This magisterial biography by the dean of Franklin scholars brings together the major sources in Franklin's life. Representing a lifetime of research, the seven-volume work will give enthusiasts, scholars, and teachers an important resource for understanding Franklin's character and place in American history.

The first volume traces young Franklin's life to his marriage in 1730. It traces the New England religious, political, and cultural contexts, exploring previously unknown influences on his philosophy and writing, and attributing new writings to him. After his move to Philadelphia, made famous in his Autobiography, Franklin became the Water American in London in 1725, where he was welcomed into that city's circle of freethinkers. Upon his return to the colonies, the sociable Franklin created a group of young friends, the Junto, devoted to self-improvement and philanthropy. He also started his own press and began to edit and publish the Pennsylvania Gazette, which became the most popular American paper of its day and the first to consistently feature American news.

J. A. Leo Lemay is H. F du Pont Winterthur Professor of English at the University of Delaware. He has written extensively on early American literature and is the author of numerous books, including The American Dream of Captain John Smith.

The Penn Franklin biography is a magisterial project by the dean of Franklin scholars to bring together the major sources in Franklin's life. Representing a lifetime of research, the seven-volume work will give enthusiasts, scholars, and teachers an important resource for understanding Franklin's character and place in American history.

Volume 2 takes Franklin from his marriage in 1730 to his retirement as a printer at the beginning of 1748, examining the mysteries of the illegitimate William Franklin's birth and mother and Franklin's increasing civic activities--starting the Library Company in Philadelphia in 1731, forming Pennsylvania's first volunteer fire company, and becoming an advocate for a clean Philadelphia environment. J. A. Leo Lemay assesses Franklin's numerous writings, attributing to him for the first time a deistic Indian speech, remarking on his use of the second African American persona in journalism, and analyzing his publishing sensation of 1747, The Speech of Miss Polly Baker. These belletristic works are complemented by Franklin's religious, political, and scientific writings, which he produced prodigiously.

As Finger shows, Franklin approached medicine in the spirit of the Enlightenment and with the mindset of an experimental natural philosopher, seeking cures for diseases and methods of alleviating symptoms of illnesses. He was one of the first people to try to use electrical shocks to help treat paralytic strokes and hysteria, and even suggested applying shocks to the head to treat depressive disorders. He also strove to topple one of the greatest fads in eighteenth-century medicine: mesmerism.

Doctor Franklin's Medicine looks at these and the many other contributions that Franklin made to the progress of medical knowledge, including a look at how Franklin approached his own chronic illnesses of painful gout and a large bladder stone. Written in accessible prose and filled with new information on the breadth of Franklin's interests and activities, Doctor Franklin's Medicine reveals the impressive medical legacy of this Founding Father.

The past fifteen years have seen a dramatic expansion in the scope of scholarship on the history of the early American republic. Whither the Early Republic consists of innovative essays on all aspects of the culture and society of this period, including Indians and empire, the economy and the environment, slavery and culture, and gender and urban life. Penned by leading historians, the essays are arranged thematically to reflect areas of change and growth in the field.

Throughout the book, preeminent scholars act as guides for students to their areas of expertise. Contributors include Pulitzer Prize-winner Alan Taylor, Bancroft Prize-winner James Brooks, Christopher Clark, Ted Steinberg, Walter Johnson, Patricia Cline Cohen, David Waldstreicher, and more. These essays, all originally commissioned to appear in a special issue of the Journal of the Early Republic, explore a diverse array of subjects: the struggles for control of North America; the economic culture of the early Republic; the interactions of humans with plants, climate, animals, and germs; the commodification of people; and the complex intersections of politics and culture.

Whither the Early Republic offers a wealth of tools for introducing a new generation of historians to the nature of the field and also to the wide array of possibilities that lie in the future for scholars of this fascinating period.

On the eve of the tercentenary of Franklin's birth, the university he founded has selected the Autobiography for the Penn Reading Project. Each year, for the past fifteen years, the University of Pennsylvania has chosen a single work that the entire incoming class, and a large segment of the faculty and staff, read and discuss together. For this occasion the University of Pennsylvania Press will publish a special edition of Franklin's Autobiography, including a new preface by University president Amy Gutmann and an introduction by distinguished scholar Peter Conn. The volume will also include four short essays by noted Penn professors as well as a chronology of Franklin's life and the text of Franklin's Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, a document resulting in the establishment of an institution of higher education that ultimately became the University of Pennsylvania.

