Bücher der Reihe Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

This study investigates changing patterns of women's participation in early American courts across a broad range of legal actions - including proceedings related to debt, divorce, illicit sex, rape and slander. It argues that women had more opportunity to be heard during the Puritan era.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the wake of American independence, it was clear that the new United States required novel political forms. Moving beyond traditional accounts of social unrest, republican and liberal ideology, and the rise of the autonomous individual, this work offers an interpretation of the American Revolution as a transformation of self and society.

This work examines the British public's predominantly loyal reponse to its government's actions during the American revolution. Drawing on nearly 1000 political pamphlets, as well as broad sides, private memoirs and popular cartoons it offers an insight into 18th-century British political culture.

Traces Freemasonry through its first century in America. The text follows the order from its origins in Britain and its introduction into North America in the 1730s to its near-destruction by a massive anti-Masonic movement and its reconfiguration into the brotherhood we know today.

Richter examines a wide range of primary documents to survey the responses of the peoples of the Iroquois League--the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras--to the challenges of the European colonialization of North America. He demonstrates that by the early eighteenth century a series of creative adaptations in politics and diplomacy allowed the peoples of the Longhouse to preserve their cultural autonomy in a land now dominated by foreign powers.

This detailed exploration of the settlement of Maine beginning in the late eighteenth century illuminates the violent, widespread contests along the American frontier that served to define and complete the American Revolution. Taylor shows how Maine's militant settlers organized secret companies to defend their populist understanding of the Revolution.

Examines the economic and cultural interactions among the Indians, Europeans, and African slaves of colonial Louisiana. Rather than focusing on a single cultural group or on a particular economic activity, this study traces the complex social linkages among Indian villages, colonial plantations, hunting camps, military outposts, and port towns across a large region of pre-cotton South.

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.

Often compared unfavourably with colonial New England, the early Chesapeake has been portrayed as irreligious, unstable, and violent. This study challenges this view and looks across the Atlantic to assess the enduring influence of English attitudes, values, and behaviour on the early Chesapeake.

A study of the Anti-Federalist legacy. Saul Cornell argues that, while the Anti-Federalists won the battle over ratification of the Constitution in 1788, their ideas continue to define the soul of US politics. He explores the range and influence of Anti-Federalist thought on the early Republic.

This volume looks at the life of Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, royal governor of New York and New Jersey from 1702 and 1708, whose range of alleged transgressions ranged from raiding the public treasury to scandalizing his subjects.

At the close of the 18th century, the poet and clergyman Timothy Dwight waged a literary and intellectual war against the forces of ""infidelity"". This text re-examines this episode by focusing on ""The Triumph of Fidelity"" (1788), the verse satire that launched Dwight's campaign.

During French colonial rule in Louisiana, nuns from the French Company of Saint Ursula came to New Orleans, where they educated women and girls of different descents, in literacy, numeracy, and the Catholic faith. By incorporating their story into the history of early America, this work exposes the limits of the republican model of national unity.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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"".

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

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.