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.

400 pages / 6 x 9 / 21 color, 69 b/w illus.
Cloth Dec 2002 / ISBN 0-8122-3692-0 / $35.00s / £24.50

The Cowpens-Guilford Courthouse Campaign

Burke Davis

"A remarkable chronicle. Davis's characterizations of the various commanders are sharp; his descriptions of the terrain concise. The graphic explanations of arms and logistics will delight the technically minded."--John Toland, New York Times Book Review

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.

224 pages / 5 1/4 x 8
Paper Sep 2002 / ISBN 0-8122-1832-9 / $14.95t / £10.50
Not available outside North America and the United Kingdom

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.

352 pages / 6 x 9 / 16 illus.
Cloth Nov 2002 / ISBN 0-8122-3698-X / $39.95s / £28.00
Material Texts

During the seven years of British occupation that spanned the American Revolution, communities conventionally depicted as hostile opponents were, in fact, in frequent contact.

Generous Enemies
Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York

Judith L. Van Buskirk

In July 1776, the final group of more than 130 ships of the Royal Navy sailed into the waters surrounding New York City, marking the start of seven years of British occupation that spanned the American Revolution. What military and political leaders characterized as an impenetrable "Fortress Britannia"--a bastion of solid opposition to the American cause--was actually very different. As Judith Van Buskirk reveals, the military standoff produced civilian communities that were forced to operate in close, sustained proximity, each testing the limits of political and military authority. Conflicting loyalties blurred relationships between the two sides: John Jay, a delegate to the Continental Congresses, had a brother whose political loyalties leaned toward the crown, while one of the daughters of Continental Army general William Alexander lived in occupied New York City with her husband, a prominent Loyalist. Indeed, the texture of everyday life during the Revolution was much more complex than historians have recognized.

In Generous Enemies, Judith Van Buskirk challenges many long-held assumptions about wartime experience during the American Revolution by demonstrating that communities conventionally depicted as hostile opponents were, in fact, in frequent contact. Living in two clearly delineated zones of military occupation--the British occupying the islands of New York Bay and the Americans in the surrounding countryside--the people of the New York City region often reached across military lines to help friends and family members, pay social calls, conduct business, or pursue a better life. Examining the movement of loyalist and rebel families, British and American soldiers, free blacks, slaves, and businessmen, Van Buskirk shows how personal concerns often triumphed over political ideology.

Making use of family letters, diaries, memoirs, soldier pensions, Loyalist claims, committee and church records, and newspapers, this compelling social history tells the story of the American Revolution with a richness of human detail.

Judith L. Van Buskirk teaches history at the State University of New York, Cortland.

272 pages / 6 x 9 / 17 illus.
Cloth Jul 2002 / ISBN 0-8122-3675-0 / $35.00s / £24.50
Early American Studies

Native American Studies

Arnold Krupat

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13763.html

Arnold Krupat, one of the most original and respected critics
working in Native American studies today, offers a clear and
compelling set of reasons why red--Native American culture,
history, and literature--should matter to Americans more than it
has to date. Although there exists a growing body of criticism
demonstrating the importance of Native American literature in its
own right and in relation to other ethnic and minority literatures,
Native materials still have not been accorded the full attention they
require. Krupat argues that it is simply not possible to understand
the ethical and intellectual heritage of the West without engaging
America's treatment of its indigenous peoples and their
extraordinary and resilient responses.

Criticism of Native literature in its current development, Krupat
suggests, operates from one of three critical perspectives against
colonialism that he calls nationalism, indigenism, and
cosmopolitanism. Nationalist critics are foremost concerned with
tribal sovereignty, indigenist critics focus on non-Western modes of
knowledge, and cosmopolitan critics wish to look elsewhere for
comparative possibilities. Krupat persuasively contends that all
three critical perspectives can work in a complementary rather
than an oppositional fashion.

A work marked by theoretical sophistication, wide learning, and
social passion, Red Matters is a major contribution to the
imperative effort of understanding the indigenous presence on the
American continents.

Arnold Krupat is Professor of Literature in the Global Studies
Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. Among his many books are
Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature; The Turn to the
Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture; and For Those Who
Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography.

