Bøger i Early American Studies serien

Zamumo's Gifts traces the evolution of Indian-European exchange, from gift giving as a diplomatic tool to the trade of commodities that bound colonists and Natives in commercial relations.

Missionary work, arising from a sense of pity, helped convince the British that they were a benevolent people. Stevens relates this to the rise of the cult of sensibility, when philosophers argued that humans were inherently good because they felt sorrow at the sign of suffering.

Ranging from Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania to the backcountry regions of the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and northern New England, The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America offers an ambitious overview of political life in pre-Revolutionary America.

Susan Branson examines the avenues through which women's presence became central to the competition for control of the nation's political life in the post-Revolutionary era.

Sweet Liberty offers a history of Martinique and its relationship to metropolitan France during the final years of slavery in the French empire. It argues that an Atlantic-world approach reveals how race, slavery, class, and gender shaped what it meant to be French on both sides of the ocean.

Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy focuses on New England's largest watershed to explore how the participation of Native nations and English settlers in local, regional, and transatlantic markets for colonial commodities transformed the physical environment in one corner of the rapidly globalizing early modern world.

Focusing on the British occupation of Philadelphia from 1777 to 1778, The Disaffected highlights the perspectives of those wearied by and withdrawn from the War for Independence and reveals the consequences of a Revolutionary ideology that assumed the nation's people to be a united and homogenous front.

A compelling history of nineteenth-century economic, social, and cultural life, Capitalism by Gaslight explores the blurred boundary between legitimate and illegitimate economic activity, describing the dealings of prostitutes, dealers in dirty books and used goods, mock auctioneers, illegal slavers, and other entrepreneurs.

In dozens of slave conspiracy scares in North American and the Caribbean, colonists terrorized and killed slaves whom they accused of planning to take over the colony. Jason T. Sharples explains the deep origins and historical triggers of these incidents and argues that conspiracy scares bound society together through shared fear.

How did we come to endanger the very future of life on Earth in our heedless pursuit of wealth and happiness? Laid Waste! answers that question with a 350-year review of the roots of an American culture of exploitation that has left us free, rich, and without an honest sense of how this came to be.

Examining how America's founding generation grappled with the problems posed by prisoners of war, Captives of Liberty reveals a cycle of violence, retaliation, and revenge that spiraled out of control, transforming a struggle for colonial independence into a revolutionary war.

Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots delineates the differences between the British and Portuguese empires as they struggled with revolutionary tumult, revealing how merchants, smugglers, rogue officials, slave traders, and pirates influenced contentious paths of independence in the United States and Brazil.

"Subjects Unto the Same King offers a comprehensive survey of the structure and functionality of authority within and between cultures in seventeenth-century New England."-William and Mary Quarterly

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.

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.

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.

Exploring the moment in which settlers, missionaries, merchants, and administrators believed in their ability to shape the environment to better resemble the country they left behind, A Not-So-New World reveals that French colonial ambitions were fueled by a vision of an ecologically sustainable empire.

In The Commerce of Vision, Peter John Brownlee integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Slavery's Capitalism explores the role of slavery in the development of the U.S. economy during the first decades of the nineteenth century. It tells the history of slavery as a story of national, even global, economic importance and investigates the role of enslaved Americans in the building of the modern world.

This study of eighteenth-century Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and its Scots-Irish inhabitants reconsiders the role early American towns played in the development of the American interior. Towns were not spearheads of a progressive Euro-American civilization but volatile places functioning in the middle of a diverse and dynamic mid-Atlantic.

During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world''s most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery''s Capitalism argues for slavery''s centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. According to editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, the issue is not whether slavery itself was or was not capitalist but, rather, the impossibility of understanding the nation''s spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center. American capitalism—renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man—has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence.Drawing on the expertise of sixteen scholars who are at the forefront of rewriting the history of American economic development, Slavery''s Capitalism identifies slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political economy that are too often attributed to the so-called free market. Approaching the study of slavery as the originating catalyst for the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism casts new light on American credit markets, practices of offshore investment, and understandings of human capital. Rather than seeing slavery as outside the institutional structures of capitalism, the essayists recover slavery''s importance to the American economic past and prompt enduring questions about the relationship of market freedom to human freedom.Contributors: Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert, Daina Ramey Berry, Kathryn Boodry, Alfred L. Brophy, Stephen Chambers, Eric Kimball, John Majewski, Bonnie Martin, Seth Rockman, Daniel B. Rood, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua D. Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Andrew Shankman, Craig Steven Wilder.

The revolutionary Ohio Valley is often depicted as a chaotic Hobbesian dystopia, in which Indians and colonists slaughtered each other at every turn. In Unsettling the West, Rob Harper overturns this familiar story. Rather than flailing in a morass, the peoples of the revolutionary Ohio Valley actively and persistently sought to establish a new political order that would affirm their land claims, protect them against attack, and promote trade. According to Harper, their efforts repeatedly failed less because of racial antipathy or inexorable competition for land than because of specific state policies that demanded Indian dispossession, encouraged rapid colonization, and mobilized men for war.Unsettling the West demonstrates that government policies profoundly unsettled the Ohio Valley, even as effective authority remained elusive. Far from indifferent to states, both Indians and colonists sought government allies to aid them in both intra- and intercultural conflicts. Rather than spreading uncontrollably across the landscape, colonists occupied new areas when changing policies, often unintentionally, gave them added incentives to do so. Sporadic killings escalated into massacre and war only when militants gained access to government resources. Amid the resulting upheaval, Indians and colonists sought to preserve local autonomy by forging relationships with eastern governments. Ironically, these local pursuits of order ultimately bolstered state power.Following scholars of European and Latin American history, Harper extends the study of mass violence beyond immediate motives to the structural and institutional factors that make large-scale killing possible. The Ohio Valley''s transformation, he shows, echoed the experience of early modern and colonial state formation around the world. His attention to the relationships between violence, colonization, and state building connects the study of revolutionary America to a vibrant literature on settler colonialism.

In Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850, Mark J. Miller argues that transatlantic Protestant discourses of abjection engaged with, and furthered the development of, concepts of race and sexuality in the creation of public subjects and public spheres.

Slavery and the Democratic Conscience explains how democratic subjects confronted and came to terms with slaveholder power in the early American Republic. Slavery was not an exception to the rise of American democracy, Padraig Riley argues, but was instead central to the formation of democratic institutions and ideals.

Anglicizing America revisits the theory of Anglicization and reconsiders its application to the lives and histories of the Atlantic world, from Britain to the Caribbean to the western wildernesses, at key moments before, during, and after the American Revolution.

Professional Indian tells the story of Eleazer Williams: missionary to the Mohawks, Indian confidence man, and icon of an era of dispossession and change that compelled many native peoples to refashion their identities in the wake of Anglo-American expansion.

Domestic Intimacies upends histories of the family, sexuality, and liberalism in nineteenth-century America by placing incest at the center of all of them, arguing that the simultaneous valorization of sentimental family and autonomous individual were constructed in relation to the threat of incest.

Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World offers an exceptional collaboration between American, Canadian, and European historians who explore the many ways and means of colonial Louisiana's relations with the rest of the Atlantic world.

Political Gastronomy examines the many meanings of food as a symbol of power in the daily life and the political culture of early America. Struggling to establish status and precedence, English settlers and American Indians alike conveyed authority through shared meals and other significant exchanges of food.

Anna M. Lawrence combines family, gender, and religious history to chronicle the rise of Methodism in England and America during the Revolutionary period. Focusing on the transatlantic Methodist notion of family, this book speaks to historical debates over what family means and how the nuclear family model developed over the eighteenth century.