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

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.

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 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.

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

At the outset of the eighteenth century, many British Americans accepted the notion that virtuous sociable feelings occurred primarily among the genteel, while sinful and selfish passions remained the reflexive emotions of the masses, from lower-class whites to Indians to enslaved Africans. Yet by 1776 radicals would propose a new universal model of human nature that attributed the same feelings and passions to all humankind and made common emotions the basis of natural rights. In Passion Is the Gale, Nicole Eustace describes the promise and the problems of this crucial social and political transition by charting changes in emotional expression among countless ordinary men and women of British America.From Pennsylvania newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, correspondence, commonplace books, and literary texts, Eustace identifies the explicit vocabulary of emotion as a medium of human exchange. Alternating between explorations of particular emotions in daily social interactions and assessments of emotional rhetoric's functions in specific moments of historical crisis (from the Seven Years War to the rise of the patriot movement), she makes a convincing case for the pivotal role of emotion in reshaping power relations and reordering society in the critical decades leading up to the Revolution. As Eustace demonstrates, passion was the gale that impelled Anglo-Americans forward to declare their independence--collectively at first, and then, finally, as individuals.

In the Age of Revolution, how did American women conceive their lives and marital obligations? Examining the attitudes and behaviors surrounding the contentious issues of family, contraception, abortion, sexuality, and identity, this book demonstrates that many women - rural and urban, free and enslaved - began to radically redefine motherhood.

Demonstrates that tales of Christian captives among Muslims, Amerindians, and hostile European nations were not only exploited in order to emphasize cultural oppositions and geopolitical hostilities. This work also demonstrates how the flexible identities of captives complicate clear-cut national, colonial, and religious distinctions.

Education played a decisive role in recasting women's collective experience in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Asking how and why women shaped their lives anew through education, this title measures the significant transformation in individual and social identities fostered by female academies and seminaries.

Brings together more than 200 period documents on topics including the settlement of Jamestown, the structure of government and society, labor, the economy, Indian-Anglo relations, and Bacon's Rebellion.

Examines how various people in the British colonies understood and represented the natural world around them from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth. The author uncovers early descriptions of American natural phenomena as well as clues to how people in the colonies construed their own identities through the natural world.

The rapid rise in popularity of maps and geography handbooks in the eighteenth century ushered in a new geographic literacy among non elite Americans. This illustrated book argues that geographic literacy as it was played out in popular literary genres significantly influenced the formation of identity in America from the 1680s to the 1820s.

Presenting an examination of Spanish California, this book aims to illuminate Indian struggles against a confining colonial order and amidst harrowing depopulation. Concentrating on the experiences of the Costanoan and Esselen peoples during the colonial period, it concludes with an epilogue that carries the story of their survival.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.