184 pages / 6 x 9
Cloth Feb 2002 / ISBN 0-8122-3649-1 / $47.50s / £33.50
Paper Feb 2002 / ISBN 0-8122-1803-5 / $18.95s / £13.50
Rethinking the Americas

Charlene Mires                                     

"This is a book I have long awaited, one that tells the life of a
single building so as to illuminate American history from almost
every angle--cultural, social, and political."--Mary Ryan, author of
Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City
During the Nineteenth Century                                   

Independence Hall is a place Americans think they know well.
Within its walls the Continental Congress declared independence in
1776, and in 1787 the Founding Fathers drafted the U.S.
Constitution. Painstakingly restored to evoke these momentous
events, the building appears to have passed through time
unscathed, from the heady days of the American Revolution to
today's tourists. But Independence Hall is more than a symbol of
the young nation. Beyond this, according to Charlene Mires, it has
a long and varied history of changing uses in an urban
environment, almost all of which have been forgotten.

In Independence Hall, Mires rediscovers and chronicles the lost
history of Independence Hall, in the process exploring the shifting
perceptions of this most important building in America's popular
imagination. According to Mires, the significance of Independence
Hall cannot be fully appreciated without assessing the full range of
political, cultural, and social history that has swirled about it for
nearly three centuries. During its existence, it has functioned as a
civic and cultural center, a political arena and courtroom, and a
magnet for public celebrations and demonstrations. Artists such as
Thomas Sully frequented Independence Square when Philadelphia
served as the nation's capital during the 1790s, and portraitist
Charles Willson Peale merged the arts, sciences, and public interest
when he transformed a portion of the hall into a center for natural
science in 1802. In the 1850s, hearings for accused fugitive slaves
who faced the loss of freedom were held, ironically, in this famous
birthplace of American independence. Over the years
Philadelphians have used the old state house and its public square
in a multitude of ways that have transformed it into an arena of
conflict: labor grievances have echoed regularly in Independence
Square since the 1830s while civil rights protesters exercised their
right to free speech in the turbulent 1960s. As much as the
Founding Fathers, these people and events illuminate the building's
significance as a cultural symbol.

In a fascinating portrait that illuminates the connections between
collective memory and history, investigates how traditions and
heritage emerge and change, and examines how a heterogeneous
society constructs and preserves its history, Mires reveals
Independence Hall, the most revered symbol of the American
republic, as a place of contradictions, where the nation's ideals
have been both defined and contested, expanded and limited.

A former editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Charlene Mires
teaches history at Villanova University and was a corecipient of the
Pulitzer Prize in Journalism.

352 pages / 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 / 60 illus.
Cloth Jun 2002 / ISBN 0-8122-3665-3 / $34.95t / £24.50                                

Timothy Sweet

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13552.html

In classical terms the georgic celebrates the working landscape, cultivated to
become fruitful and prosperous, in contrast to the idealized or fanciful
landscapes of the pastoral. Arguing that economic considerations must become
central to any understanding of the human community's engagement with the
natural environment, Timothy Sweet identifies a distinct literary mode he calls
the American georgic. Offering a fresh approach to ecocritical and
environmentally-oriented literary studies, Sweet traces the history of the
American georgic from its origins in late sixteenth-century English literature
promoting the colonization of the Americas through the mid-nineteenth
century, ending with George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature (1864), the
foundational text in the conservationist movement.

Timothy Sweet is Associate Professor of English at West Virginia University.
He is the author of Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union.

232 pages / 6 x 9
Cloth 2001 / ISBN 0-8122-3637-8 / $45.00s / £31.50

Ivor Noel Hume and Audrey Noel Hume

The Archaeology of Martin's Hundred explores the history and
artifacts of a 20,000-acre tract of land in Tidewater Virginia, one of
the most extensive English enterprises in the New World. Settled
in 1618, all signs of its early occupation soon disappeared, leaving
no trace above ground. More than three centuries later,
archaeological explorations uncovered tantalizing evidence of the
people who had lived, worked, and died there in the seventeenth century.

Part I: Interpretive Studies addresses four critical questions, each
with complex and sometimes unsatisfactory answers: Who was
Martin? What was a hundred? When did it begin and end? Where
was it located? We then see how scientific detective work resulted
in a reconstruction of what daily life must have been like in the
strange and dangerous new land of colonial Virginia. The authors
use first-person accounts, documents of all sorts, and the treasure
trove of artifacts carefully unearthed from the soil of Martin's Hundred.