No area of human endeavor escaped Franklin's keen attentions. His ideas and values, as Amy Gutmann notes in her remarks, have shaped the modern University of Pennsylvania profoundly, "more profoundly than have the founders of any other major university of college in the United States." Franklin believed that he had been born too soon. Readers will recognize that his spirit lives on at Penn today.

Essay contributors: Richard R. Beeman, Paul Guyer, Michael Weisberg, and Michael Zuckerman.

Peter Conn is Andrea Mitchell Term Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917, Literature in America, and Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book, was included among the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle award in biography, and received the Athenaeum Award.

New World Orders addresses these broad conceptual issues by reexamining the relationships among violence, sanction, and authority in the early modern Americas. More specifically, the essays in this volume explore the wide variety of legal and extralegal means--from state-sponsored executions to unsanctioned crowd actions--by which social order was maintained, with a particular emphasis on how extralegal sanctions were defined and used; how extralegal sanctions related to legal forms of maintaining order; and how these patterns of sanction, embedded within other forms of colonialism and culture, created cultural, legal, social, or imperial spaces in the early Americas.

With essays written by senior and junior scholars on the British, Spanish, Dutch, and French colonies, New World Orders presents one of the most comprehensive looks at the sweep of colonization in the Atlantic world. By juxtaposing case studies from Brazil, Venezuela, New York, California, Saint Domingue, and Louisiana with treatments of broader trends in Anglo-America or Spanish America more generally, the volume demonstrates the need to examine the questions of violence, sanction, and authority in hemispheric perspective.

John Smolenski teaches history at the University of California, Davis. Thomas J. Humphrey is Associate Professor of History at Cleveland State University and author of Land and Liberty: Hudson Valley Riots in the Age of Revolution.

Charles Edward gained support from the clans of the Scottish Highlands, communities that had long been derided as primitive. In 1745 the Jacobite Highlanders were denigrated both as rebels and as savages, and this double stigma helped provoke and legitimate the violence of the government's anti-Jacobite campaigns. Though the colonies stayed relatively peaceful in 1745, the rising inspired fear of a global conspiracy among Jacobites and other suspect groups, including North America's purported savages.

The defeat of the rising transformed the leader of the army, the Duke of Cumberland, into a popular hero on both sides of the Atlantic. With unprecedented support for the maintenance of peacetime forces, Cumberland deployed new garrisons in the Scottish Highlands and also in the Mediterranean and North America. In all these places his troops were engaged in similar missions: demanding loyalty from all local inhabitants and advancing the cause of British civilization. The recent crisis gave a sense of urgency to their efforts. Confident that "a free people cannot oppress," the leaders of the army became Britain's most powerful and uncompromising imperialists.

Geoffrey Plank argues that the events of 1745 marked a turning point in the fortunes of the British Empire by creating a new political interest in favor of aggressive imperialism, and also by sparking discussion of how the British should promote market-based economic relations in order to integrate indigenous peoples within their empire. The spread of these new political ideas was facilitated by a large-scale migration of people involved in the rising from Britain to the colonies, beginning with hundreds of prisoners seized on the field of battle and continuing in subsequent years to include thousands of men, women and children. Some of the migrants were former Jacobites and others had stood against the insurrection. The event affected all the British domains.

Geoffrey Plank is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati and author of An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia, also published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"A fascinating page-turner that should not be missed."--Michael Kammen, Cornell University

John Bartram (1699-1777), the first native-born American to devote his entire life to the study of nature, was an eminently practical man, a scientist devoted to the rigorous description of living things. Among his subjects was the Venus flytrap, along with hundreds of species of plants and animals, fully one quarter of all the plants identified and sent to Europe during the colonial period. His son William (1739-1823) was a pioneering naturalist who documented his travels through the Florida wilderness in prose and drawings that inspired a generation of Romantic poets. William's lyrical Travels is read today, while John's work is not.

As he follows the Bartrams through their respective careers--and through the tenderness and disappointment of the father-son relationship--Thomas P. Slaughter examines the ways each viewed the natural world: as a resource to be exploited, as evidence of divine providence, as a temple in which all life was interconnected and sacred. The Natures of John and William Bartram is a major work of natural and human history--beautifully written, psychologically insightful, and full of provocative ideas concerning the place of nature in the imagination of Americans, past and present.

