Bøger i Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia serien

Provides the first major study of public disorder in New York City from the Revolutionary period through the Jacksonian era. Paul Gilje relates the practices of New York mobs to their American and European roots and uses both historical and anthropological methods to show how those mobs adapted to local conditions.

This Violent Empire traces the origins of American violence, racism, and paranoia to the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans' national sense of self.Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series of "Others" (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless) whose differences from European American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders. These "Others," dangerous and polluting, had to be excluded from the European American body politic. Feared, but also desired, they refused to be marginalized, incurring increasingly enraged enactments of their political and social exclusion that shaped our long history of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Close readings of political rhetoric during the Constitutional debates reveal the genesis of this long history.

In mid-17-century England, people were born into authority based on their social status. By the late 18th century, however, English and American law began to emphasize contractual relations based on informed consent. This work explores how the changing legal status of children illuminates the debates over consent and status in England and America.

Shows that men and women created a vibrant urban pleasure culture, including the eroticization of print culture. By reading representations of sex against actual behavior, the author reveals the clash of meanings given to sex and illuminates struggles to recast sexuality in order to eliminate its subversive potential.

The origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender are examined in this book. The author argues that gender was both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, and assesses its role in the construction of racism in Virginia.

This text describes the evolution of political thought from the Declaration to the ratification of the Constitution. The author discusses the debate over Republicanism.

The traditional history of early America paints the colonies as a transplantation of European culture to a new continent - a 'virgin land' in which Native Americans were assigned the role of foil whose contribution was to stimulate the energy of European dispossessors. This book recasts the story of American colonization as a territorial invasion.

William Byrd II (1674-1744) was an important figure in the history of colonial Virginia: a founder of Richmond, an active participant in Virginia politics, and the proprietor of one of the colony's greatest plantations. But Byrd is best known today for his diaries. Considered essential documents of private life in colonial America, they offer readers an unparalleled glimpse into the world of a Virginia gentleman. This book joins Byrd's Diary, Secret Diary, and other writings in securing his reputation as one of the most interesting men in colonial America. Edited and presented here for the first time, Byrd's commonplace book is a collection of moral wit and wisdom gleaned from reading and conversation. The nearly six hundred entries range in tone from hope to despair, trust to dissimulation, and reflect on issues as varied as science, religion, women, Alexander the Great, and the perils of love. A ten-part introduction presents an overview of Byrd's life and addresses such topics as his education and habits of reading and his endeavors to understand himself sexually, temperamentally, and religiously, as well as the history and cultural function of commonplacing. Extensive annotations discuss the sources, background, and significance of the entries.

Charles Carroll of Carrollton is most often remembered as the sole Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. In this study of the Carrolls in Ireland and America, that act vindicates a family's determination to triumph without compromising lineage and faith.

In examining the founding of New England towns during the seventeenth century, John Frederick Martin investigates an old subject with fresh insight. He demonstrates that colonists sought profits in town-founding, that town founders used business corporations to organise themselves into landholding bodies, and that multiple and absentee landholding was common.

The Antifederalists come alive in this state-by-state analysis of politics during the Confederation and the debates over the enlargement of congressional powers prior to the formation of the Constitution. Main presents a perceptive account of the factors that influenced some of the delegates to change their minds.

A challenge to the belief that the introduction of racial slavery in America was the consequence of a scarce labour market. It contends that during the late-17th and early-18th centuries a small, powerful planter class, to further its own economic interests, brought racial slavery to Virginia.

This collection of 17 essays reshapes the field of early American legal history by using the concept of ""legality"" to explore the myriad ways in which the people of early America ordered their relationships with one another, as individuals, groups, classes, communities and states.

This study describes and analyzes the dramatic confrontations, primarily religious and political, that transformed Virginia in the second half of the 18th century.

A reinterpretation of the American Revolution. Woody Holton shows that when Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and other elite Virginians joined their peers from other colonies in declaring independence from Britain, they acted partly in response to grassroots rebellion against their own rule.

Exploring the importance of political festivals in the early American republic, this text shows how patriotic celebrations and their reproduction in the expanding print culture, helped connect local politics to national identity.

This volume seeks to document the distinctions between British regulars and Massachusetts provincial troops during the Seven Years' War. It investigates colonial military life, giving attention to official records and to the diaries and writings of the common soldier.

The five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first transatlantic voyage has provoked an outpouring of scholarship on how European exploration and colonization affected America. This book of eleven essays from leading scholars in the fields of intellectual and cultural history reverses that trend by focusing on the ways in which contact with the Americas transformed European thought.

This collection of original essays documents technology's centrality to the history of early America. Unlike much previous scholarship, this volume emphasizes the quotidian rather than the exceptional. Brooke Hindle's classic 1966 essay on early American technology is also reprinted, and his view of the field is reassessed.

The American revolutionaries themselves believed the change from monarchy to republic was the essence of the Revolution. King and People in Provincial Massachusetts explores what monarchy meant to Massachusetts under its second charter and why the momentous change to republican government came about.

An examination of the origin and legacies of the captive exchange economy within and among the Native Americans and Euro-American communities throughout the Southwest borderlands from the Spanish colonial era to the end of the 19th century.

In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825.

An intellectual dialogue of the highest plane achieved in America, the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson spanned half a century and embraced government, philosophy, religion, quotidiana, and family griefs and joys. This reissue of The Adams-Jefferson Letters brings to a broader audience one of the monuments of American scholarship.

History and Present State of Virginia: A New Edition with an Introduction by Susan Scott Parrish

In an exploration of the oceanic connections of the Atlantic world, Michael J. Jarvis recovers a mariner's view of early America as seen through the eyes of Bermuda's seafarers. The first social history of eighteenth-century Bermuda, this book profiles how one especially intensive maritime community capitalized on its position ""in the eye of all trade"".

This interdisciplinary collection considers Mark Catesby's endeavours as a naturalist-artist, scientific explorer, experimental horticulturist, ornamental gardener, and early environmental thinker in terms of the interests held by the various, overlapping communities in which he functioned.

In an examination of transatlantic Puritanism from 1570 to 1638, Theodore Dwight Bozeman analyzes the quest for purity through sanctification. The word "Puritan," he says, accurately depicts a major and often obsessive trait of the English late Reformation: a hunger for discipline. The Precisianist Strain clarifies what Puritanism in its disciplinary mode meant for an early modern society struggling with problems of change, order, and identity.Focusing on ascetic teachings and rites, which in their severity fostered the "precisianist strain" prevalent in Puritan thought and devotional practice, Bozeman traces the reactions of believers put under ever more meticulous demands. Sectarian theologies of ease and consolation soon formed in reaction to those demands, Bozeman argues, eventually giving rise to a "first wave" of antinomian revolt, including the American conflicts of 1636-1638. Antinomianism, based on the premise of salvation without strictness and duty, was not so much a radicalization of Puritan content as a backlash against the whole project of disciplinary religion. Its reconceptualization of self and responsibility would affect Anglo-American theology for decades to come.

Follows the Catawbas from their first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century until they carved out a place in the American republic three centuries later. This title tells the story of Native agency, creativity, resilience, and endurance.

The author has put simple solutions and flashy theories aside and brought to his task a patience, skepticism, thoroughness, and humility commensurate with the vast undertaking. He combines these qualities with imagination and insight. The result is a massive and learned work that stands as the most informed and impressive pronouncement on the subject yet made."" New York Times Book Review

Creolization describes the cultural adaptations that occur when a community moves to a new geographic setting. Exploring the consciousness of peoples defined as 'creoles' who moved from the Old World to the New World, this work investigates the creolization of literary forms and genres in the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries.