growing up and growing old in revolutionary
New England
What was life like for the young men who came of age in late eighteenth-century
New England? How did the American Revolution and its aftermath shape their outlook
and experiences? This book offers a collective biography of the 204 members of
the Harvard College classes of 1771 through 1774, men whose lives intersected
with the War for Independence and the other formative events of the founding years
of the American Republic. The names of a few of these men are still familiar,
including painter John Trumbull and Congressman Fisher Ames, but this study's
principal importance lies in these schoolmates' shared experiences—experiences
that were also common to a much wider group of youths who reached adulthood in
the 1770s.
Conrad Edick Wright draws on extensive research on the classes that graduated
from Harvard immediately before the start of the war to follow their members as
they passed through life's common and predictable events from birth and childhood
through youth to maturity, careers, marriage, the increasing civic and family
responsibilities of midlife, old age, and death. He is also sensitive to his subjects'
thoughts and feelings. Unusually articulate and frequently reflective, the men
of the Harvard College classes of 1771 through 1774 often revealed their ambitions
and concerns through their letters and diaries.
Revolutionary Generation provides the most sustained application of life course
and life cycle analysis to be found in any study of late-eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century
America. At the same time, it shows on a personal level through the lives of its
subjects many of the most important consequences of the War for Independence.
CONRAD EDICK WRIGHT is Ford Editor of Publications at the Massachusetts Historical
Society.
American History
320 pp., 16 illus.
$34.95s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-484-7
March 2005
A
Place Called Paradise
Culture and Community in Northampton, Massachusetts, 1654–2004
Edited by Kerry W. Buckley
A volume of essays commemorating the 350th anniversary of
a historic New England community
In 1790, President Timothy Dwight of Yale offered this description of Northampton,
a town situated on the banks of the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts: "The inhabitants of this valley possess a common character," he remarked.
"Even the beauty of the scenery, scarcely found in the same degree elsewhere,
becomes a source of pride as well as enjoyment." For Dwight, the appeal of
the place lay in its proportions, which epitomized eighteenth-century ideas about
the proper balance between the natural world and the built environment.
Northampton evoked equally powerful visions in others. To minister Jonathan Edwards
it was a stage for the enactment of God's drama of saving grace and redemption,
while to Swedish soprano Jenny Lind it was simply a "paradise." During
the 1920s Northampton became Main Street USA—a reassuring backdrop for the
presidency of the city's former mayor, Calvin Coolidge. But for Smith College
professor Newton Arvin, it was the dark side of small-town America that surfaced
during the early decades of the Cold War. From witchcraft trials to Shays' Rebellion,
from Sojourner Truth and the utopian abolitionists to Sylvester Graham and diet
reform, many of the main currents of American life have flowed through this New
England river town.
To commemorate the 350th anniversary of the founding of Northampton, A Place Called
Paradise brings together a broad range of writing on the city's rich heritage.
Edited with an introduction by Kerry W. Buckley, the volume includes essays by
John Demos, Christopher Clark, Nell Irvin Painter, David W. Blight, and other
distinguished scholars who have found this region fertile ground for research.
Together their writings not only chronicle the history of a place but illustrate,
in microcosm, the dynamics at work in the larger sweep of America's past.
Paul S. Boyer, editor, The Oxford Companion to United States History
KERRY W. BUCKLEY is executive director of Historic Northampton. He is author of
Mechanical Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviorism and coeditor
of Letters from an American Utopia: The Stetson Family and the Northampton Association,
1843–1847.
American History
544 pp., 33 illus.
$39.95s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-485-5
December 2004
Political
Waters
The Long, Dirty, Contentious, Incredibly Expensive but Eventually Triumphant History
of Boston Harbor—A Unique Environmental Success Story
Eric Jay Dolin
A lively account of the centuries-long struggle to clean up one of the nation’s
most polluted bodies of water
Boston Harbor has always been America’s harbor. It served as a colonial gateway
to the world, witnessed the Boston Tea Party, and helped Boston transform itself
from an outpost of a few hardy settlers into a bustling metropolis and self-proclaimed
hub of the universe.