Thomas P. Slaughter is Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is editor of William Bartram: Travels and Other Writings and author of Exploring Lewis and Clark and Apostle of Abolition: A Spiritual Biography of John Woolman.

Alan Taylor

Foreword by Christopher Clark

How is American history written? In a penetrating series of review essays, prize-winning author Alan Taylor provides his own answer to this question. As a contributing editor for The New Republic , he has regularly scrutinized the writing of the most interesting historians of early American history.

Together these reviews provide a rich and rewarding introduction to their subjects for the general reader. The books reviewed span an enormous range of scholarship, from popular biographies of Founding Fathers to investigations of murders of prostitutes to discussions of frontier technology. Grouped thematically, the essays reveal a historian with an unrivaled breadth of knowledge and an admirable passion for his subject, and one who has contributed a continent-wide perspective to Colonial history. As readers steep themselves in world-class scholarship, they also discover a writer who takes very seriously his role as reader.

Alan Taylor is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and a contributing editor for The New Republic . He is the author of several books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Cooper's Town and most recently American Colonies .

Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780-1850

Rodney Hessinger

Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn exposes the fears expressed by elders about young people in the early American republic. Those authors, educators, and moral reformers who aspired to guide youth into respectable stations perceived new dangers in the decades following independence. Battling a range of seducers in the burgeoning marketplace of early America, from corrupt peers to licentious prostitutes, from pornographic authors to firebrand preachers, these self-proclaimed moral guardians crafted advice and institutions for youth, hoping to guide them safely away from harm and toward success. By penning didactic novels and advice books while building reform institutions and colleges, they sought to lead youth into dutiful behavior. But, thrust into the market themselves, these moral guides were forced to compromise their messages to find a popular audience. Nonetheless, their calls for order did have lasting impact. In urban centers in the Northeast, middle-class Americans became increasingly committed to their notions of chastity, piety, and hard work.

Focusing on popular publications and large urban centers, Hessinger draws a portrait of deeply troubled reformers, men and women, who worried incessantly about the vulnerability of youth to the perils of prostitution, promiscuity, misbehavior, and revolt.

Benefiting from new insights in cultural history, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn looks at the way the categories of gender, age, and class took rhetorical shape in the early republic. In trying to steer young adults away from danger, these advisors created values that came to define the emerging middle class of urban America.

Rodney Hessinger teaches history at Hiram College.

280 pages | 6 x 9 | 9 illus.

Cloth Jun 2005 | ISBN 0-8122-3879-6 | $45.00s | £29.50
Early American Studies

Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World

Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet, Editors

Envisioning an English Empire brings together leading historians and literary scholars to reframe our understanding of the history of Jamestown and the literature of empire that emerged from it.

The founding of an English colony at Jamestown in 1607 was no isolated incident. It was one event among many in the long development of the North Atlantic world. Ireland, Spain, Morocco, West Africa, Turkey, and the Native federations of North America all played a role alongside the Virginia Company in London and English settlers on the ground. English proponents of empire responded as much to fears of Spanish ambitions, fantasies about discovering gold, and dreams of easily dominating the region's Natives as they did to the grim lessons of earlier, failed outposts in North America. Developments in trade and technology, in diplomatic relations and ideology, in agricultural practices and property relations were as crucial as the self-consciously combative adventurers who initially set sail for the Chesapeake.

The collection begins by exploring the initial encounters between the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan Indians and the relations of both these groups with London. It goes on to examine the international context that defined English colonialism in this period--relations with Spain, the Turks, North Africa, and Ireland. Finally, it turns to the ways both settlers and Natives were transformed over the course of the seventeenth century, considering conflicts and exchanges over food, property, slavery, and colonial identity.

What results is a multifaceted view of the history of Jamestown up to the time of Bacon's Rebellion and its aftermath. The writings of Captain John Smith, the experience of Powhatans in London, the letters home of a disappointed indentured servant, the Moroccans, Turks, and Indians of the English stage, the ethnographic texts of early explorers, and many other phenomena all come into focus as examples of the envisioning of a nascent empire and the Atlantic world in which it found a hold.

Robert Appelbaum is Lecturer in Renaissance Studies at Lancaster University and is the author of Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England . John Wood Sweet teaches history at the University of North Carolina and is the author of Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 .

Not All Wives

Women of Colonial Philadelphia

Karin Wulf

Marital status was a fundamental legal and cultural feature of women's identity in the eighteenth century. Free women who were not married could own property and make wills, contracts, and court appearances, rights that the law of coverture prevented their married sisters from enjoying. Karin Wulf explores the significance of marital status in this account of unmarried women in Philadelphia, the largest city in the British colonies.

