Recent Publications on
Early American Topics

University of Pennsylvania Press

The Way of Improvement Leads Home
Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America

John Fea

The Way of Improvement Leads Home traces the short but fascinating life of Philip Vickers Fithian, one of the most prolific diarists in early America. Born to Presbyterian grain-growers in rural New Jersey, he was never quite satisfied with the agricultural life he seemed destined to inherit. Fithian longed for something more—to improve himself in a revolutionary world that was making upward mobility possible. While Fithian is best known for the diary that he wrote in 1773-74 while working as a tutor at Nomini Hall, the Virginia plantation of Robert Carter, this first full biography moves beyond his experience in the Old Dominion to examine his inner life, his experience in the early American backcountry, his love affair with Elizabeth Beatty, and his role as a Revolutionary War chaplain.

From the villages of New Jersey, Fithian was able to participate indirectly in the eighteenth-century republic of letters—a transatlantic intellectual community sustained through sociability, print, and the pursuit of mutual improvement. The republic of letters was above all else a rational republic, with little tolerance for those unable to rid themselves of parochial passions. Participation required a commitment to self-improvement that demanded a belief in the Enlightenment values of human potential and social progress. Although Fithian was deeply committed to these values, he constantly struggled to reconcile his quest for a cosmopolitan life with his love of home. As John Fea argues, it was the people, the religious culture, and the very landscape of his "native sod" that continued to hold Fithian's affections and enabled him to live a life worthy of a man of letters.

"Many historians of Revolutionary America have plundered the diaries of Philip Vickers Fithian, but until now no one has satisfactorily told the life story of this great diarist. John Fea's insightful book does just that—and yet more. By showing how Fithian pursued the values of a cosmopolitan Enlightenment, in concert with the values of Presbyterian Christianity and American patriotism, his study reveals much about an enduring American tradition."—Mark Noll, University of Notre Dame

"John Fea has given readers . . . a gift in this delightful biography of diarist Philip Fithian. . . . Fea has captured a multifaceted world that teachers of American history should rush to share with their students."—Dallett Hemphill, author of Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America

John Fea teaches history at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania.

280 pages | 6 x 9 | 12 illus.
Cloth Feb 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4109-9 | $39.95s | £26.00 | Add to shopping cart
A volume in the Early American Studies series

Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World

Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith, Editors

As a category of historical analysis, class is dead—or so it has been reported over the past two decades. The contributors to Class Matters contest this demise. Although differing in their approaches, they all agree that socioeconomic inequality remains indispensable to our understanding of the transition from the early modern to modern era in North America and the rest of the Atlantic world. As a whole, they chart the emergence of class as a concept and its subsequent loss of analytic purchase in Anglo-American historiography.

The opening section considers the dynamics of class relations in the Atlantic world across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—from Iroquoian and Algonquian communities in North America to tobacco lords in Glasgow. Subsequent chapters examine the cultural development of a new and aspirational middle class and its relationship to changing economic conditions and the articulation of corporate and industrial ideologies in the era of the American Revolution and beyond.

A final section shifts the focus to the poor and vulnerable—tenant farmers, infant paupers, and the victims of capital punishment. In each case the authors describe how elite Americans exercised their political and social power to structure the lives and deaths of weaker members of their communities. An impassioned afterword urges class historians to take up the legacies of historical materialism. Engaging the difficulties and range of meanings of class, the essays in Class Matters seek to energize the study of social relations in the Atlantic world.

Simon Middleton is Lecturer in American History at the University of Sheffield and author of From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Billy G. Smith is Professor of History at Montana State University and author of The "Lower Sort": Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750-1800.

Beyond the Farm
National Ambitions in Rural New England

J. M. Opal

During the first half-century of American independence, a fundamental change in the meaning and morality of ambition emerged in American culture. Long stigmatized as a dangerous passion that led people to pursue fame at the expense of duty, ambition also raised concerns among American Revolutionaries who espoused self-sacrifice. After the ratification of the U.S. Constitution and the creation of the federal republic in 1789, however, a new ethos of nation-making took hold in which ambition, properly cultivated, could rescue talent and virtue from the parochial needs of the family farm. Rather than an apology for an emerging market culture of material desire and commercial dealing, ambition became a civic project—a concerted reply to the localism of provincial life. By thus attaching itself to the national self-image during the early years of the Republic, before the wrenching upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, ambitious striving achieved a cultural dominance that future generations took for granted.

Beyond the Farm not only describes this transformation as a national effort but also explores it as a personal journey. Centered on the lives of six aspiring men from the New England countryside, the book follows them from youthful days full of hope and unrest to eventual careers marked by surprising success and crushing failure. Along the way, J. M. Opal recovers such intimate dramas as a young man's abandonment by his self-made parents, a village printer's dreams of small-town fame, and a headstrong boy's efforts to both surpass and honor his family. By relating the vast abstractions of nation and ambition to the everyday milieus of home, work, and school, Beyond the Farm reconsiders the roots of American individualism in vivid detail and moral complexity.

