Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement
Kay Dian Kriz
This highly original book asks new questions about paintings and prints associated with the British West Indies between 1700 and 1840, when the trade in sugar and slaves was most active and profitable. In a wide-ranging study of scientific illustrations, scenes of daily life, caricatures, and landscape imagery, Kay Dian Kriz analyzes the visual culture of refinement that accompanied the brutal process by which African slaves transformed “rude” sugar cane into pure white crystals.
In these works refinement is usually associated with the metropole, and “rudeness” with the colonies. Many artists capitalized on those characteristics of rudeness—animality, sensuality, and savagery—that increasingly became associated with all the island inhabitants. Yet other artists produced works that offered the possibility of colonial refinement, not just economic profit and sexual pleasure, thus complicating perceptions of difference between the two sides of the Atlantic.
Kay Dian Kriz is associate professor of art history in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Brown University. She is the author of The Idea of the English Landscape Painter (Yale).
Jun 16, 2008
288 p., 7 1/2 x 10
80 b/w + 40 color illus.
ISBN: 0300140622
Cloth: $75.00 sc
Extending the Frontiers
Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database
Edited by David Eltis and David Richardson
Since 1999, intensive research efforts have vastly increased what is known about the history of coerced migration of transatlantic slaves. A huge database of slave trade voyages from Columbus’s era to the mid-nineteenth century is now available on an open-access Web site, incorporating newly discovered information from archives around the Atlantic world. The groundbreaking essays in this book draw on these new data to explore fundamental questions about the trade in African slaves. The research findings—that the size of the slave trade was 14 percent greater than had been estimated, that trade above and below the equator was largely separate, that ports sending out the most slave voyages were not in Europe but in Brazil, and more—challenge accepted understandings of transatlantic slavery and suggest a variety of new directions for important further research.
For the most complete database on slave trade voyages ever compiled, visit www.slavevoyages.org .
David Eltis is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History, Emory University. He lives in Atlanta. David Richardson is director, Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, and professor of economic history, University of Hull, England. He lives in East Yorkshire.
Available Aug 25, 2008
400 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
17 b/w illus. + 2 maps
ISBN: 0300134363
Cloth: $90.00 tx
The Comanche Empire
Pekka Hämäläinen
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at the high tide of imperial struggles in North America, an indigenous empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in historical accounts.
This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches. It is a story that challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. Pekka Hämäläinen shows in vivid detail how the Comanches built their unique empire and resisted European colonization, and why they fell to defeat in 1875. With extensive knowledge and deep insight, the author brings into clear relief the Comanches’ remarkable impact on the trajectory of history.
Pekka Hämäläinen is assistant professor of history, University of California, Santa Barbara. He lives in Santa Barbara.
Published in Association with The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
Apr 14, 2008
512 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
12 b/w illus. + 8 maps
ISBN: 0300126549
Cloth: $35.00
Flowers and Herbs of Early America
Lawrence D. Griffith; Photography by Barbara Temple Lombardi
Hounds-tongue. Ragged robin. Costmary. Pennyroyal. All-heal. These plants, whose very names conjure up a bygone world, were among the great variety of flowers and herbs grown in America’s colonial and early Federal gardens. In this sumptuously illustrated book, a leading historic plant expert brings this botanical heritage back to life.
Drawing on years of archival research and field trials in Colonial Williamsburg’s gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia, Lawrence Griffith documents fifty-six species of flowers and herbs and provides details on how they were cultivated and used. For each plant, an elegant period hand-colored engraving, watercolor, or woodcut is presented along with glorious new photographs by Barbara Temple Lombardi.
This book is a dazzling treat for armchair gardeners and for those who have visited and admired the famous gardens of Colonial Williamsburg. It is also an invaluable companion for twenty-first-century gardeners who will appreciate the specific advice of a master gardener on how to plan, choose appropriate species for, and maintain a beautiful, historic flower and herb garden.
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation is a not-for-profit educational institution that operates the world’s largest living history museum.
Published in association with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Lawrence Griffith is curator of plants for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and former garden columnist for The Daily Press, Newport News, VA. He lives on the Middle Peninsula of Virginia. Barbara Temple Lombardi is a photographer for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. She lives in Williamsburg, VA.