  In a major act of historical reconstruction, Wulf draws upon sources ranging from tax lists, censuses, poor relief records, and wills to almanacs, newspapers, correspondence, and poetry in order to recreate the daily experiences of women who were never-married, widowed, divorced, or separated. With its substantial population of unmarried women, eighteenth-century Philadelphia was much like other early modern cities, but it became a distinctive proving ground for cultural debate and social experimentation involving those women. Arguing that unmarried women shaped the city as much as it shaped them, Wulf examines popular literary representations of marriage, the economic hardships faced by women, and the decisive impact of a newly masculine public culture in the late colonial period.

Karin Wulf is Associate Professor of History at American University. She is the coeditor of Milcah Martha Moore's Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America .

240 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 5 illus.

Brendan McConville

During the century preceding the American Revolution, bitter conflicts raged in New Jersey over control of the land tenure system. This book examines how the struggle between yeoman farmers and landed gentry shaped public life in the colony. At once a cultural, political, and social history, it carefully delineates the beliefs of rioters and upholders of order, both of whom wanted control over the land.

Brendan McConville describes how changes in provincial society--affecting politics and government, religious life, economic conditions, gender relations, and ethnic composition--led farmers to resort to violence as a means of settling property disputes. He examines the disagreements in light of competing conceptions of property held by separate landowning classes, differences in the legal and political traditions of British and Dutch colonists, and local conditions unique to New Jersey. He also considers the ways in which the lack of a shared perception of deference to authority among Puritan, Dutch, and multi-ethnic communities helped foster insurrection.

According to McConville, the social transformations brought into sharp focus by the agrarian unrest ultimately undermined imperial control and encouraged the creation of a new American identity. His book--the recipient of the Driscoll Prize from the New Jersey Historical Commission--is a careful account of a colony that has seldom been seriously examined by colonial historians and a challenge to those scholars to rethink commonly accepted arguments about the development of the United States.

Brendan McConville is Associate Professor of History at Binghamton University.

Adrienne D. Hood

"I admire Adrienne Hood immensely, both as a scholar and as a textile curator. This is a very good work, a real model of how to reconstruct craft processes and organization. In my view, the publication of this book is long overdue."--Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth

This is a . . . real model of how to reconstruct craft processes and organization. In my view, the publication of this book is long overdue."--Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Cloth was one of the most important commodities in the early modern world, and colonial North Americans had to develop creative strategies to acquire it. Although early European settlers came from societies in which hand textile production was central to the economy, local conditions in North America interacted with traditional craft structures to create new patterns of production and consumption. The Weaver's Craft examines the development of cloth manufacture in early Pennsylvania from its roots in seventeenth-century Europe to the beginning of industrialization.
Adrienne D. Hood's focus on Pennsylvania and the long sweep of history yields a new understanding of the complexities of early American fabric production and the regional variations that led to distinct experiences of industrialization. Drawing on an extensive array of primary sources, combined with a quantitative approach, the author argues that in contrast to New England, rural Pennsylvania women spun the yarn that a small group of trained male artisans wove into cloth on a commercial basis throughout the eighteenth century. Their production was considerably augmented by consumers purchasing cheap cloth from Europe and Asia, making them active participants in a global marketplace. Hood's painstaking research and numerous illustrations of textile equipment, swatch books, and consumer goods will be of interest to both scholars and craftspeople.

Adrienne D. Hood teaches history at the University of Toronto. She is a former curator of textiles at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Paul A. Gilje

Sailors were a rough bunch, tending to drink, carouse, and spend all their money on their brief stays ashore. Paul Gilje examines this stereotype and, in doing so, explores how sailors lived the ideal of "liberty."Liberty on the Waterfront