"Through the lives of six 'ordinary' rural men who left their fathers' farms in search of something better, Jason Opal explains how ambition came to stand near the center of U.S. national character. Both a collective biography and a sweeping historical synthesis, Beyond the Farm sheds new light on the transformation of civil society and boldly revises our understanding of the emergence of capitalism."—Catherine E. Kelly, University of Oklahoma

J. M. Opal teaches history at Colby College.

280 pages | 6 x 9 | 20 illus.
Cloth Mar 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4062-7 | $39.95s | £26.00 | Add to shopping cart
A volume in the Early American Studies series

Reading Women
Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800

Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly, Editors

In 1500, as many as 99 out of 100 English women may have been illiterate, and girls of all social backgrounds were the objects of purposeful efforts to restrict their access to full literacy. Three centuries later, more than half of all English and Anglo-American women could read, and the female reader was emerging as a cultural ideal and a market force. While scholars have written extensively about women's reading in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and about women's writing in the early modern period, they have not attended sufficiently to the critical transformation that took place as female readers and their reading assumed significant cultural and economic power.

Reading Women brings into conversation the latest scholarship by early modernists and early Americanists on the role of gender in the production and consumption of texts during this expansion of female readership. Drawing together historians and literary scholars, the essays share a concern with local specificity and material culture. Removing women from the historically inaccurate frame of exclusively solitary, silent reading, the authors collectively return their subjects to the activities that so often coincided with reading: shopping, sewing, talking, writing, performing, and collecting. With chapters on samplers, storytelling, testimony, and translation, the volume expands notions of reading and literacy, and it insists upon a rich and varied narrative that crosses disciplinary boundaries and national borders.

"Destined to become a landmark study and a fixture in the bibliographies of feminist and textual scholars, literary and social historians, students of the English Renaissance and the American Republic alike."—William Sherman, University of York

Heidi Brayman Hackel, Associate Professor of English at Oregon State University, is the author of Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy.

Catherine E. Kelly is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and author of In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Century.

264 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus.
Cloth Dec 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4054-2 | $59.95s | £39.00 | Add to shopping cart
A volume in the Material Texts series
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Medicine Bundle
Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature, 1824-1932

Joshua David Bellin

From the 1820s to the 1930s, Christian missionaries and federal agents launched a continent-wide assault against Indian sacred dance, song, ceremony, and healing ritual in an attempt to transform Indian peoples into American citizens. In spite of this century-long religious persecution, Native peoples continued to perform their sacred traditions and resist the foreign religions imposed upon them, as well as to develop new practices that partook of both. At the same time, some whites began to explore Indian performance with interest, even to promote Indian sacred traditions as a source of power for their own society. The varieties of Indian performance played a formative role in American culture and identity during a critical phase in the nation's development.

In Medicine Bundle, Joshua David Bellin examines the complex issues surrounding Indian sacred performance in its manifold and intimate relationships with texts and images by both Indians and whites. From the paintings of George Catlin, the traveling showman who exploited Indian ceremonies for the entertainment of white audiences, to the autobiography of Black Elk, the Lakota holy man whose long life included stints as a dancer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, a supplicant in the Ghost Dance movement, and a catechist in the Catholic Church, Bellin reframes American literature, culture, and identity as products of encounter among diverse performance traditions. Like the traditional medicine bundle of sacred objects bound together for ritual purposes, Indian performance and the performance of Indianness by whites and Indians alike are joined in a powerful intercultural knot.

"An excellent book about the way in which performance constitutes (rather than merely reflects) cultural differences between and among Native American and Anglo-American peoples."—Joseph Roach, Yale University

Joshua David Bellin is a member of the faculty of La Roche College and the author of The Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Revolutionary Backlash
Women and Politics in the Early American Republic

Rosemarie Zagarri

The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise. According to Rosemarie Zagarri, the debate over women's rights began not in the decades prior to 1848 but during the American Revolution itself. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, this study explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution until the election of Andrew Jackson.

Although the period produced no collective movement for women's rights, women built on precedents established during the Revolution and gained an informal foothold in party politics and male electoral activities. Leaders of both parties, Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, vied for women's allegiance and sought their support in times of national crisis. Women, in turn, attended rallies, organized political activities, and voiced their opinions on the issues of the day. After the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a widespread debate about the nature of women's rights ensued. The state of New Jersey attempted a bold experiment: for a brief time, women there voted on the same terms as men.

Yet as Zagarri argues, this opening for women soon closed. By 1828, women's politicization was seen more as a liability than as a strength, contributing to a divisive political climate that repeatedly brought the country to the brink of civil war. The increasing sophistication of party organizations and triumph of universal suffrage for white males marginalized those who could not vote, especially women. Yet all was not lost. Women had already begun to participate in charitable movements, benevolent societies, and social reform organizations. Through these organizations, women found another way to practice politics.

Spanning the first fifty years of the nation's history, Revolutionary Backlash uncovers women's forgotten role in early American politics and explores an alternative explanation for the emergence of the first women's rights movement.

"This book makes a significant contribution to the literature of American women's history by defining a period that has received too little attention. The writing is gorgeous. The research is first-rate."—Edith B. Gelles, author of Abigail Adams: A Writing Life

Rosemarie Zagarri is Professor of History at George Mason University.

232 pages | 6 x 9 | 13 illus.
Cloth Oct 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4027-6 | $39.95s | £26.00 | Add to shopping cart
A volume in the Early American Studies series
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The Head in Edward Nugent's Hand
Roanoke's Forgotten Indians

Michael Leroy Oberg

Roanoke is part of the lore of early America, the colony that disappeared. Many Americans know of Sir Walter Ralegh's ill-fated expedition, but few know about the Algonquian peoples who were the island's inhabitants. The Head in Edward Nugent's Hand examines Ralegh's plan to create an English empire in the New World but also the attempts of native peoples to make sense of the newcomers who threatened to transform their world in frightening ways.