Yet for hundreds of years, Eric Jay Dolin points out, Boston Harbor was also a
cesspool. Long before Bostonians dumped tea into the harbor to protest English
taxes, they dumped sewage there. As the Boston area grew and prospered, its sewage
problems worsened, as did the harbor’s health, to the point where in the
1980s it was considered the most polluted harbor in the country and ridiculed
as the "harbor of shame." Then, in one of the most impressive environmental
comebacks in American history, Boston Harbor was dramatically cleaned up. All
it took was two lawsuits, two courts, dozens of lawyers, the creation of a powerful
sewage authority, thousands of workers, millions of labor hours, and billions
of dollars.
Sewage management is rarely as compelling and exciting as higher profile environmental
issues such as global climate change, preserving endangered species, or protecting
tropical rainforests. But it can be, as Dolin shows in this engaging narrative
account. Boston’s struggle to deal with its sewage is an epic story of failure
and success, replete with colorful characters, political, bureaucratic, and legal
twists and turns, engineering feats, and massive amounts of money. In the end,
success hinged on the often overlooked yet monumentally important act of responsibly
disposing of the waste people produce every day.
Michael R. Deland, former regional administrator,
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, New England Region
An independent scholar and freelance writer, Eric Jay Dolin earned his Ph.D. at
MIT. He is author of the Smithsonian Book of National Wildlife Refuges and other
books on the environment.
American History / Environmental Studies
296 pp., 40 illus.
$34.95s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-445-6
June 2004
Pastkeepers
in a Small Place
Five Centuries in Deerfield, Massachusetts
Michael C. Batinski
How ordinary people use the past to shape their sense of
self and community
People know who they are by fixing themselves in place and time. They keep the
past in numerous ways—not simply by writing histories but also by telling
stories, creating pictures, collecting memorabilia, preserving old homes, and
tracing genealogies. As Michael C. Batinski shows in this imaginative study, the
pastkeepers of Deerfield, Massachusetts, have long illustrated this human yearning
to connect with past and place. For five centuries people in this small New England
town have passed stories from one generation to the next, preserved homes, and
established one of the nation’s first historical societies and local history
museums.
Like many small places in the American landscape, Batinski points out, Deerfield
does not fit into the history we learn in textbooks. With the exception of the
famous French and Indian raid on the town in 1704, nothing of national significance
has happened there. Yet that has not diminished the interest of local inhabitants
in establishing and maintaining a vital connection to the past.
Different groups, from Native Pocumtuck to Puritan settlers to the grandchildren
of Polish immigrants, have told the Deerfield story in varied and sometimes conflicting
ways, each drawing on the past to shape its own sense of collective identity.
Together their efforts at pastkeeping reveal how people organize and explain the
motion of time, why they feel it important to pass on family stories, and why
they keep family heirlooms. In doing so, Batinski argues, they illustrate why
the preservation of the past remains a civic concern to us all.
"A major contribution to regional history. Several general works about New
England have appeared in recent years, but Batinski has written the first detailed
study focusing on a single town. His scholarship is impeccable, and he writes
gracefully and with precision. . . . A genuine pleasure to read."
Jere Daniell, Dartmouth College Born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, Michael C.
Batinski teaches history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. In addition
to having written two books on early American politics, he serves as a member
of the council of the Illinois State Historical Society.
American History / American Studies
320 pp., 7 illus.
$80.00s library cloth edition, ISBN 1-55849-455-3
$24.95s paper, ISBN 1-55849-461-8
August 2004
Books,
Maps, and Politics
A Cultural History of the Library of Congress, 1783–1861
Carl Ostrowski
The story of the early years of America’s national
library
Delving into the origins and development of the Library of Congress, this volume
ranges from the first attempt to establish a national legislative library in 1783
to the advent of the Civil War. Carl Ostrowski shows how the growing and changing
Library was influenced by—and in turn affected—major intellectual, social,
historical, and political trends that occupied the sphere of public discourse
in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America.
The author explores the relationship between the Library and the period’s
expanding print culture. He identifies the books that legislators required to
be placed in the Library and establishes how these volumes were used. His analysis
of the earliest printed catalogs of the Library reveals that law, politics, economics,
geography, and history were the subjects most assiduously collected. These books
provided government officials with practical guidance in domestic legislation
and foreign affairs, including disputes with European powers over territorial
boundaries.