John Blatchford signed on the Continental ship Hancock in 1777; in less than two months he was captured and forced to serve aboard a British man o' war. Over the course of the next six years, Blatchford served under six different flags, mostly against his will. Horace Lane went to sea at age ten, was impressed into the British Navy, escaped, and served aboard merchantmen plying the West Indies trade routes. He was initially shocked by the ripe sexuality and gregariousness of the dance houses and pubs that crammed the congested Atlantic ports but eventually came to appreciate the respite they gave from the hard life at sea. Through these and other colorful accounts, historian Paul A. Gilje discovers what liberty meant to an important group of common men in American society, those who lived and worked on the waterfront and aboard ships. In the process he reveals that the idealized vision of liberty associated with the Founding Fathers had a much more immediate and complex meaning than previously thought.
In Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution, life aboard warships, merchantmen, and whalers, as well as the interactions of mariners and others on shore, are recreated in absorbing detail. Describing the important contributions of sailors to the resistance movement against Great Britain and their experiences during the Revolutionary War, Gilje demonstrates that, while sailors recognized the ideals of the Revolution, the idea of liberty that they practiced was far more individual in nature-often expressed through hard drinking and womanizing or through the ability to join a ship of their choice. Gilje continues the story into the post-Revolutionary world highlighted by the Quasi War with France, the confrontation with the Barbary Pirates, and the War of 1812, showing how the American Jack Tar emerged as an important symbol of the spirit of the new nation. Finally, Gilje discusses the efforts of evangelical reform to reach the waterfront and examines expressions of the ideals of the age of revolution as they emerged from maritime workers themselves in the form of literature, including the work of Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, and Richard Henry Dana.

By embarking on this engaging voyage through the history of American maritime culture, readers will come to appreciate a broader and more complete meaning of liberty to common Americans as the foil against which the more rarified definitions penned by the Founding Fathers can be measured.

Paul A. Gilje is Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Rioting in America and The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 and coeditor of American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750-1850 and Keepers of the Revolution: New Yorkers at Work in the Early Republic.

April Lee Hatfield

Through networks of trails and rivers inland and established ocean routes across the seas, seventeenth-century Virginians were connected to a vibrant Atlantic world. They routinely traded with adjacent Native Americans, and received ships from England, the Netherlands, and other English and Dutch colonies, maintaining less direct connections to Africa and to French and Spanish colonies. Their Atlantic world emerged from the movement of goods and services, but trade routes quickly became equally important in the transfer of people and information. Much seventeenth-century historiography, however, still assumes that each North American colony operated as a largely self-contained entity and interacted with other colonies only indirectly, through London. By contrast, in Atlantic Virginia, historian April Lee Hatfield demonstrates that the colonies actually had vibrant interchange among themselves and with peoples throughout the hemisphere, as well as with Europeans.

According to Hatfield, seventeenth-century Virginians realized early on that they lived in a world much larger than the Chesapeake, a conception they shared with other early American colonies. Beginning with the Virginia colonists' dependence on the Native American overland trade routes, Atlantic Virginia proceeds to examine intercolonial and transatlantic sea routes and their impact on the colony. The author then explains how the Chesapeake's unusual geography facilitated significant communication between mariners and colonists, explaining how that communication enmeshed Virginia within an Atlantic context that shaped its religious map, its relations with England, its negotiations with Indians, and the development of slavery. She also demonstrates how the use of the land and sea connections by runaway slaves and criminals served to reinforce border divisions among colonies.

Written in a clear and engaging style, and based on extensive archival research, Atlantic Virginia convincingly demonstrates that seventeenth-century colonies can be fully understood only within their full Atlantic context: intercolonial, transatlantic, and international.

April Lee Hatfield teaches history at Texas A&M University.

280 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 10 maps
Cloth Dec 2003 | ISBN 0-8122-3757-9 | $39.95s | £28.00

Leonard L. Richards

Leonard L. Richards provides a clear picture of Shays's rebellion, capturing the spirit of the insurgency, the reasons for the revolt, and its long-term impact on the participants, the state of Massachusetts, and the nation as a whole. Shays's Rebellion, though seemingly a local affair, was the revolution that gave rise to modern American democracy.

During the bitter winter of 1786-87, Daniel Shays, a modest farmer and Revolutionary War veteran, and his compatriot Luke Day led an unsuccessful armed rebellion against the state of Massachusetts. Their desperate struggle was fueled by the injustice of a regressive tax system and a conservative state government that seemed no better than British colonial rule. But despite the immediate failure of this local call-to-arms in the Massachusetts countryside, the event fundamentally altered the course of American history. Shays and his army of four thousand rebels so shocked the young nation's governing elite--even drawing the retired General George Washington back into the service of his country--that ultimately the Articles of Confederation were discarded in favor of a new constitution, the very document that has guided the nation for more than two hundred years, and brought closure to the American Revolution.

