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"Is marriage a privilege or a right? A sacrament or a contract? Is it a public or a private matter? Where does ultimate jurisdiction over it lie? And when a marriage goes wrong, how do we adjudicate marital disputes-particularly in the usual circumstance, where men and women do not have equal access to power, justice, or even voice? These questions have long been with us because they defy easy, concrete answers. Kirsten Sword here reveals that contestation over such questions in early America drove debates over the roles and rights not only of women but of all unfree people. Sword shows how and why gendered hierarchies change-and why, frustratingly, they don't"--
"Sharon Murphy's book is a powerful and unprecedented dive into the entangled history of banking and slavery in nineteenth-century America. Slaveholders developed credit and creditworthiness by using enslaved people as collateral, and this allowed them to undertake an endless array of projects. But Murphy further shows that this credit system grew and changed as banks sought new ways to realize their own profits and power. She demonstrates not merely how slavery was financed by banks but how banks were financed by slavery. By extension, everything banks enabled, not least the physical expansion of the United States itself, was also then literally indebted to that noxious institution"--
A Great and Rising Nation illuminates the unexplored early decades of the United States’ imperialist naval aspirations. Conventional wisdom holds that, until the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States was a feeble player on the world stage, with an international presence rooted in commerce rather than military might. Michael A. Verney’s A Great and Rising Nation flips this notion on its head, arguing that early US naval expeditions, often characterized as merely scientific, were in fact deeply imperialist. Circling the globe from the Mediterranean to South America and the Arctic, these voyages reflected the diverse imperial aspirations of the new republic, including commercial dominance in the Pacific World, religious empire in the Holy Land, proslavery expansion in South America, and diplomatic prestige in Europe. As Verney makes clear, the United States had global imperial aspirations far earlier than is commonly thought.
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Land ownership was not the sole reason for conflict between Indians and English, Jenny Pulsipher writes in Subjects unto the Same King, a book that cogently redefines the relationship between Indians and colonists in seventeenth-century New England. Rather, the story is much more complicated—and much more interesting. It is a tale of two divided cultures, but also of a host of individuals, groups, colonies, and nations, all of whom used the struggle between and within Indian and English communities to promote their own authority. As power within New England shifted, Indians appealed outside the region—to other Indian nations, c...
Focusing on the fate of the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, this comprehensive history of the thirty year war over welfare shows how stubborn allegiance to the male-headed household undermined the struggle for economic justice.
A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the heart of t...
In this superb volume in Oxford's acclaimed Pivotal Moments series, Colin Calloway reveals how the Treaty of Paris of 1763 had a profound effect on American history, setting in motion a cascade of unexpected consequences, as Indians and Europeans, settlers and frontiersmen, all struggled to adapt to new boundaries, new alignments, and new relationships. Most Americans know the significance of the Declaration of Independence or the Emancipation Proclamation, but not the Treaty of Paris. Yet 1763 was a year that shaped our history just as decisively as 1776 or 1862. This captivating book shows why.
In The Province of Affliction, Ben Mutschler explores the surprising roles that illness played in shaping the foundations of New England society and government from the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century. Considered healthier than people in many other regions of early America, and yet still riddled with disease, New Englanders grappled steadily with what could be expected of the sick and what allowances were made to them and their providers. Mutschler integrates the history of disease into the narrative of early American social and political development, illuminating the fragility of autonomy, individualism, and advancement . Each sickness in early New England crea...
This book is an innovative collection of original research which analyzes the many varieties of post-conflict masculinity. Exploring topics such as physical disability and psychological trauma, and masculinity and sexuality in relation to the "feminizing" contexts of wounding and desertion, this volume draws together leading academics in the fields of gender, history, literature, and disability studies, in an inter- and multi-disciplinary exploration of the conditions and circumstances that men face in the aftermath of war.
Beginning with the first colonists and continuing down to the present, the dominant narrative of New England Puritanism has maintained that piety and prosperity were enemies, that the rise of commerce delivered a mortal blow to the fervor of the founders, and that later generations of Puritans fell away from their religious heritage as they moved out across the New England landscape. This book offers a new alternative to the prevailing narrative, which has been frequently criticized but heretofore never adequately replaced. The authors argument follows two main strands. First, he shows that commercial development, rather than being detrimental to religion, was necessary to sustain Puritan ...