Beginning his narrative well before Ralegh's arrival, Michael Leroy Oberg looks closely at the Indians who first encountered the colonists. The English intruded into a well-established Native American world at Roanoke, led by Wingina, the weroance, or leader, of the Algonquian peoples on the island. Oberg also pays close attention to how the weroance and his people understood the arrival of the English: we watch as Wingina's brother first boards Ralegh's ship, and we listen in as Wingina receives the report of its arrival. Driving the narrative is the leader's ultimate fate: Wingina is decapitated by one of Ralegh's men in the summer of 1586.

When the story of Roanoke is recast in an effort to understand how and why an Algonquian weroance was murdered, and with what consequences, we arrive at a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of what happened during this, the dawn of English settlement in America.

"Michael Oberg sheds new light on one of the great stories in early American history. He has taken seriously what a generation of historians have been urging: he has tried to reconstruct the history of Roanoke not only from the view of colonists, who left all of the written records, but also from the view of the Native peoples of the region. The narrative is briskly paced and the research is thorough."—Peter C. Mancall, author of Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America

Michael Leroy Oberg is Professor of History at the State University of New York, College at Geneseo.

232 pages | 6 x 9 | 9 illus.
Cloth Oct 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4031-3 | $32.50t | £21.50 |
A volume in the Early American Studies series

Performing Patriotism
National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater

Jason Shaffer

During the eighteenth century, North American colonists began to display an increasing appetite for professional and amateur theatrical performances and a familiarity with the British dramatic canon ranging from the tragedies of Shakespeare, Addison, and Rowe to the comedies of Farquhar, Steele, and Gay. This interest sparked demand for both the latest hits of the London stage and a body of plays centered on patriotic (and often partisan) British themes. As relations between the crown and the colonies soured, the texts of these plays evolved into a common frame of reference for political arguments over colonial policy. Making the transition to print, these arguments deployed dramatic texts and theatrical metaphors for political advantage. Eventually, with the production of American propaganda plays during the Revolution, colonists began to develop a patriotic drama of their own, albeit one that still stressed the "British" character of American patriotism.

Performing Patriotism examines the role of theatrical performance and printed drama in the development of early American political culture. Building on the eighteenth-century commonplace that the theater could be a school for public virtue, Jason Shaffer illustrates the connections between the popularity of theatrical performances in eighteenth-century British North America and the British and American national identities that colonial and Revolutionary Americans espoused. The result is a wide-ranging survey of eighteenth-century American theater history and print culture.

"Jason Shaffer has written a much-needed transatlantic account of the theater of the eighteenth-century British North American colonies and the early U.S. and its relationship to imperial and revolutionary politics."—Sandra M. Gustafson, University of Notre Dame

Jason Shaffer is Associate Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy.

The Pilgrim and the Bee
Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England

Matthew P. Brown

"The Pilgrim and the Bee makes a broad claim about a reading-centered history, reclaiming for this purpose a distinctive body of texts. Brown's analysis marks an important step toward a better history of reading."—David D. Hall, Harvard University

We conventionally understand the book as a vessel for words, a place where the reader goes to have a private experience with written language. But readers' relationships with books are much more complex. In The Pilgrim and the Bee, Matthew P. Brown examines book culture and the rituals of reading in early New England, ranging across almanacs, commonplace books, wonder tales, funeral elegies, sermon notes, conversion relations, and missionary tracts. What emerges is a new understanding of the book at once as a material good, existing within the economies of buying, selling, giving, and receiving; as an object of reverence and a medium for the performance of reading; and as an organizational system for word, sound, and image.

The product of extensive archival research, The Pilgrim and the Bee brings together the disciplines of book studies and performance theory to reconsider the literary history of early America. Brown focuses on the reader's body, carefully studying reading practices during the first three generations of English settlement, with particular emphasis on the way such practices operated in the social rituals of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Understanding Puritanism as a style of piety predicated on access to texts, he describes a canon of texts (devotional "steady sellers") that, with the Bible, served as conduct literature for pious readers. These devotional manuals were reprinted and read frequently and helped to shape the social identities of gender, race, class, faith, and age. To Brown, seventeenth-century devotional readers are both pilgrims, treating texts as continuous narratives of redemptive journeying, and bees, treating texts as flowers or hives, as spatial objects where information is extracted and deposited discontinuously.

"A stunning work of scholarship. . . . A crucial text in American book history and American literary history."—Jay Fliegelman, Stanford University

Matthew P. Brown teaches English and is Director of the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa.

272 pages | 6 x 9 | 20 illus.

Cloth Jun 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4015-3 | $65.00s | £42.50 |

A volume in the Material Texts series
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Jesus Is Female
Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America

Aaron Spencer Fogleman

"Fogleman ventures a bold re-envisioning of the Moravians and their importance in the eighteenth century. Jesus Is Female marks an excellent new interpretation that situates them firmly in broad historical and historiographic currents."—Jon Sensbach, University of Florida

In the middle of the Great Awakening, a group of religious radicals called Moravians came to North America from Germany to pursue ambitious missionary goals. How did the Protestant establishment react to the efforts of this group that allowed women to preach, practiced alternative forms of marriage, sex, and family life, and believed Jesus could be female? Aaron Spencer Fogleman explains how these views, as well as the Moravians' missionary successes, provoked a vigorous response by Protestant authorities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Based on documents in German, Dutch, and English from the Old World and the New, Jesus Is Female chronicles the religious violence that erupted in many German and Swedish communities in colonial America as colonists fought over whether to accept the Moravians, and suggests that gender issues were at the heart of the raging conflict. Colonists fought over the feminine, ecumenical religious order offered by the Moravians and the patriarchal, confessional order offered by Lutheran and Reformed clergy. This episode reveals both the potential and the limits of radical religion in early America. Though religious nonconformity persisted despite the repression of the Moravians, and though America remained a refuge for such groups, those who challenged the cultural order in their religious beliefs and practices would not escape persecution.