The importance of Shays's Rebellion has never been fully appreciated, chiefly because Shays and his followers have always been viewed as a small group of poor farmers and debtors protesting local civil authority. In Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle, Leonard Richards reveals that this perception is misleading, that the rebellion was much more widespread than previously thought, and that the participants and their supporters actually represented whole communities--the wealthy and the poor, the influential and the weak, even members of some of the best Massachusetts families.

Through careful examination of contemporary records, including a long-neglected but invaluable list of the participants, Richards provides a clear picture of the insurgency, capturing the spirit of the rebellion, the reasons for the revolt, and its long-term impact on the participants, the state of Massachusetts, and the nation as a whole. Shays's Rebellion, though seemingly a local affair, was the revolution that gave rise to modern American democracy.

Leonard L. Richards is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of numerous books, including The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 and The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams, a finalist in 1987 for the Pulitzer Prize for biography.

Susan Juster

"In the retrieval of early American religion, Susan Juster is not just the smartest, most imaginative scholar of her generation. She is also the most artful and the edgiest. Her luminous, atmospheric study of prophecy in the early republic will change forever the way you think about the democratization of American culture. And her doomsayers themselves, rendered brilliantly in the tangles of authenticity and imposture that define democracy, will steal your heart even as they unsettle you."--Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania

The age of revolution, in which kings were dethroned, radical ideals of human equality embraced, and new constitutions written, was also the age of prophecy. Neither an archaic remnant nor a novel practice, prophecy in the eighteenth century was rooted both in the primitive worldview of the Old Testament and in the vibrant intellectual environment of the philosophes and their political allies, the republicans. In Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution, Susan Juster examines the culture of prophecy in Great Britain and the United States from 1765 to 1815 side by side with the intellectual and political transformations that have given the period its historical distinction as the era of enlightened rationalism and democratic revolution.

Although sometimes viewed as madmen or fools, prophets of the 1790s and early 1800s were very much products of a liberal commercial society, even while they registered their disapproval of the values and practices of that society and fought a determined campaign to return Protestant Anglo-America to its biblical moorings. They enjoyed greater visibility than their counterparts of earlier eras, thanks to the creation of a vigorous new public sphere of coffeehouses, newspapers, corresponding societies, voluntary associations, and penny pamphlets. Prophecy was no longer just the art of applying biblical passages to contemporary events; it was now the business of selling both terror and reassurance to eager buyers. Tracking the careers of several hundred men and women in Britain and North America, most of ordinary background, who preached a message of primitive justice that jarred against the cosmopolitan sensibilities of their audiences, Doomsayers explores how prophetic claims were formulated, challenged, tested, advanced, and abandoned. The stories of these doomsayers, whose colorful careers entertained and annoyed readers across the political spectrum, challenge the notion that religious faith and the Enlightenment represented fundamentally alien ways of living in and with the world.

From the debates over religious enthusiasm staged by churchmen and the literati to the earnest offerings of ordinary men and women to speak to and for God, Doomsayers shows that the contest between prophets and their critics for the allegiance of the Anglo-American reading public was part of a broader recalibration of the norms and values of civic discourse in the age of revolution.

Susan Juster is Associate Professor of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is author of Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England.

Simon P. Newman

Offering a new view into the lives and experiences of plebeian men and women, and a provocative exploration of the history of the body itself, Embodied History approaches the bodies of the poor in early national Philadelphia as texts to be read and interpreted. Through a close examination of accounts of the bodies that appeared in runaway advertisements and in seafaring, almshouse, prison, hospital, and burial records, Simon P. Newman uses physical details to paint an entirely different portrait of the material circumstances of the poor, examining the ways they became categorized in the emerging social hierarchy, and how they sought to resist such categorization.

The Philadelphians examined in Embodied History were members of the lower sort, a social category that emerged in the early modern period from the belief in a society composed of natural orders and ranks. The population of the urban poor grew rapidly after the American Revolution, and middling and elite citizens were frightened by these poor bodies, from the tattooed professional sailor, to the African American runaway with a highly personalized hairstyle and distinctive mannerisms and gestures, to the vigorous and lively Irish prostitute who refused to be cowed by the condemnation of others, to the hardworking laboring family whose weakened and diseased children played and sang in the alleys. In a new republic premised on liberty and equality, the rapidly increasing ranks of unruly bodies threatened to overwhelm traditional notions of deference, hierarchy, and order.