Available Sep 22, 2008304 p., 9 1/4 x 10 1/2
265 color
ISBN: 0300145365
Cloth: $50.00
The Talking Book
African Americans and the Bible
Allen Dwight Callahan
The Talking Book casts the Bible as the central character in a vivid portrait of black America, tracing the origins of African-American culture from slavery’s secluded forest prayer meetings to the bright lights and bold style of today’s hip-hop artists.
The Bible has profoundly influenced African Americans throughout history. From a variety of perspectives this wide-ranging book is the first to explore the Bible’s role in the triumph of the black experience. Using the Bible as a foundation, African Americans shared religious beliefs, created their own music, and shaped the ultimate key to their freedom—literacy. Allen Callahan highlights the intersection of biblical images with African-American music, politics, religion, art, and literature.
The author tells a moving story of a biblically informed African-American culture, identifying four major biblical images—Exile, Exodus, Ethiopia, and Emmanuel. He brings these themes to life in a unique African-American history that grows from the harsh experience of slavery into a rich culture that endures as one of the most important forces of twenty-first-century America.
Allen Dwight Callahan is director of the Instituto Martin Luther King, Jr. in Salvador, Brazil.
2008
304 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
# Paper: $18.00
# Also available in Cloth: $30.00
A Fragile Freedom
African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City
Erica Armstrong Dunbar
This book is the first to chronicle the lives of African American women in the urban north during the early years of the republic. A Fragile Freedom investigates how African American women in Philadelphia journeyed from enslavement to the precarious status of “free persons” in the decades leading up to the Civil War and examines comparable developments in the cities of New York and Boston.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar argues that early nineteenth-century Philadelphia, where most African Americans were free, enacted a kind of rehearsal for the national emancipation that followed in the post–Civil War years. She explores the lives of the “regular” women of antebellum Philadelphia, the free black institutions that took root there, and the previously unrecognized importance of African American women to the history of American cities.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar is associate professor of history, University of Delaware. She lives in Wyncote, PA.
2008
212 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
13 b/w illus.
ISBN: 0300125917
# Cloth: $55.00 tx
Converting California
Indians and Franciscans in the Missions
James A. Sandos
This book is a compelling and balanced history of the California missions and their impact on the Indians they tried to convert. Focusing primarily on the religious conflict between the two groups, it sheds new light on the tensions, accomplishments, and limitations of the California mission experience.
James A. Sandos, an eminent authority on the American West, traces the history of the Franciscan missions from the creation of the first one in 1769 until they were turned over to the public in 1836. Addressing such topics as the singular theology of the missions, the role of music in bonding Indians to Franciscan enterprises, the diseases caused by contact with the missions, and the Indian resistance to missionary activity, Sandos not only describes what happened in the California missions but offers a persuasive explanation for why it happened.
James A. Sandos is Farquhar Professor of the Southwest, University of Redlands.
2008272 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
18 b/w illus.
ISBN: 0300136439
# Paper: $20.00 sc
# Also available in Cloth: $38.00
The Discovery of Mankind
Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus
David Abulafia
The first landings in the Atlantic World generated striking and terrifying impressions of unknown peoples who were entirely foreign to anything in European explorers’ experience. From the first recorded encounters with the native inhabitants of the Canary Islands in 1341 to Columbus’s explorations in 1492 and Cabral’s discovery of Brazil in 1500, western Europeans struggled to make sense of the existence of the peoples they met. Were they Adam’s children, of a common lineage with the peoples of the Old World, or were they a separate creation, the monstrous races of medieval legend? Should they govern themselves? Did they have the right to be free? Did they know God? Could they know God?
Emphasizing contact between peoples rather than the discovery of lands, and using archaeological findings as well as eyewitness accounts, David Abulafia explores the social lives of the New World inhabitants, the motivations and tensions of the first transactions with Europeans, and the swift transmutation of wonder to vicious exploitation. Lucid, readable, and scrupulously researched, this is a work of humane engagement with a period in which a tragically violent standard was set for European conquest across the world.
David Abulafia is professor of Mediterranean History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Spain and 1492, Mediterranean Encounters, and The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume 5, c.1198–c.1300.
Available Feb 18, 2008408 p., 234 x 156
30 b/w illus.