Jesus Is Female traces the role of gender in eighteenth-century religious conflict back to the European Reformation and the beginnings of Protestantism. This transatlantic approach heightens our understanding of American developments and allows for a better understanding of what occurred when religious freedom in a colonial setting led to radical challenges to tradition and social order.

Aaron Spencer Fogleman is Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717-1775, also published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

328 pages | 6 x 9 | 8 color, 19 b/w illus.
Cloth Mar 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-3992-8 | $49.95s | £32.50 | Add to
A volume in the Early American Studies series

Many Identities, One Nation
The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic

Liam Riordan

Liam Riordan explores how the American Revolution politicized religious, racial, and ethnic identity among the diverse inhabitants of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey from 1770 to 1830.

The richly diverse population of the mid-Atlantic region distinguished it from the homogeneity of Puritan New England and the stark differences of the plantation South that still dominate our understanding of early America. In Many Identities, One Nation, Liam Riordan explores how the American Revolution politicized religious, racial, and ethnic identities among the diverse inhabitants of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. Attending to individual experiences through a close comparative analysis, Riordan explains the transformation from British subjects to U.S. citizens in a region that included Quakers, African Americans, and Pennsylvania Germans.

In the face of a gradually emerging sense of nationalism, varied forms of personal and group identities took on heightened public significance in the Revolutionary Delaware Valley. While Quakers in Burlington, New Jersey, remained suspect after the war because of their pacifism, newly freed slaves in New Castle, Delaware, demanded full inclusion, and bilingual Pennsylvania Germans in Easton, Pennsylvania, successfully struggled to create a central place for themselves in the new nation. By placing the public contest over the proper expression of group distinctiveness in the context of local life, Riordan offers a new understanding of how cultural identity structured the early Jacksonian society of the 1820s as a culmination of the American Revolution in this region.

This compelling story brings to life the popular culture of the Revolutionary Delaware Valley through analysis of wide-ranging evidence, from architecture, folk art, clothing, and music to personal papers, newspapers, and local church, tax, and census records. The study's multilayered local perspective allows us to see how the Revolutionary upheaval of the colonial status quo penetrated everyday life and stimulated new understandings of the importance of cultural diversity in the Revolutionary nation.

Liam Riordan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maine.

392 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 27 illus.
Cloth Apr 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4001-6 | $49.95s | £32.50 | Add to shopping cart

A volume in the Early American Studies series

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Peoples of the River Valleys
The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians

Amy C. Schutt

Offers a fresh interpretation of the history of the Delaware, or Lenape, Indians in the context of events in the mid-Atlantic region and the Ohio Valley.

Seventeenth-century Indians from the Delaware and lower Hudson valleys organized their lives around small-scale groupings of kin and communities. Living through epidemics, warfare, economic change, and physical dispossession, survivors from these peoples came together in new locations, especially the eighteenth-century Susquehanna and Ohio River valleys. In the process, they did not abandon kin and community orientations, but they increasingly defined a role for themselves as Delaware Indians in early American society.

Peoples of the River Valleys offers a fresh interpretation of the history of the Delaware, or Lenape, Indians in the context of events in the mid-Atlantic region and the Ohio Valley. It focuses on a broad and significant period: 1609-1783, including the years of Dutch, Swedish, and English colonization and the American Revolution. An epilogue takes the Delawares' story into the mid-nineteenth century.

Amy C. Schutt examines important themes in Native American history—mediation and alliance formation—and shows their crucial role in the development of the Delawares as a people. She goes beyond familiar questions about Indian-European relations and examines how Indian-Indian associations were a major factor in the history of the Delawares. Drawing extensively upon primary sources, including treaty minutes, deeds, and Moravian mission records, Schutt reveals that Delawares approached alliances as a tool for survival at a time when Euro-Americans were encroaching on Native lands. As relations with Colonists were frequently troubled, Delawares often turned instead to form alliances with other Delawares and non-Delaware Indians with whom they shared territories and resources. In vivid detail, Peoples of the River Valleys shows the link between Delawares' approaches to land and the relationships they constructed on the land.

Amy C. Schutt teaches history at the State University of New York College at Cortland.

264 pages | 6 x 9 | 14 illus.
Cloth 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-3993-5 | $45.00s | £29.50 | Add to shopping cart

A volume in the Early American Studies series
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Troubled Experiment
Crime and Justice in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800

Jack D. Marietta and G. S. Rowe

Troubled Experiment exposes the difference between glowing reputation and grim reality of crime in early Pennsylvania. The plight of lawmakers and magistrates, and the sufferings of victims, women, children, and minorities take their places in this tragedy. The authors conclude that through this lens, we see the troubled future of America.

Eighteenth-century Pennsylvanians killed and abused each other at a pace that outstripped most of their English and American contemporaries and rivaled some of the worst crime rates in the following 200 years. They victimized their kin and neighbors as well as their enemies and rivals, and the powerful as well as the weak. And yet the land they populated was captioned the "Holy Experiment," renowned as the "best poor man's country on earth," and memorialized as the "Peaceable Kingdom." Troubled Experiment chronicles the extravagant crime in this unlikely place and explains how the disparity between reputation and reality arose.