Ostrowski also discusses a number of secondary functions of the Library, one of
which was to provide reading material for the entertainment and instruction of
government officials and their families. As a result, the richness of America’s
burgeoning literary culture from the 1830s to the 1860s was amply represented
on the Library’s shelves. For those with access to its Capitol rooms, the
Library served an important social function, providing a space for interaction
and the display and appreciation of American works of art.
Ostrowski skillfully demonstrates that the history of the Library of Congress
offers a lens through which we can view changing American attitudes toward books,
literature, and the relationship between the federal government and the world
of arts and letters.
"A highly readable book located comfortably at the intersection of print
culture studies and American library history. Ostrowski has done an admirable
job of positioning his data to address the important questions currently being
explored by these two scholarly communities."
Wayne A. Wiegand, Florida State University
"The strength of Books, Maps, and Politics is its emphasis on the growth
of a national print culture and its descriptions of how legislators’ attitudes
affected the development of the Library."
Jane Aikin, author of The Nation’s Great Library:
Herbert Putnam and the Library of Congress, 1899–1939
Carl Ostrowski is assistant professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University.
He received the American Library Association’s Donald G. Davis Award for
an article he wrote based on part of Books, Maps, and Politics.
American Studies / Book History
256 pp.
$39.95s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-433-2
February 2004
A volume in the series Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book
Captors
and Captives
The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield
Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney
The definitive account of a pivotal episode in colonial
American history
On February 29, 1704, a party of French and Indian raiders descended on the Massachusetts
village of Deerfield, killing fifty residents and capturing more than a hundred
others. In this masterful work of history, Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney reexamine
the Deerfield attack and place it within a framework stretching from the Atlantic
Ocean to the Great Lakes. Drawing on previously untapped sources, they show how
the assault grew out of the aspirations of New England family farmers, the ambitions
of Canadian colonists, the calculations of French officials, the fears of Abenaki
warriors, and the grief of Mohawk women as they all struggled to survive the ongoing
confrontation of empires and cultures.
Haefeli and Sweeney reconstruct events from multiple points of view, through the
stories of a variety of individuals involved. These stories begin in the Native,
French, and English communities of the colonial Northeast, then converge in the
February 29 raid, as a force of more than two hundred Frenchmen, Abenakis, Hurons,
Kahnawake Mohawks, Pennacooks, and Iroquois of the Mountain overran the northwesternmost
village of the New England frontier. Although the inhabitants put up more of a
fight than earlier accounts of the so-called Deerfield Massacre have suggested,
the attackers took 112 men, women, and children captive. The book follows the
raiders and their prisoners on the harsh three-hundred-mile trek back to Canada
and into French and Native communities. Along the way the authors examine how
captives and captors negotiated cultural boundaries and responded to the claims
of competing faiths and empires—all against a backdrop of continuing warfare.
By giving equal weight to all participants, Haefeli and Sweeney range across the
fields of social, political, literary, religious, and military history, and reveal
connections between cultures and histories usually seen as separate. "I suspect
that no one alive knows more about the 1704 Deerfield raid than Sweeney and Haefeli.
Their evenhanded ability to bring both intense archival research and the latest
historiography to bear on Native Americans, French habitants, and Deerfield residents
is truly impressive."
Daniel K. Richter, author of Facing East from Indian Country:
A Native History of Early America
"The most sophisticated treatment of the raid I have seen. The book does
a tremendous job of tracing and connecting individual lives to demonstrate the
fluidity of community and boundary, and wears its painstaking research lightly."
Colin G. Calloway, author of The American Revolution in Indian Country:
Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities Evan Haefeli is assistant
professor of history at Tufts University.
Kevin Sweeney is professor of history at American Studies at Amherst College.
American History / Native American Studies
408 pp., 30 illus.