Affluent Philadelphians responded by employing runaway advertisements, the almshouse, the prison, and to a lesser degree the hospital to incarcerate, control, and correct poor bodies and transform them into well-dressed, hardworking, deferential members of society. Embodied History is a compelling and accessible exploration of how poverty was etched and how power and discipline were enacted upon the bodies of the poor, as well as how the poor attempted to transcend such discipline through assertions of bodily agency and liberty.

Simon P. Newman is Sir Denis Brogan Professor of American Studies, University of Glasgow, and author of Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Emma Jones Lapsansky and Anne A. Verplanck, Editors

The notion of a uniquely Quaker style in architecture, dress, and domestic interiors is a subject with which scholars have long grappled, since Quakers have traditionally held both an appreciation for high-quality workmanship and a distrust of ostentation. Early Quakers, or members of the Society of Friends, who held "plainness" or "simplicity" as a virtue, were also active consumers of fine material goods. Through an examination of some of the material possessions of Quaker families in America during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, the contributors to Quaker Aesthetics draw on the methods of art, social, religious, and public historians as well as folklorists to explore howFriends during this period reconciled their material lives with their belief in the value of simplicity.

In early America, Quakers dominated the political and social landscape of the Delaware Valley, and, because this region held a position of political and economic strength, the Quakers were tightly connected to the transatlantic economy. Given this vantage, they had easy access to the latest trends in fashion and business. Detailing how Quakers have manufactured, bought, and used such goods as clothing, furniture, and buildings, the essays in Quaker Aesthetics reveal a much more complicated picture than that of a simple people with simple tastes. Instead, the authors show how, despite the high quality of their material lives, the Quakers in the past worked toward the spiritual simplicity they still cherish.

Emma Jones Lapsansky is Professor of History and Curator, Special Collections, Haverford College. Anne A. Verplanck is Curator of Prints and Paintings, Winterthur Museum.

The Cowpens-Guilford Courthouse Campaign

Burke Davis

On January 17, 1781, near Cowpens, a drover's camp on the old Cherokee trading trail in Carolina territory, Continental troops and horsemen under the direction of Daniel Morgan inflicted a stunning defeat on a crack British detachment led by the ruthless Banastre Tarleton, commander of Lord Cornwallis's cavalry. Although Tarleton fled the battlefield to avoid capture, the American victory effectively destroyed the light corps of the British army in the South. Stung by the loss, Cornwallis ordered a deliberate and dogged chase of the American rebels, a campaign that meandered through the wilderness and small communities of the Carolinas. After months of retreating, the Continental army under the command of Nathanael Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker, chose to confront the British army near Guilford Courthouse, North Carolina. Although they fought with tenacity, the Americans were forced to retreat, but Cornwallis's army had suffered casualties too heavy to pursue the Continentals and instead fell back to the port city of Wilmington. Discouraged by the guerrilla tactics, Cornwallis moved north, to his final defeat at Yorktown.

In The Cowpens-Guilford Courthouse Campaign, Burke Davis provides an engaging account of the key battles in the American South, demonstrating that it was here that the strength of the Continental army's resistance to superior British forces laid the foundations for the final American victory.
Burke Davis is the author of many books, including Gray Fox: Robert E. Lee and the Civil War, Jeb Stuart: The Last Cavalier, and Black Heroes of the American Revolution. He lives in North Carolina.

Meredith L. McGill

The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. And yet, as McGill argues, a mass market for books in this period was built and sustained through what we would call rampant literary piracy: a national literature did not emerge despite but because of the systematic copying of foreign works. Restoring a political dimension to accounts of the economic grounds of antebellum literature, McGill unfolds the legal arguments and political struggles that produced an American "culture of reprinting" and held it in place for two crucial decades.

In this culture of reprinting, the circulation of print outstripped authorial and editorial control. McGill examines the workings of literary culture within this market, shifting her gaze from first and authorized editions to reprints and piracies, from the form of the book to the intersection of book and periodical publishing, and from a national literature to an internally divided and transatlantic literary marketplace. Through readings of the work of Dickens, Poe, and Hawthorne, McGill seeks both to analyze how changes in the conditions of publication made themselves felt at the level of literary form and to take the measure of what was lost as literary markets became centralized and literary culture became stratified in the early 1850s. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 delineates a distinctive literary culture that was regional in articulation and transnational in scope, while questioning the grounds of the startlingly recent but nonetheless powerful equation of the national interest with the extension of authors' rights.

Meredith McGill teaches English at Rutgers University.