This work attaches numbers and faces to the criminals and their victims and to the magistrates, judges, and others seeking to maintain a civil society in the face of violence and licentiousness. To provide such detail, the authors assembled an impressive array of archival materials, including all the extant public court records. No previous history has looked so closely at the volume and variety of crime in the Quaker province, the identity of the perpetrators of crime, their victims, and their prosecutors. The authors also examine the historical record of women, children, African Americans, and ethnic groups in their behavior as criminals, victims, and other actors in the criminal justice system.

Pennsylvanians exalted the freedom and toleration of their province, but Troubled Experiment explains that they confronted abuses of freedom that made them reexamine their tolerance and rethink their idealism. It lends a new perspective to the conventional characterization of Pennsylvania by adding the momentous dimensions of crime and punishment. The authors conclude by depicting Pennsylvania—vaunted as an enlightened, free society—as a community suffering from the problems of crime that plague America today.

Jack D. Marietta is Professor of History at the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748-1783, also published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. G. S. Rowe is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Northern Colorado. He is the author of Thomas McKean and the Shaping of an American Republicanism and Embattled Bench: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the Forging of a Democratic Society, 1684-1809.

A volume in the Early American Studies series
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The Captive's Position
Female Narrative, Male Identity, and Royal Authority in Colonial New England

Teresa A. Toulouse

Why do narratives of Indian captivity emerge in New England between 1682 and 1707 and why are these texts, so centrally concerned with women's experience, supported and even written by a powerful group of Puritan ministers? In The Captive's Position, Teresa Toulouse argues for a new interpretation of the captivity narrative—one that takes into account the profound shifts in political and social authority and legitimacy that occurred in New England at the end of the seventeenth century.

While North American narratives of Indian captivity had been written before this period by French priests and other European adventurers, those stories had focused largely on Catholic conversions and martyrdoms or male strategies for survival among the Indians. In contrast, the New England texts represented a colonial Protestant woman who was separated brutally from her family but who demonstrated qualities of religious acceptance, humility, and obedience until she was eventually returned to her own community. Toulouse explores how the female captive's position came to resonate so powerfully for traditional male elites in the second and third generation of the Massachusetts colony. Threatened by ongoing wars with Indians and French as well as by a range of royal English interventions in New England political and cultural life, figures such as Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and John Williams perceived themselves to be equally challenged by religious and social conflicts within New England. By responding to and employing popular representations of female captivity, they were enabled to express their ambivalence toward the world of their fathers and toward imperial expansion and thereby to negotiate their own complicated sense of personal and cultural identity.

Examining the captivity narratives of Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Dustan, Hannah Swarton, and John Williams (who comes to stand in for the female captive), Toulouse asserts the need to read these gendered texts as cultural products that variably engage, shape, and confound colonial attitudes toward both Europe and the local scene in Massachusetts. In doing so, The Captive's Position offers a new story of the rise and breakdown of orthodox Puritan captivities and a meditation on the relationship between dreams of authority and historical change.

Teresa A. Toulouse is Professor of English at Tulane University and author of The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief.

240 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth Nov 2006 | ISBN 0-8122-3958-X | $49.95s | £32.50 |

Abraham in Arms
War and Gender in Colonial New England

Ann M. Little

“Abraham in Arms is a creative and fascinating tour-de-force. Sweeping across two centuries of conflict in the colonial Northeast, from the Pequot War of 1636-37 to the Seven Years’ War of the mid-eighteenth century, Little shows how northeastern Native peoples, English colonists, and French settlers interpreted each other’s actions through the lens of their own gendered sense of proper social order. The book makes a very persuasive case for gender being central to any study of war that historians might undertake, and the writing flows elegantly from insight to insight.”—Nancy Shoemaker, University of Connecticut

In 1678, the Puritan minister Samuel Nowell preached a sermon he called “Abraham in Arms,” in which he urged his listeners to remember that “Hence it is no wayes unbecoming a Christian to learn to be a Souldier.” The title of Nowell’s sermon was well chosen. Abraham of the Old Testament resonated deeply with New England men, as he embodied the ideal of the householder-patriarch, at once obedient to God and the unquestioned leader of his family and his people in war and peace. Yet enemies had challenged Abraham’s authority in New England: Indians threatened the safety of his household, subordinates in his own family threatened his status, and wives and daughters taken into captivity became baptized Catholics, married French or Indian men, and refused to return to New England.

In a bold reinterpretation of the years between 1620 and 1763, Ann M. Little reveals how ideas about gender and family life were central to the ways people in colonial New England, and their neighbors in New France and Indian Country, described their experiences in cross-cultural warfare. Little argues that English, French, and Indian people had broadly similar ideas about gender and authority. Because they understood both warfare and political power to be intertwined expressions of manhood, colonial warfare may be understood as a contest of different styles of masculinity. For New England men, what had once been a masculinity based on household headship, Christian piety, and the duty to protect family and faith became one built around the more abstract notions of British nationalism, anti-Catholicism, and soldiering for the Empire.

Based on archival research in both French and English sources, court records, captivity narratives, and the private correspondence of ministers and war officials, Abraham in Arms reconstructs colonial New England as a frontier borderland in which religious, cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries were permeable, fragile, and contested by Europeans and Indians alike.

Ann M. Little is Associate Professor of History at Colorado State University.