ISBN: 0300125828
Cloth: $35.00
Pilgrims
New World Settlers and the Call of Home
Susan Hardman Moore
This book uncovers what might seem to be a dark side of the American dream: the New World from the viewpoint of those who decided not to stay. At the core of the volume are the life histories of people who left New England during the British Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1640–1660. More than a third of the ministers who had stirred up emigration from England deserted their flocks to return home. The colonists’ stories challenge our perceptions of early settlement and the religious ideal of New England as a “City on a Hill.” America was a stage in their journey, not an end in itself.
Susan Hardman Moore first explores the motives for migration to New England in the 1630s and the rhetoric that surrounded it. Then, drawing on extensive original research into the lives of hundreds of migrants, she outlines the complex reasons that spurred many to brave the Atlantic again, homeward bound. Her book ends with the fortunes of colonists back home and looks at the impact of their American experience.
Of exceptional value to studies of the connections between the Old and New Worlds, Pilgrims contributes to debates about the nature of the New England experiment and its significance for the tumults of revolutionary England.
Susan Hardman Moore is lecturer in divinity, University of Edinburgh.
Nov 26, 2007336 p., 6 x 9
16 b/w
ISBN: 0300117183
Cloth: $35.00 sc
Originalism, Federalism, and the American Constitutional Enterprise
A Historical Inquiry
Edward A. Purcell, Jr.
In this lively historical examination of American federalism, a leading scholar in the field refutes the widely accepted notion that the founding fathers carefully crafted a constitutional balance of power between the states and the federal government. Edward A. Purcell Jr. bases his argument on close analysis of the Constitution’s original structure and the ways that structure both induced and accommodated changes over the centuries.
There was no clear agreement among the founding fathers regarding the “true” nature of American federalism, Purcell contends, nor was there a consensus on “correct” lines dividing state and national authority. Furthermore, even had there been some true “original” understanding, the elastic and dynamic nature of the constitutional structure would have made it impossible for subsequent generations to maintain any “original” or permanent balance. The author traces the evolution of federalism through the centuries, focusing particularly on shifting interpretations founded on political interests. He concludes with insights into current issues of federal power and a discussion of the grounds on which legitimate decisions about federal and state power should rest.
Edward A. Purcell, Jr., is Joseph Solomon Distinguished Professor, New York Law School. He is author of many books and scholarly articles, including Brandeis and the Progressive Constitution: Erie, the Judicial Power, and the Politics of Federal Courts in Twentieth-Century America (2000), published by Yale University Press, for which he received the Coif Triennial Book Award and the Triennial Griswold Prize. He lives in New York City.
Nov 05, 2007
320 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Cloth: $45.00 sc
The Yale Book of Quotations
Edited by Fred R. Shapiro; Foreword by Joseph Epstein
Named a Best Book of 2006 by amazon.com; won a Professional Scholarly Publishing Honorable Mention; winner of the Bronze ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in Reference; received rating of “Outstanding” from 2007 University Press Books Committee.
This reader-friendly volume contains more than 12,000 famous quotations, arranged alphabetically by author. It is unique in its focus on American quotations and its inclusion of items not only from literary and historical sources but also from popular culture, sports, computers, science, politics, law, and the social sciences. Anonymously authored items appear in sections devoted to folk songs, advertising slogans, television catchphrases, proverbs, and others.
For each quotation, a source and first date of use is cited. In many cases, new research for this book has uncovered an earlier date or a different author than had previously been understood. (It was Beatrice Kaufman, not Sophie Tucker, who exclaimed, “I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich. Rich is better!” William Tecumseh Sherman wasn’t the originator of “War is hell!” It was Napoleon.) Numerous entries are enhanced with annotations to clarify meaning or context for the reader. These interesting annotations, along with extensive cross-references that identify related quotations and a large keyword index, will satisfy both the reader who seeks specific information and the curious browser who appreciates an amble through entertaining pages.
Fred R. Shapiro is associate librarian and lecturer in legal research at the Yale Law School. He is a well-known authority on quotations and the editor of The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations.
Sep 25, 20061104 p., 7 x 9 1/4
92 b/w illus.