Part II: Artifact Catalog illustrates and describes the principal
artifacts in 110 figures. The objects, divided by category and by
site, range from ceramics, which were the most readily and reliably
datable, to glass, of which there was little, to metalwork, in all its
varied aspects from arms and armor to rail splitters' wedges, and,
finally, to tobacco pipes.

The two-part Archaeology of Martin's Hundred is a fascinating
account of the ways archaeological fieldwork, laboratory
examination, and analysis based on lifelong study of documentary
and artifact research came together to increase our knowledge of
early colonial history.

Ivor Noel Hume headed the archaeological program at the
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for thirty years. Audrey Noel
Hume was curator of archaeological collections at Colonial
Williamsburg.

Copublished with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

600 pages / 2-vol set, 8 1/2 x 11 / 110 illus.
Cloth 2001 / ISBN 0-924171-85-5 / $100.00s / £70.00
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology

Leonard L. Richards

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 4,000 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 200 years, and brought
closure to the American Revolution.

The importance of Shays's Rebellion has never been fully
appreciated chiefy 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 infuential and the weak, even members
of some of the best Massachusetts families. Through a 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.

272 pages / 6 x 9 / 38 illus.
Cloth Jun 2002 / ISBN 0-8122-3669-6 / $29.95t / £21.00

Lucy Fowler Williams

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13738.html

Totaling approximately 40,000 objects, the University Museum's
ethnographic holdings represent native peoples from ten North
American culture areas--the Arctic, Subarctic, Northwest Coast,
California, Plateau, Great Basin, Southwest, Great Plains,
Northeast, and the Southeast.

This guide highlights the strength of the collections and
demonstrates how objects are tied to history and people living
within different cultural and social contexts. It also underscores
that objects have different multiple meanings. Some objects
illustrate intertribal relations; others best reflect collecting attitudes
at the turn of the century when much of the Museum's collections
was acquired.

Visitors and off-site readers will learn about such related archival
resources as documentation and photographs, past and present
Museum exhibitions, current research, repatriation, and
contemporary collections development.

Lucy Fowler Williams is Keeper of the American Section of the
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology.

96 pages / 6 x 9 / 64 color illus., 2 maps
Cloth May 2002 / ISBN 1-931707-32-4 / $29.95t / £21.00
Paper May 2002 / ISBN 1-931707-33-2 / $14.95t / £10.50
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Making Race in America

Elise Lemire

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13764.html

  "Lemire opens new paths of inquiry into the invention of race and
of whiteness, as well as into the history of love and sexual desire in
the United States."--Martha Hodes, New York University

In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, as the
question of black political rights was debated more and more
vociferously, descriptions and pictorial representations of whites
coupling with blacks proliferated in the North. Novelists,
short-story writers, poets, journalists, and political cartoonists
imagined that political equality would be followed by widespread
inter-racial sex and marriage. Legally possible yet socially
unthinkable, this "amalgamation" of the races would manifest itself
in the perverse union of "whites" with "blacks," the latter figured
as ugly, animal-like, and foul-smelling. In "Miscegenation," Elise
Lemire reads these literary and visual depictions for what they can
tell us about the connection between the racialization of desire and
the social construction of race.

Previous studies of the prohibition of inter-racial sex and marriage
in the U.S. have focused on either the slave South or the
post-Reconstruction period. Looking instead to the North, and to
such texts as the Federalist poetry about Thomas Jefferson and
Sally Hemings, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans,
Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," and the 1863
pamphlet in which the word "miscegenation" was first used,
Lemire examines the steps by which whiteness became a sexual
category and same-race desire came to seem a biological
imperative.

"This is an exciting book. Lemire convinces the reader that the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed an often shrill
argument for intra-racial, as opposed to inter-racial, coupling in the
northeastern United States. Making love across the racial divide
between black and white thus came to appear as a contradiction in
terms, since only making miscegenation was possible."--Werner
Sollors, Harvard University

Elise Lemire teaches literature at Purchase College, State
University of New York.