264 pages | 6 x 9 | 17 illus.
Cloth Oct 2006 | ISBN 0-8122-3965-2 | $45.00s | £29.50 |
A volume in the Early American Studies series

Bodies Politic
Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830

John Wood Sweet

“An ambitious and persuasive account of the ways the political inclusion of some groups and not others connected the colonial era through the Revolution to the early American republic.”—Journal of American History

“At once detailed and sweeping, social and political, archival and synthetic. . . . This book is the best application yet to early American history of postcolonial theory.”—American Historical Review

“Sweet offers scholars a capacious history of race in the North and a primer for thinking about the relationship between ‘cultures’ and identities. . . . Bodies Politic is deeply researched and richly detailed.”—William and Mary Quarterly

“This superb study explores the origins of that ironic definition of democracy as ‘universal freedom and racial inequality.’ . . . Sophisticated and engaging. . . . Highly recommended.”—Choice

In this sweeping analysis of colonialism and its legacies, John Wood Sweet explores how the ongoing interaction of conquered Indians, English settlers, and enslaved Africans in New England produced a closely interwoven, though radically divided, society. The coming together of these diverse peoples profoundly shaped the character of colonial New England, the meanings of the Revolution in the North, and the making of American democracy writ large.

Critically engaged with current debates about the dynamics of culture, racial identity, and postcolonial politics, this innovative and intellectually capacious work is grounded in a remarkable array of evidence. What emerges from this analysis of colonial and early national censuses, newspapers, diaries, letters, court records, printed works, and visual images are the dramatic confrontations and subtle negotiations by which Indians, Africans, and Anglo-Americans defined their respective places in early New England. Citizenship, as Sweet reveals, was defined in meeting houses as well as in courthouses, in bedrooms as well as on battlefields, in land disputes as well as on streets. Bodies Politic reveals how the legacy of colonialism shaped the emergence of the nineteenth-century North and continues, even to this day, to shape all our lives.

John Wood Sweet is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina and the coeditor (with Robert Appelbaum) of Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

504 pages | 6 x 9 | 24 illus.
Paper Sep 2006 | ISBN 0-8122-1978-3 | $22.50s | £15.00 |

The Shame and the Sorrow
Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland

Donna Merwick

The Dutch, through the directors of the West India Company, purchased Manhattan Island in 1625. They had come to the New World as traders, not expecting to assume responsibility as the sovereign possessor of a conquered New Netherland. They did not intend to make war on the natives peoples around Manhattan Island but they did; they did not intend to help destroy native cultures but they did; they intended to be overseas the tolerant, pluralistic, and antimilitaristic people they thought themselves to be—and in so many respects were—at home, but they were not.

For the Dutch intruders, establishing a settled presence away from the homeland meant the destabilization of the adventurers' values and self-regard. They found that the initially peaceful encounters with the indigenous people soon took on the alarming overtones of an insurgency as the influx of the Dutch led to a complete upheaval and eventual disintegration of the social and political worlds of the natives.

How are the Dutch to be judged? Donna Merwick, in The Shame and the Sorrow, asks this question. She points to a betrayal both of their own values and of the native peoples. She also directs us to the self-delusion of hegemonic control. Her work belongs alongside the best of today's postcolonial studies in the description of cross-cultural violence and subtle questioning of the nature of writing its history.

Donna Merwick is Senior Fellow, University of Melbourne, and Long Term Visiting Fellow, Australian National University. She is the author of Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York and Possessing Albany, 1630-1710: The Dutch and English Experiences.

320 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 20 illus.
Cloth May 2006 | ISBN 0-8122-3928-8 | $49.95s | £32.50 |
A volume in the Early American Studies series

The Native Ground
Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent

Kathleen DuVal

"Moving beyond an 'Indians and Europeans' story, Kathleen DuVal looks instead at competing and overlapping stories involving multiple Native groups (Quapaws, Osages, and eventually Cherokees) who operate from different positions with different strategies and experiences, and incorporate an array of outsiders (Spanish, French, British, and eventually Americans). This is the kind of study we need more of."—Colin G. Calloway, Dartmouth College

"With keen insight and broad vision, Kathleen DuVal has produced an ambitious study of a neglected region in early American history, but the significance of her analysis transcends the Arkansas Valley and will influence scholars working in other areas of American Indian and colonial American history. She traces all of the connections with other regions and draws comparisons where appropriate, from the Northeast to Mexico, and makes Indian-to-Indian relations central to the story. The Native Ground is indeed a book that will grab plenty of attention from the fields of early American and American Indian history."—Daniel Usner, Vanderbilt University

In The Native Ground, Kathleen DuVal argues that it was Indians rather than European would-be colonizers who were more often able to determine the form and content of the relations between the two groups. Along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, far from Paris, Madrid, and London, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. Rather than being colonized, Indians drew European empires into local patterns of land and resource allocation, sustenance, goods exchange, gender relations, diplomacy, and warfare. Placing Indians at the center of the story, DuVal shows both their diversity and our contemporary tendency to exaggerate the influence of Europeans in places far from their centers of power. Europeans were often more dependent on Indians than Indians were on them.

Now the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, this native ground was originally populated by indigenous peoples, became part of the French and Spanish empires, and in 1803 was bought by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Drawing on archaeology and oral history, as well as documents in English, French, and Spanish, DuVal chronicles the successive migrations of Indians and Europeans to the area from precolonial times through the 1820s. These myriad native groups—Mississippians, Quapaws, Osages, Chickasaws, Caddos, and Cherokees—and the waves of Europeans all competed with one another for control of the region.

Only in the nineteenth century did outsiders initiate a future in which one people would claim exclusive ownership of the mid-continent. After the War of 1812, these settlers came in numbers large enough to overwhelm the region's inhabitants and reject the early patterns of cross-cultural interdependence. As citizens of the United States, they persuaded the federal government to muster its resources on behalf of their dreams of landholding and citizenship.