ISBN: 0300107986
Cloth: $50.00
The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism
George McKenna
In this absorbing book, George McKenna ranges across the entire panorama of American history to track the development of American patriotism. That patriotism—shaped by Reformation Protestantism and imbued with the American Puritan belief in a providential “errand”—has evolved over 350 years and influenced American political culture in both positive and negative ways, McKenna shows. The germ of the patriotism, an activist theology that stressed collective rather than individual salvation, began in the late 1630s in New England and traveled across the continent, eventually becoming a national phenomenon. Today, American patriotism still reflects its origins in the seventeenth century.
By encouraging cohesion in a nation of diverse peoples and inspiring social reform, American patriotism has sometimes been a force for good. But the book also uncovers a darker side of the nation’s patriotism—a prejudice against the South in the nineteenth century, for example, and a tendency toward nativism and anti-Catholicism. Ironically, a great reversal has occurred, and today the most fervent believers in the Puritan narrative are the former “outsiders”—Catholics and Southerners. McKenna offers an interesting new perspective on patriotism’s role throughout American history, and he concludes with trenchant thoughts on its role in the post-9/11 era.
George McKenna is professor emeritus, City College of the City University of New York, where he taught American government and American political thought for forty years. He lives in Tenafly, NJ.
448 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
ISBN: 030010099x
Cloth: $35.00
The Business of Books
Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450-1850
James Raven
In 1450 very few English men or women were personally familiar with a book; by 1850, the great majority of people daily encountered books, magazines, or newspapers. This book explores the history of this fundamental transformation, from the arrival of the printing press to the coming of steam. James Raven presents a lively and original account of the English book trade and the printers, booksellers, and entrepreneurs who promoted its development.
Viewing print and book culture through the lens of commerce, Raven offers a new interpretation of the genesis of literature and literary commerce in England. He draws on extensive archival sources to reconstruct the successes and failures of those involved in the book trade—a cast of heroes and heroines, villains, and rogues. And, through groundbreaking investigations of neglected aspects of book-trade history, Raven thoroughly revises our understanding of the massive popularization of the book and the dramatic expansion of its markets over the centuries.
James Raven is professor of modern history, University of Essex. He is the author of numerous studies in cultural history and has published extensively on the history of the book and related topics.
Jun 04, 2007448 p., 234 x 156
20 b/w illus
ISBN: 0300122616
Cloth: $65.00 tx
James Fenimore Cooper
The Early Years
Wayne Franklin
James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) invented the key forms of American fiction—the Western, the sea tale, the Revolutionary War romance. Furthermore, Cooper turned novel writing from a polite diversion into a paying career. He influenced Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Francis Parkman, and even Mark Twain—who felt the need to flagellate Cooper for his “literary offenses.” His novels mark the starting point for any history of our environmental conscience. Far from complicit in the cleansings of Native Americans that characterized the era, Cooper’s fictions traced native losses to their economic sources.
Perhaps no other American writer stands in greater need of a major reevaluation than Cooper. This is the first treatment of Cooper’s life to be based on full access to his family papers. Cooper’s life, as Franklin relates it, is the story of how, in literature and countless other endeavors, Americans in his period sought to solidify their political and cultural economic independence from Britain and, as the Revolutionary generation died, stipulate what the maturing republic was to become. The first of two volumes, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years covers Cooper’s life from his boyhood up to 1826, when, at the age of thirty-six, he left with his wife and five children for Europe.
Wayne Franklin is author of The New World of James Fenimore Cooper and coeditor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. His research on Cooper has had the financial support of the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Stanton W. and Elisabeth K. Davis Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He is professor of English and director of American studies at the University of Connecticut.
May 07, 2007752 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
20 b/w ills in gallery
ISBN: 0300108052
Cloth: $40.00
The Hudson
A History
Tom Lewis
The Hudson River has always played a vital role in American culture. Flowing through a valley of sublime scenery, the great river uniquely connects America’s past with its present and future. This book traces the course of the river through four centuries, recounting the stories of explorers and traders, artists and writers, entrepreneurs and industrialists, ecologists and preservationists—those who have been shaped by the river as well as those who have helped shape it. Their compelling narratives attest to the Hudson River’s distinctive place in American history and the American imagination.
Among those who have figured in the history of the Hudson are Benedict Arnold, Alexander Hamilton, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Astors and the Vanderbilts, and Thomas Cole of the Hudson River school. Their stories appear here, alongside those of such less famous individuals as the surveyor who found the source of the Hudson and the engineer who tried to build a hydroelectric plant at Storm King Mountain. Inviting us to view the river from a wider perspective than ever before, this entertaining and enlightening book is worthy of its grand subject.