224 pages / 6 x 9 / 19 illus.
Cloth May 2002 / ISBN 0-8122-3664-5 / $35.00s / £24.50

The Vanishing Landscape and Architecture of the New England Tobacco Fields

James F. O'Gorman

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13775.html

"Little by little the gap grows larger and larger between people
and their roots. Western life now plays out far from its origins in
nature and history. Think of this essay as a pause in that
on-rushing existence."--From the Introduction

A traveler along the banks of the Connecticut River will be struck
by the number of long low sheds rising from the fields as if they
are an extension of the landscape. A building type shaped by
necessity that grows more beautiful with use and age, these are
tobacco curing sheds, mute witnesses to a slowly vanishing
agricultural tradition and a thriving economic boom of the last
hundred and fifty years.

Surprisingly, the Connecticut River valley was once a major
producer of cigar leaf tobacco. One of the plants whose cultivation
was learned from the native Americans, tobacco was the main
crop of many old Yankee farmers and their inheritors, the Slavic
newcomers. The need to season the "Indian weede" gave rise to
the structure of the drying barns, a vernacular style unique to its
time and place. Just as a picture can throw light on an entire
world, so can these drying sheds open a window on a way of life
that is fast receding. James F. O'Gorman reads through oral
histories, newspaper reports, and the terse factual writing of
agricultural diaries to bring to life the risks and rewards of living
close to the seasons, at the mercy of rainfall and sunshine. He has
collected an array of vintage and newly commissioned photos of
the work of growing tobacco, from de facto portraits of
anonymous laborers to images of the sheds themselves, with all
their ventilating doors open, welcoming the air. In this beautifully
crafted book, O'Gorman treats both the people and the sheds with
the respect and admiration their precarious presence requires.

An inquiry that becomes an elegy for a way of life that is part of
our rural heritage, Connecticut Valley Vernacular is an appreciative
glance back by one of our premier architectural historians.

James F. O'Gorman is Grace Slack McNeil Professor of History of
American Art at Wellesley College. He is the author of the
best-selling ABC of Architecture.

146 pages / 9 x 9 / 26 color, 19 b/w illus.
Cloth Jun 2002 / ISBN 0-8122-3670-X / $34.95t / £24.50

Gary B. Nash

With its rich foundation stories, Philadelphia may be
the most important city in America's collective memory.
By the middle of the eighteenth century William Penn's
"greene countrie town" was, after London, the largest
city in the British Empire. The two most important
documents in the history of the United States, the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were
drafted and signed in Philadelphia. The city served off
and on as the official capital of the young country until
1800, and was also the site of the first American
university, hospital, medical college, bank, paper mill,
zoo, sugar refinery, public school, and government mint.

In First City, acclaimed historian Gary B. Nash
examines the complex process of memory making in
this most historic of American cities. Though history is
necessarily written from the evidence we have of the
past, as Nash shows, rarely is that evidence preserved
without intent, nor is it equally representative. Full of
surprising anecdotes, First City reveals how
Philadelphians--from members of elite cultural
institutions, such as historical societies and museums, to
relatively anonymous groups, such as women, racial and
religious minorities, and laboring people--have
participated in the very partisan activity of transmitting
historical memory from one generation to the next.

Gary B. Nash is Professor of History at University of
California, Los Angeles and author of many books
including History on Trial: Culture Wars and the
Teaching of the Past, The Urban Crucible: Social
Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the
American Revolution, and Forging Freedom: The
Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community,
1720-1840.

Covering more than two centuries of social,
economic, and political change, and offering a
challenging, innovative approach to urban as well
national history, First City tells the Philadelphia
story through the wealth of material culture its
citizens have chosen to preserve.

352 pages / 7 x 10
Cloth Sep 2001 / 0-8122-3630-0 / $34.95t / £24.50
Early American Studies

Susan Branson

On July 4, 1796, a group of women gathered in York,
Pennsylvania, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of
American independence. They drank tea and toasted the
Revolution, the Constitution, and, finally, the rights of
women. This event would have been unheard of thirty
years before, but a popular political culture developed
after the war in which women were actively involved,
despite the fact that they could not vote or hold political
office. This new-found atmosphere not only provided
women with opportunities to celebrate national
occasions outside the home but also enabled them to
conceive of possessing specific rights in the young
republic and to demand those rights in very public
ways.