$29.95s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-419-7
November 2003
Elizabeth
Murray
A Woman’s Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America
Patricia
Cleary
A
woman shopkeeper’s struggle to achieve economic self-sufficiency in eighteenth-century
Boston
"A
welcome addition to the literature on women in early America. Murray was an
exceptional ordinary woman for her day. . . . Cleary mined Murray's own papers,
which included not just correspondence but business records, to get past the
veneer of gentility and see the complex woman underneath. Murray worked as a
shopkeeper before and during one of her marriages, and Cleary does an excellent
job discussing the material culture of the commercial millinery trade between
the colonies and England. One of the more 'ordinary' aspects of Murray's life
was that despite her wealth and experience as a shopkeeper, she had to petition
the court, just like other women, to keep control of her own property after
she married a second time. This biography fills in many gaps in the history
of Colonial women and does so with an enjoyable writing style."
Choice
"Precisely
because Murray breaks ideological and historiographical rules, she commands
attention. . . . In this brave book, Cleary manages to knock some of the bricks
out of historiographical walls. With luck, the fruits of her and other feminist
scholars' labors will soon fill library shelves and force reconsideration of
how American entrepreneurship came into being. In that account, Elizabeth Murray
will stand alongside Alexander Hamilton, with her surrogate daughters all in
a row, as cofounders of the wealthiest empire the world has ever known."
Women's Review of Books
"Scholars
of early American history will find much of interest in this rare book-length
portrait of an eighteenth-century woman. Cleary tells an engaging story. The
quotations from eighteenth-century letters keep us as close as possible to the
perspective that Elizabeth Murray had at that time and help us to avoid superimposing
a present-day view of the world onto her and her contemporaries. . . . Cleary
provides a broader context by bringing in other women's and men's stories where
relevant, so we end up with more than one woman's story. Without a heavy theoretical
or historiographical overlay, the stories illustrate many of the key issues
and experiences of the time, such as immigration, trade and consumption, family
and community, and the American Revolution, and thus makes a useful contribution
to scholarship on early American history."
American Historical Review
Patricia
Cleary is professor of history at California State University, Long Beach.
296
pp., 14 illus., LC 00-030277
$19.95t paper, ISBN 1-55849-396-4
February 2003
Conquering
the American Wilderness
The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast
Guy
Chet
Challenges
longstanding myths about the nature of warfare in early America
A
study of military tactics and strategy before the War of Independence, this
book reexamines the conquest of the North American wilderness and its native
peoples by colonial settlers. Historians have long believed that the peculiar
conditions of the New World, coupled with the success of Indians tactics, forced
the colonists to abandon traditional European methods of warfare and to develop
a new "American" style of combat. By combining firearms with guerrilla-like
native tactics, colonial commanders were able not only to subdue their Indian
adversaries but eventually to prevail against more conventionally trained British
forces during the American Revolution.
Yet
upon closer scrutiny, this common understanding of early American warfare turns
out to be more myth than reality. As Guy Chet reveals, clashes between colonial
and Indian forces during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not lead
to a reevaluation and transformation of conventional military doctrine. On the
contrary, the poor performance of the settlers during King Philip's War (1675–76)
and King William's War (1689–1697) prompted colonial magistrates to address
the shortcomings of their military forces through a greater reliance on British
troops and imperial administrators. Thus, as the eighteenth century wore on,
growing military success in the New England colonies reflected an increasing
degree of British planning, administration, participation, and command.
The
colonies' military and political leadership, Chet argues, never rejected the
time-tested principles of European warfare, and even during the American War
of Independence, the republic's military leadership looked to Europe for guidance
in the art of combat. "Chet's enterprise is to explain the character and
consequences of American war in its formative period, before the Revolution.
He shows that it is not Americanized warfare, but the progressive Europeanization
of war in America by professional British military and naval officers that ultimately
overwhelms the poorer, less numerous, and less well-organized French-Indian
axis of Canada and the West. Professionalism is the decisive factor, and it
carries on into the Revolution and the early national period as an unsung but
decisive influence on the creation of a new American empire."Fred Anderson,
author of Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War
and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766
Guy
Chet is assistant professor of history at the University of North Texas.
American History / Military History
248
pp., 11 illus.
$60.00s library cloth edition, ISBN 1-55849-366-2
$18.95s paper, ISBN 1-55849-382-4
February 2003
September 14, 2005