Böcker i Early American Studies-serien

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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occupation of Philadelphia from 1777 to 1778, The Disaffected highlights the perspectives of those wearied by and withdrawn from the War for Independence and reveals the consequences of a Revolutionary ideology that assumed the nation's people to be a united and homogenous front.

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.

Revolutions and Reconstructions gathers historians of the early republic, the Civil War era, and African American and political history to consider not whether African Americans participated in the politics of the long nineteenth century but how, when, and with what lasting effects.

Unearthing personal stories from the archive, Wicked Flesh shows how black women, from Senegambia in West Africa to the Caribbean to New Orleans, used intimacy and kinship to redefine freedom in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Their practices laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century.

Focusing on the creation of the African Colonization Society (ACS) in the nineteenth century, The World Colonization Made chronicles the rise and fall of the colonization movement-an ideology that enabled Americans to envision a world of self-governing republics that harmonized with the racialized political institutions at home.

In Occupied America, Donald F. Johnson chronicles the everyday lives of ordinary people living under British military occupation during the American Revolution. Focusing on port cities, Johnson recovers how Americans navigated dire hardships, balanced competing attempts to secure their loyalty, and in the end rejected restored royal rule.

In Rogue Revolutionaries, Vanessa Mongey revives a lost and fleeting world of cosmopolitan radicalism through the stories of "foreigners of desperate fortune" who sought to ignite revolutions and create their own independent states. Their quest for recognition clashed with the growing power of nation-states and a new international order.

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.

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.

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.

"Moving beyond an 'Indians and Europeans' story, DuVal looks instead at competing and overlapping stories involving multiple Native groups who operate from different positions with different strategies and experiences, and incorporate an array of outsiders."-Colin G. Calloway, Dartmouth College

Dangerous Neighbors shows how the Haitian Revolution permeated early American print culture and had a profound impact on the young nation's domestic politics.

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.

Contested Spaces of Early America is a wide-ranging, eclectic volume that seeks to reconcile the parallel histories and historiographies of European and Indian spaces created throughout the hemisphere during the colonial era.

Exploring the intersection of the early republic's material, visual, literary, and political cultures, Republic of Taste demonstrates how American thinkers upheld the similarities between aesthetics and politics in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority.

Philadelphia Stories chronicles the rich lives of twelve of its citizens-men and women, Black and white Americans, immigrants and native born-to explore the city's people and places from the colonial era to the years before the Civil War.

How did descriptions of individuals' appearance reinforce emergent categories of race? In Colonial Complexions, more than 4000 advertisements for runaway slaves and servants reveal how colonists transformed seemingly observable characteristics into racist reality.

In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, Erik Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead, from Elizabethan England to the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Through prodigious research and careful analysis, he boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.

The Medical Imagination traces the practice of using imagination and literature to craft, test, and implement theories of health in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. This history of imaginative experimentation provides a usable past for conversations about the role of the humanities in health research and practice today.

In her eighteenth-century medical recipe manuscript, the Philadelphia healer Elizabeth Coates Paschall asserted her ingenuity and authority with the bold strokes of her pen. Paschall developed an extensive healing practice, consulted medical texts, and conducted experiments based on personal observations. As British North Americäs premier city of medicine and science, Philadelphia offered Paschall a nurturing environment enriched by diverse healing cultures and the Quaker values of gender equality and women¿s education. She participated in transatlantic medical and scientific networks with her friend, Benjamin Franklin. Paschall was not unique, however. Women Healers recovers numerous women of European, African, and Native American descent who provided the bulk of health care in the greater Philadelphia area for centuries.Although the history of women practitioners often begins with the 1850 founding of Philadelphiäs Female Medical College, the first women¿s medical school in the United States, these students merely continued the legacies of women like Paschall. Remarkably, though, the lives and work of early American female practitioners have gone largely unexplored. While some sources depict these women as amateurs whose influence declined, Susan Brandt documents women¿s authoritative medical work that continued well into the nineteenth century. Spanning a century and a half, Women Healers traces the transmission of European women¿s medical remedies to the Delaware Valley where they blended with African and Indigenous women¿s practices, forming hybrid healing cultures.Drawing on extensive archival research, Brandt demonstrates that women healers were not inflexible traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the onward march of Enlightenment science, capitalism, and medical professionalization. Instead, women of various classes and ethnicities found new sources of healing authority, engaged in the consumer medical marketplace, and resisted physicians¿ attempts to marginalize them. Brandt reveals that women healers participated actively in medical and scientific knowledge production and the transition to market capitalism.

"Undoing Slavery excavates cultural, political, medical, and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Motivated by their conviction that the physical form of the human body was universal and faced with the growing racism of eighteenth and nineteenth century science, abolitionists in North America and Britain focused on undoing slavery's harm to the bodies of the enslaved. Their pragmatic focus on restoring the bodily integrity and wellbeing of enslaved people threw up many unexpected challenges. This book explores those challenges"--

"This book charts the connections between mission work, capitalism, and Native politics in order to understand the making of the American empire. It shows that civilizing missions and rhetoric were hinges for U.S. economic and political development that could both wreck devastation on Indigenous communities and offer Native peoples additional means to negotiate for power and endure"--

The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures.The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship—husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy—corporeal, carnal, quotidian—tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world.Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.

In A Constitutional Culture, Adrian Chastain Weimer uncovers the story of how, more than a hundred years before the American Revolution, colonists pledged their lives and livelihoods to the defense of local political institutions against arbitrary rule. With the return of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, the puritan-led colonies faced enormous pressure to conform to the crown's priorities. Charles demanded that puritans change voting practices, baptismal policies, and laws, and he also cast an eye on local resources such as forests, a valuable source of masts for the English navy. Moreover, to enforce these demands, the king sent four royal commissioners on warships, ostensibly headed for New Netherland but easily redirected toward Boston. In the face of this threat to local rule, colonists had to decide whether they would submit to the commissioners' authority, which they viewed as arbitrary because it was not accountable to the people, or whether they would mobilize to defy the crown. Those resisting the crown included not just freemen (voters) but also people often seen as excluded or marginalized such as non-freemen, indentured servants, and women. Together they crafted a potent regional constitutional culture in defiance of Charles II that was characterized by a skepticism of metropolitan ambition, a defense of civil and religious liberties, and a conviction that self-government was divinely sanctioned. Weimer shows how they expressed this constitutional culture through a set of well-rehearsed practices--including fast days, debates, committee work, and petitions. Equipped with a ready vocabulary for criticizing arbitrary rule, with a providentially informed capacity for risk-taking, and with a set of intellectual frameworks for divided sovereignty, the constitutional culture that New Englanders forged would not easily succumb to an imperial authority intent on consolidating its power.