Susan Branson examines the avenues through which
women's presence became central to the competition for
control of the nation's political life and, despite attempts
to quell the emerging power of women--typified by
William Cobbett's derogatory label of politically active
women as "these fiery Frenchified
dames"--demonstrates that the social, political, and
intellectual ideas regarding women in the
post-Revolutionary era contributed to a more significant
change in women's public lives than most historians
have recognized.

As an early capital of the United States, the leading
publishing center, and the largest and most
cosmopolitan city in America during the eighteenth
century, Philadelphia exerted a considerable influence
on national politics, society, and culture. It was in
Philadelphia that the Federalists and Democratic
Republicans first struggled for America's political
future, with women's involvement critical to the outcome
of their heated partisan debates. Middle and upper-class
women of Philadelphia were able to achieve a greater
share in the culture and politics of the new nation
through several key developments, including theaters
and salons that were revitalized following the war,
allowing women to intermingle and participate in
political discussions, and the wider availability of
national and international writings, particularly those
that described women's involvement in the French
Revolution--perhaps the most important and
controversial historical event in the early development of
American women's political consciousness. Given these
circumstances, Branson argues, American women were
able to create new more active social and political roles
for themselves that brought them out of the home and
into the public sphere. Although excluded from the
formal political arenas of voting and lawmaking,
American women in the Age of Revolution nevertheless
thought and acted politically and were able to make their
presence and opinions known to the benefit of a young
nation.

"Branson argues convincingly that, contrary to
the claims of recent historians, women in the
revolutionary era had an identity as women, that
many of them were feminists in these years. This
book contributes a great deal to the current
debate about the meaning of the American
Revolution for women."--Sheila Skemp, University of Mississippi

Susan Branson teaches history at the University of Texas at Dallas.

224 pages / 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Cloth 2001 / 0-8122-3609-2 / $47.50s / £33.50
Paper 2001 / 0-8122-1777-2 / $17.50s / £12.50
Early American Studies

352 pages / 6 x 9 1/4
Paper Jun 2001 / 0-8122-1771-3 / $24.95t / £17.50

Paul Giles

"A rich and varied work that turns up new literary
indebtednesses, surprising readings, and a far more
interesting set of contours both to what had been
thought of as the boundaries of American literature as
well as to what we thought British literature
was."--Leonard Tennenhouse, Brown University

Giles traces the paradoxical relations between English
and American literature from 1730 through 1860,
suggesting how the formation of a literary tradition in
each national culture was deeply dependent upon
negotiation with its transatlantic counterpart. Using the
American Revolution as the fulcrum of his argument,
Giles describes how the impulse to go beyond
conventions of British culture was crucial in the
establishment of a distinct identity for American
literature. Similarly, he explains the consolidation of
British cultural identity partly as a response to the need
to suppress the memory and consequences of defeat in
the American revolutionary wars.

Giles ranges over neglected American writers such as
Mather Byles and the Connecticut Wits as well as
better-known figures like Franklin, Jefferson, Irving,
and Hawthorne. He reads their texts alongside those of
British authors such as Pope, Richardson, Equiano,
Austen, and Trollope. Taking issue with more
established utopian narratives of American literature,
Transatlantic Insurrections analyzes how elements of
blasphemous, burlesque humor entered into the making
of the subject.

Paul Giles is University Lecturer in American Literature
at the University of Cambridge.

272 pages / 6 x 9
Cloth May 2001 / 0-8122-3603-3 / $55.00s / £39.00
Paper May 2001 / 0-8122-1767-5 / $19.95s / £14.00

Joshua David Bellin

"This work will join such studies as Toni Morrison's
Playing in the Dark, Eric Sundquist's To Wake the
Nations, and Lucy Maddox's Removals. It is a
thoughtful, engaging study."--Priscilla Wald, Duke
University

"Bellin not only proposes a major and fundamentally
new reading of American literature itself, he also writes
beautifully."--Barry F. O'Connell, Amherst College

In recent years, the study and teaching of Native
American oral and written art have flourished. During
the same period, there has been a growing recognition
among historians, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians
that Indians must be seen not as the voiceless, nameless,
faceless Other but as people who had a powerful impact
on the historical development of the United States.
Literary critics, however, have continued to overlook
Indians as determinants of American--rather than
specifically Native American--literature. The notion that
the presence of Indian peoples shaped American
literature as a whole remains unexplored.