With keen insight and broad vision, Kathleen DuVal retells the story of Indian and European contact in a more complex and, ultimately, more satisfactory way.

Kathleen DuVal teaches history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

328 pages | 6 x 9 | 20 illus.
Cloth Mar 2006 | ISBN 0-8122-3918-0 | $45.00s | £29.50 |
A volume in the Early American Studies series

Doomsayers
Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution

Susan Juster

"This delightful and provocative book describe a dimension of Anglo-American culture typically lost from view. . . . While retaining the bizarre and humorous elements of their stories, she also admirable brings the underlying desperation and devotion of her subjects to light."—Journal of the Early Republic

"This original, richly textured book . . . skillfully challenges comfortable notions about the historical interplay between faith and reason."—William and Mary Quarterly

"Outstanding."—Journal of Church and State

"With dazzling execution, Susan Juster not only gives us a fascinating cast of human characters but brings alive the Anglo-American ferment in the Age of Revolution over religious change, theories of what connects body to mind and soul, modes of self-presentation and communication, and critiques of modernity. This elegant study contains many wonderful surprises."—Cornelia H. Dayton, University of Connecticut

"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 philosophers 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.

288 pages | 6 x 9 | 5 illus.
Cloth 2003 | ISBN 0-8122-3732-3 | $39.95s | £26.00 | Add to shopping cart
Paper May 2006 | ISBN 0-8122-1951-1 | $24.95s | £16.50 | Add to shopping cart
A volume in the Early American Studies series

Along the Hudson and Mohawk
The 1790 Journey of Count Paolo Andreani

Cesare Marino and Karim M. Tiro, Editors and Translators

In the summer of 1790 the Italian explorer Count Paolo Andreani embarked on a journey that would take him through New York State and eastern Iroquoia. Traveling along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, Andreani kept a meticulous record of his observations and experiences in the New World. Published for the first time in English, the diary is of major importance to those interested in life after the American Revolution, political affairs in the New Republic, and Native American peoples.

Through Andreani's writings, we glimpse a world in cultural, economic, and political transition. An active participant in Enlightenment science, Andreani provides detailed observations of the landscape and natural history of his route. He also documents the manners and customs of the Iroquois, Shakers, and German, Dutch, and Anglo New Yorkers. Andreani was particularly interested in the Oneida and Onondaga Indians he visited, and his description of an Oneida lacrosse match accompanies the earliest known depiction of a lacrosse stick. Andreani's American letters, included here, relate his sometimes difficult but always revealing personal relationships with Washington, Jefferson, and Adams.

Prefaced by an illuminating historical and biographical introduction, Along the Hudson and Mohawk is a fascinating look at the New Republic as seen through the eyes of an observant and curious explorer.

Cesare Marino is an anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution. His books include The Sioux Vocabulary of 1823, Dal Piave at Little Bighorn, and The Remarkable Carlo Gentile, Pioneer Italian Photographer of the West.

Karim M. Tiro teaches history at Xavier University.

128 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | 15 illus.
Cloth Feb 2006 | ISBN 0-8122-3914-8 | $35.00s | £23.00 |

From Privileges to Rights
Work and Politics in Colonial New York City

Simon Middleton

"A remarkable book. From Privileges to Rights opens up a new vista on the history of colonial New York City by focusing on the experiences of a group that has never been the subject of a major study. In doing so, it calls into question conventional notions of the work lives and political understandings of a broad strand of the urban population and builds a convincing case for locating the emergence of artisanal republicanism several decades before the revolutionary era."—Joyce D. Goodfriend, University of Denver

From Privileges to Rights connects the changing fortunes of tradesmen in early New York to the emergence of a conception of subjective rights that accompanied the transition to a republican and liberal order in eighteenth-century America.

Tradesmen in New Amsterdam occupied a distinct social position and, with varying levels of success, secured privileges such as a reasonable reward and the exclusion of strangers from their commerce. The struggle to maintain these privileges figured in the transition to English rule as well as Leisler's Rebellion. Using hitherto unexamined records from the New York City Mayor's Court, Simon Middleton also demonstrates that, rather than merely mastering skilled crafts in workshops, artisans participated in whatever enterprises and markets promised profits with a minimum of risk. Bakers, butchers, and carpenters competed in a bustling urban economy knit together by credit that connected their fortunes to the Atlantic trade.

In the early eighteenth century, political and legal changes diminished earlier social distinctions and the grounds for privileges, while an increasing reliance on slave labor stigmatized menial toil. When an economic and a constitutional crisis prompted the importation of radical English republican ideas, artisans were recast artisans as virtuous male property owners whose consent was essential for legitimate government. In this way, an artisanal subject emerged that provided a constituency for the development of a populist and egalitarian republican political culture in New York City.

Simon Middleton teaches early American history at the University of Sheffield.

320 pages | 6 x 9 | 14 illus.
Cloth Feb 2006 | ISBN 0-8122-3915-6 | $45.00s | £29.50 |
A volume in the Early American Studies series

The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 1
Journalist, 1706-1730

J. A. Leo Lemay

Described by Carl Van Doren as "a harmonious human multitude," Benjamin Franklin was the most famous American of his time, of perhaps any time. His life and careers were so varied and successful that he remains, even today, the epitome of the self-made man. Born into a humble tradesman's family, this adaptable genius rose to become an architect of the world's first democracy, a leading light in Enlightenment science, and a major creator of what has come to be known as the American character. Journalist, musician, politician, scientist, humorist, inventor, civic leader, printer, writer, publisher, businessman, founding father, and philosopher, Franklin is a touchstone for America's egalitarianism.