Tom Lewis is professor of English at Skidmore College. Among his previous books are Divided Highways: The Interstate Highway System and the Transformation of American Life and Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, both of which became award-winning documentaries.
Apr 23, 2007352 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
33 b/w illus. + 40 maps
ISBN: 0300119909
Paper: $17.00
Also available in Cloth: $30.00
The Making of John Ledyard
Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler
Edward G. Gray
During the course of his short but extraordinary life, John Ledyard (1751–1789) came in contact with some of the most remarkable figures of his era: the British explorer Captain James Cook, American financier Robert Morris, Revolutionary naval commander John Paul Jones, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and others. Ledyard lived and traveled in remarkable places as well, journeying from the New England backcountry to Tahiti, Hawaii, the American Northwest coast, Alaska, and the Russian Far East. In this engaging biography, the historian Edward Gray offers not only a full account of Ledyard’s eventful life but also an illuminating view of the late eighteenth-century world in which he lived.
Ledyard was both a product of empire and an agent in its creation, Gray shows, and through this adventurer’s life it is possible to discern the many ways empire shaped the lives of nations, peoples, and individuals in the era of the American Revolution, the world’s first modern revolt against empire.
Edward Gray is associate professor of history, Florida State University. He is the author or coeditor of three previous books and editor of Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life (www.common-place.org). He lives in Tallahassee.
May 21, 2007240 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4; 15 figures & 5 maps
ISBN: 0300110553
Cloth: $35.00 sc
Findings
The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing
Mary C. Beaudry
Mary C. Beaudry mines archaeological findings of sewing and needlework to discover what these small traces of female experience reveal about the societies and cultures in which they were used. Beaudry’s geographical and chronological scope is broad: she examines sites in the United States and Great Britain, as well as Australia and Canada, and she ranges from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution.
The author describes the social and cultural significance of pins, needles, thimbles, scissors, and other sewing accessories and tools. Through the fascinating stories that grow out of these findings, Beaudry shows the extent to which such “small things” were deeply entrenched in the construction of gender, personal identity, and social class.
Mary C. Beaudry is professor of archaeology and anthropology, Boston University. She lives in Malden, MA.
256 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/446 b/w illus.
ISBN: 0300110936
Cloth: $55.00 tx
A Republic of Mind and Spirit
A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion
Catherine L. Albanese
This path-breaking book tells the story of American metaphysical religion more fully than it has ever been told before, along the way significantly revising the panorama of American religious history. Catherine L. Albanese follows metaphysical traditions from Renaissance Europe to England and then America, where they have flourished from colonial days to the twenty-first century, blending often with African, Native American, and other cultural elements.
The book follows evolving versions of metaphysical religion, including Freemasonry, early Mormonism, Universalism, and Transcendentalism—and such further incarnations as Spiritualism, Theosophy, New Thought, Christian Science, and reinvented versions of Asian ideas and practices. Continuing into the twentieth century and after, the book shows how the metaphysical mix has broadened to encompass UFO activity, channeling, and chakras in the New Age movement—and a much broader new spirituality in the present. In its own way, Albanese argues, American metaphysical religion has been as vigorous, persuasive, and influential as the evangelical tradition that is more often the focus of religious scholars’ attention. She makes the case that because of its combinative nature—its ability to incorporate differing beliefs and practices—metaphysical religion offers key insights into the history of all American religions.
Catherine L. Albanese is professor and chair, Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, and former president of the American Academy of Religion. She lives in the Santa Barbara area.
640 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4ISBN: 0300110898
Cloth: $40.00
Published in association with the Yale Center for British Art
Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830
Edited by John Styles and Amanda Vickery
Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
John Styles is research professor in history at the University of Hertfordshire. He co-authored Design and the Decorative Arts: Britain 1500 to 1900. Amanda Vickery is reader in the history of women and gender at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her first book, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (Yale), won the Whitfield, Wolfson and Longman-History Today prizes.
368 p., 7 x 1026 b/w + 58 color illus.
