Bøger i Early American Studies serien

Susan Juster explores different forms of sacred violence-blood sacrifice, holy war, malediction, and iconoclasm-to uncover how European traditions of ritual violence developed during the Reformation were introduced and ultimately transformed in the New World.

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.

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.

Synthesizing the tensions between high and low politics and eastern and western regions in Pennsylvania before the Revolution, Patrick Spero recasts the importance of frontiers, as eighteenth-century Pennsylvanians would have understood them, to the development of colonial America and the origins of American Independence.

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.

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.

In this first biography of Elihu Palmer, Kirsten Fischer depicts a once notorious freethinker who countered Christianity with the idea of an interconnected universe infused with a divine life force. Denounced as "heretical," Palmer's speeches and writings shaped the contest over freedom of religion and of speech in the new United States.

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.

Drawing on the diaries of contemporaries, personal correspondence, the minutes of Quaker meetings, business and probate records, pamphlets, and other sources, this book shows that Woolman and his neighbors were far more engaged with the problems of inequality, trade, and warfare than previously understood.

"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.

"The world of the Founding Fathers was also a postrevolutionary society, in whose streets people of all social classes jostled in festivals and parades that expressed a vibrant popular politics. Simon Newman's book is as lively as the tumultuous political culture he has mapped."-Linda K. Kerber, author of Women of the Republic

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.