Bøger i Early American Studies serien

Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? Christian Slavery shows how debates about slavery transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic world.

Vividly recounting the lives of enslaved women in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados, and their conditions of confinement through urban, legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, authorities, and the archive, Marisa J. Fuentes challenges how histories of vulnerable and invisible subjects are written.

Susan Juster explores different forms of sacred violence-blood sacrifice, holy war, malediction, and iconoclasm-to uncover how European traditions of ritual violence developed during the Reformation were introduced and ultimately transformed in the New World.

Liberty's Prisoners chronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment for the most egregious of offenders, quickly became a holding tank for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation's promise of liberty.

The Settlers' Empire examines the peculiar status of the young United States as a postcolonial republic with its own domestic empire by looking at where these dual political responsibilities inevitably collided-in the federal project of early state formation and its joint colonial rules over Euroamericans and diverse Indian nations.

From the staged debates over religious enthusiasm 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 reading public was part of a broader recalibration of the norms and values of civic discourse in the age of revolution.

Friends and Strangers offers a provocative new look at the transfer of English culture to North America. Setting Pennsylvania in the context of the broader Atlantic phenomenon of creolization, Smolenski's account of the Quaker colony's origins reveals the vital role this process played in creating early American society.

Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean depicts the human drama in which enslaved Africans struggled against their enslavers and environment, and one another. The book reorients Atlantic slavery studies by revealing how social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies reflected an unrelenting fight to survive.

By centering the practical and figurative significance of the Ohio River as a political border, a cultural boundary, and an artery of movement and economy that gave form to the region, Matthew Salafia sheds light on peculiarities of labor and economy along the Ohio River.

Robert Love's Warnings follows the walks of one otherwise obscure townclerk, Robert Love, as he warned itinerants and sojourners to depart the town in fourteen days. Love's meticulous records reveal the complex legal, social, and political landscape of New England in the decade before the Revolution.

Synthesizing the tensions between high and low politics and eastern and western regions in Pennsylvania before the Revolution, Patrick Spero recasts the importance of frontiers, as eighteenth-century Pennsylvanians would have understood them, to the development of colonial America and the origins of American Independence.

Thanks to the recent discovery of Judith Sargent Murray's papers-including some 2,500 personal letters-Sheila L. Skemp has documented the compelling story of a talented and most unusual eighteenth-century woman.

A Nation of Women provides a history of the significance of gender in Lenape/Delaware encounters with Europeans, and a history of women in these encounters.

This history of New York culture and commerce in the first two thirds of the eighteenth century tells how the volatile forces of imperial politics and commerce created a fluid society in which establishing one's own status or verifying another's was a challenge.

"Herndon has painstakingly reconstructed the lives of these most obscure early New Englanders. . . . The resulting study at once opens an important window onto the development of poor-relief policy in America and offers a fascinating account of lives and voices often lost to us."-New England Quarterly

Lenape Country is a sweeping narrative history of Lenape Indian encounters with European settlers in the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

An Infinity of Nations tells the story of the indigenous peoples who ruled the western interior of North America, focusing in particular on the Great Lakes and Northern Great Plains.

The Empire Reformed describes how, in the era of the Glorious Revolution, imperial leaders and colonial subjects created new political bonds based on their common desire to save English America from the designs of French "papists" and their "savage" Indian allies.

Ranging from the birth of town meetings in England to the whipping posts of early Boston to the creation of the Scituate shipbuilding common, Town Born reveals how New England town political economies created the foundation for a relatively egalitarian American society.

During the forty years of the Dutch presence in colonial America, their intrusion led to the betrayal of their own values and the betrayal of the indigenous peoples. They reaped the shame of reproaching themselves for unjust wars and faced a native insurgency that they could neither negotiate nor satisfactorily quell.

Contested Bodies explores how the end of the transatlantic trade impacted Jamaican slaves and their children. Examining the struggles for control over biological reproduction, Turner shows how central childbearing was to the organization of plantation work, the care of slaves, and the development of their culture.

In this cultural history of the War of 1812, Nicole Eustace examines the way this expensive, unproductive war won popular support through appeal to the emotions. 1812 looks at the major dramatic events of the war and the subsequent songs, speeches, and images that spoke of opportunity and romantic adventure.

Seneca Possessed explores how the Seneca people and their homeland were "possessed"-culturally, spiritually, materially, and legally-in the wake of the American Revolution.

The Ties That Buy traces the lives of black and white women in early America to reveal how they used residence, work, credit, and money to shape consumer culture precisely at a time when the politics of the marketplace gained national significance.

Eric R. Schlereth places religious conflicts between deists and their opponents at the center of early American public life. This history recasts the origins of cultural politics in the United States by exploring how everyday Americans navigated questions of religious truth and difference in an age of emerging religious liberty.

During the first half-century of American independence, a fundamental change in the meaning and morality of ambition emerged. Beyond the Farm blends biography, social history, and cultural history to describe and explain that change.

Through a series of engrossing narratives, Death in the New World uses the customs surrounding death among Indians, Africans, and Europeans as a lens through which to examine the cross-cultural interactions in North America and the Caribbean in the three centuries following Columbus.

In an era of bewildering geographical mobility, economic metamorphosis, and political upheaval, the proliferation of letter writing and the development of a communications infrastructure enabled middle-class Britons and Americans to rise to advantage in the British Atlantic world.

Catalysts in the birth of evangelicalism, the Moravians supported their religious projects through financial savvy, a distinctive communalism at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and transatlantic commercial networks. This book traces the Moravians' evolving projects, arguing that imperial war, not capitalism, transformed Moravian religious life.

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.