ISBN: 030011659
Cloth: $65.00 sc
Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 24: The Blank Bible
Edited by Stephen Stein
In 1730, Jonathan Edwards acquired a book-like, leather-bound manuscript containing an interleaved printed edition of the King James Version of the Bible. Over the next three decades, Edwards proceeded to write in the manuscript more than five thousand notes and entries relating to biblical texts (though paradoxically he called the manuscript his “Blank Bible”). Only a fraction of the entries has ever been published. This volume presents a complete edition of the “Blank Bible” accompanied by an informative introduction, multiple appendices, and an extensive index.
This volume, perhaps the most unusual in Edwards’ oeuvre, brings to light more clearly than ever before the full scope of his creative investment in biblical studies.
Stephen J. Stein is Chancellor’s Professor, Emeritus, in the Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the editor of two previous volumes in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Apocalyptic Writings and Notes on Scripture. He lives in Bloomington, IN.
"The Jonathan Edwards Project is the first of its kind—a comprehensive, exhaustive effort to produce an online archive of all of Edwards' sermons, treatises, letters and musings to serve the needs of anyone who cares to know the man. To date, no other university or institute has attempted to transcribe, computerize and then post online the complete works of any one historical figure. . . . Though he may never attain the rock-star status of George Washington, with the Yale project, Edwards will live forever.—Adrian Brune, Hartford Courant
1472 p., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4ISBN: 0300109318
Cloth: $200.00 tx
Jul 31, 2006
Empires of the Atlantic World
Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830
J. H. Elliott
This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus’s arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J. H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working today, offers us history on a grand scale, contrasting the worlds built by Britain and by Spain on the ruins of the civilizations they encountered and destroyed in North and South America.
Elliott identifies and explains both the similarities and differences in the two empires’ processes of colonization, the character of their colonial societies, their distinctive styles of imperial government, and the independence movements mounted against them. Based on wide reading in the history of the two great Atlantic civilizations, the book sets the Spanish and British colonial empires in the context of their own times and offers us insights into aspects of this dual history that still influence the Americas.
J. H. Elliott is Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History, University of Oxford. His previous books include The Count-Duke of Olivares, A Palace for a King (with Jonathan Brown), and Spain and Its World, 1500—1700, all published by Yale University Press. Among the many honors he has received are the Wolfson Prize for History, the Prince of Asturias Prize for the Social Sciences, and the Balzan Prize for History.
Sir John Elliott Observes...
A long period of residence in a foreign country opens new windows on the world. For seventeen years I lived and worked in Princeton, New Jersey, at the Institute for Advanced Study, before returning to my home country to take up a professorship at Oxford in 1990. During those seventeen years I was heavily engaged in researching and writing on my principal area of interest, the history of Spain and Hispanic civilization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But, living in the United States and not in Europe, I was for the first time looking at Spain from across the Atlantic, and at Iberian America within a hemispheric context. As a Briton living abroad, I was also coming to look at the past and present of my own country from a transatlantic vantage point, and to reflect on the ways in which British institutions and culture had been reshaped by their transfer to an American environment.
It then occurred to me that it would be an interesting exercise to compare and contrast the empires of Britain and Spain in America, and explore the similarities and the differences in the societies that emerged from the process of conquest and colonization. It has been a long but exciting voyage of exploration, which I hope will open the eyes of others, as it has opened mine, to the rich and complex history of the Atlantic world.
560 p., 246 x 171
40/50in 2 plate sections half colour
ISBN: 0300114311
Cloth: $35.00
John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty
Arthur H. Cash, State University of New York at New Paltz
“Arthur Cash’s biography of Wilkes combines outstanding scholarship—the product of years of archival research —with a compelling, nuanced and beautifully told narrative of the life of one of the eighteenth century’s most compelling characters.” —John Brewer “It is diffi cult to believe that John Wilkes, a notorious womanizer and scandal-monger, was a genuine hero of civil liberties and political democracy on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 18th century, but hero he was and in this engaging book Arthur Cash gives Wilkes the serious treatment he has long deserved.”—Eric Foner This highly entertaining biography draws a full portrait of one of the most colorful fi gures in English political history, John Wilkes. Remembered as the father of the British free press, a champion of liberty, and a hero to American colonists, Wilkes’s political career was rancorous (involving duels, imprisonments, and a famous massacre) while his private life was notorious.
2006 496 pp. 27 b/w illus.Cloth ISBN 0-300-10871-0 $37.50
August 1 , 2008