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.

568 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 41 illus.
Cloth Oct 2005 | ISBN 0-8122-3854-0 | $39.95t | £26.00 |

The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 2
Printer and Publisher, 1730-1747

J. A. Leo Lemay

Described by Carl Van Doren as "a harmonious human multitude," Benjamin Franklin was the most famous American of his time, of perhaps any time. His life and careers were so varied and successful that he remains, even today, the epitome of the self-made man. Born into a humble tradesman's family, this adaptable genius rose to become an architect of the world's first democracy, a leading light in Enlightenment science, and a major creator of what has come to be known as the American character. Journalist, musician, politician, scientist, humorist, inventor, civic leader, printer, writer, publisher, businessman, founding father, philosopher, Franklin is a touchstone for America's egalitarianism.

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.

Doctor Franklin's Medicine

Stanley Finger

Benjamin Franklin founded the first hospital and medical school in the American colonies. He studied the efficacy of smallpox inoculation and investigated the causes of the common cold. His inventions--including bifocal lenses and a "long arm" that extended the user's reach-made life easier for the aged and afflicted. In Doctor Franklin's Medicine, Stanley Finger uncovers the instrumental role that this scientist, inventor, publisher, and statesman played in the development of the healing arts--enhancing preventive and bedside medicine, hospital care, and even personal hygiene in ways that changed the face of medical care in both America and Europe.

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.

Stanley Finger is Professor of Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches in the programs of Neural Sciences and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology. He has written widely on the history of medicine, and his many books include Origins of Neuroscience, and Minds Behind the Brain. Finger is senior editor of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.

288 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 45 illus. Cloth Dec 2005 | ISBN 0-8122-3913-X | $39.95t | £26.00 |

New World Orders
Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas

John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey, Editors

From the Early American Studies series

As the geographic boundaries of early American history have expanded, so too have historians' attempts to explore the comparative dimensions of this history. At the same time, historians have struggled to find a conceptual framework flexible enough to incorporate the sweeping narratives of imperial history and the hidden narratives of social history into a broader, synthetic whole. No such paradigm that captures the two perspectives has yet emerged.

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.

376 pages | 6 x 9 | 6 illus.
Cloth Oct 2005 | ISBN 0-8122-3895-8 | $49.95s | £32.50

Rebellion and Savagery
The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire

Geoffrey Plank

From the Early American Studies series
View table of contents and sample text
In the summer of 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, the grandson of England's King James II, landed on the western coast of Scotland intending to overthrow George II and restore the Stuart family to the throne. He gathered thousands of supporters, and the insurrection he led--the Jacobite Rising of 1745--was a crisis not only for Britain but for the entire British Empire. Rebellion and Savagery examines the 1745 rising and its aftermath on an imperial scale.

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.

272 pages | 6 x 9 | 13 illus.
Cloth Nov 2005 | ISBN 0-8122-3898-2 | $39.95s | £26.00 |

The Natures of John and William Bartram

Thomas P. Slaughter

From the Pennsylvania Paperbacks series
Not for sale in the British Commonwealth except Canada

"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.

328 pages | 5 1/4 x 8 | 16 illus.
Paper Oct 2005 | ISBN 0-8122-1934-1 | $17.50t | £11.50 |

The Origins of Freemasonry
Facts and Fictions

Margaret C. Jacob

Can the ancestry of freemasonry really be traced back to the Knights Templar? Is the image of the eye in a triangle on the back of the dollar bill one of its cryptic signs? Is there a conspiracy that stretches through centuries and generations to elevate this shadow organization with secret rituals and ties to world governments and religions? Myths persist and abound about the freemasons, Margaret C. Jacob notes. But what is their origin? How has an early modern organization of bricklayers and stonemasons aroused so much public interest? In The Origins of Freemasonry, Jacob throws back the veil from a secret society that turns out not to have been very secret at all.

As early as the 1650s, Jacob writes, records show how impoverished English and Scottish guilds of stonemasons began to admit relatives of members as well as prominent figures with philosophical interests. By 1750, membership was estimated in the tens of thousands, with perhaps a thousand women among them, and by the time of the French Revolution, well over 100,000 individuals in Europe and America had taken the Masonic Oath to the Grand Architect of the Universe.

What factors contributed to the extraordinarily rapid spread of freemasonry over the course of the eighteenth century, and why were so many of the era's most influential figures drawn to it? Using material from the archives of leading masonic libraries in Europe, Jacob examines masonic almanacs and pocket diaries to get closer to what living as a freemason might have meant on a daily basis. She explores the persistent connections between masons and nascent democratic movements, as each lodge set up a polity--often more honored in the breach than in the execution--where an individual's standing would be based on merit, rather than on birth or wealth, and she demonstrates, beyond any doubt, how active a role women played in the masonic movement. Membership implied an interest in government, as the lodges often functioned as schools where brothers and sisters learned to vote, to orate, to practice social discipline, and, not least, regularly to pay "taxes" to their lodge.

The Origins of Freemasonry separates fact from fiction, revealing the truth about an organization that fascinated the eighteenth-century public in much the same way it fascinates us today.

Margaret C. Jacob is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of many books, including The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Selected Texts and Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West.

192 pages | 6 x 9 | 16 illus.
Cloth Nov 2005 | ISBN 0-8122-3901-6 | $26.50t | £17.50 |

May 13, 2008

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