In The Demon of the Continent, Joshua David Bellin
probes the complex interrelationships among Native
American and Euro-American cultures and literatures
from the midseventeenth to the midnineteenth centuries.
He asserts that cultural contact is at the heart of
American literature. For Bellin, previous studies of
Indians in American literature have focused largely on
the images Euro-American writers constructed of
indigenous peoples, and have thereby only perpetuated
those images. Unlike authors of those earlier studies,
Bellin refuses to reduce Indians to static antagonists or
fodder for a Euro-American imagination.

Drawing on works such as Henry David Thoreau's
Walden, William Apess' A Son of the Forest, and little
known works such as colonial Indian conversion
narratives, he explores the ways in which these texts
reflect and shape the intercultural world from which
they arose. In doing so, Bellin reaches surprising
conclusions: that Walden addresses economic clashes
and partnerships between Indians and whites; that
William Bartram's Travels encodes competing and
interpenetrating systems of Indian and white
landholding; that Catherine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie
enacts the antebellum drama of Indian conversion; that
James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow struggled with Indian authors such as
George Copway and David Cusick for physical,
ideological, and literary control of the nation.

The Demon of the Continent proves Indians to be
actors in the dynamic processes in which America and
its literature are inescapably embedded. Shifting the
focus from textual images to the sites of material,
ideological, linguistic, and aesthetic interaction between
peoples, Bellin reenvisions American literature as the
product of contact, conflict, accommodation, and
interchange.

Joshua David Bellin is on the faculty of La Roche
College.

280 pages / 6 x 9
Cloth 2000 / 0-8122-3570-3 / $49.95s / £35.00
Paper 2000 / 0-8122-1748-9 / $24.95s / £17.50

Ruth Wallis Herndon

In eighteenth-century America, no centralized system of
welfare existed to assist people who found themselves
without food, medical care, or shelter. Any poor relief
available was provided through local taxes, and these
funds were quickly exhausted. By the end of the
century, state and national taxes levied to help pay for
the Revolutionary War further strained municipal
budgets. In order to control homelessness, vagrancy,
and poverty, New England towns relied heavily on the
"warning out" system inherited from English law. This
was a process in which community leaders determined
the legitimate hometown of unwanted persons or
families in order to force them to leave, ostensibly to
return to where they could receive care. The
warning-out system alleviated the expense and
responsibility for the general welfare of the poor in any
community, and placed the burden on each town to look
after its own.

But homelessness and poverty were problems as
onerous in early America as they are today, and the
system of warning out did little to address the
fundamental causes of social disorder. Ultimately the
warning-out system gave way to the establishment of
general poorhouses and other charities. But the
documents that recorded details about the lives of those
who were warned out provide an extraordinary--and
until now forgotten--history of people on the margin.

Unwelcome Americans puts a human face on poverty in
early America by recovering the stories of forty New
Englanders who were forced to leave various
communities in Rhode Island. Rhode Island towns kept
better and more complete warning-out records than
other areas in New England, and because the official
records include those who had migrated to Rhode
Island from other places, these documents can be relied
upon to describe the experiences of poor people across
the region.

The stories are organized from birth to death, beginning
with the lives of poor children and young adults,
followed by families and single adults, and ending with
the testimonies of the elderly and dying. Through
meticulous research of historical records, Herndon has
managed to recover voices that have not been heard for
more than two hundred years, in the process painting a
dramatically different picture of family and community
life in early New England. These life stories tell us that
those who were warned out were predominantly
unmarried women with or without children, Native
Americans, African Americans, and destitute families.
Through this remarkable reconstruction, Herndon
provides a corrective to the narratives of the privileged
that have dominated the conversation in this crucial
period of American history, and the lives she chronicles
give greater depth and a richer dimension to our
understanding of the growth of American social
responsibility.

Ruth Wallis Herndon teaches history at the University
of Toledo.

264 pages / 6 x 9
Cloth Feb 2001 / 0-8122-3592-4 / $49.95s / £35.00
Paper Feb 2001 / 0-8122-1765-9 / $18.95s / £13.50
Early American Studies

320 pages / 5 3/8 x 8
Paper 2000 / 0-8122-1731-4 / $19.95s / £15.00