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This text is a study of 16 individuals who lived during the colonial period of American history. These mini-biographies aim to highlight the exploits and actions of well-known and obscure individuals whose lives provide insight into the time in which they lived.
Through innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and fresh avenues of inquiry, the nine essays collected in A Peculiar Mixture endeavor to transform how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity that characterized the experience of German-speaking people in the middle colonies. They explore how the various cultural expressions of German speakers helped them bridge regional, religious, and denominational divides and eventually find a way to partake in America’s emerging national identity. Instead of thinking about early American culture and literature as evolving continuously as a singular entity, the contributions to this volume conceive of it as an ever-shifting and tangled “web of contact zones.” They present a society with a plurality of different native and colonial cultures interacting not only with one another but also with cultures and traditions from outside the colonies, in a “peculiar mixture” of Old World practices and New World influences. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Marie Basile McDaniel, Philip Otterness, Liam Riordan, Matthias Schönhofer, and Marianne S. Wokeck.
The volume questions traditional nation-centred narratives of the Empire as an exclusively British undertaking by concentrating on the transnational networks of German migrants, pursued over more than two centuries in a multitude of geographical settings within the British Empire.
In 1700, some 250,000 white and black inhabitants populated the thirteen American colonies, with the vast majority of whites either born in England or descended from English immigrants. By 1776, the non-Native American population had increased tenfold, and non-English Europeans and Africans dominated new immigration. Of all the European immigrant groups, the Germans may have been the largest. Aaron Spencer Fogleman has written the first comprehensive history of this eighteenth-century German settlement of North America. Utilizing a vast body of published and archival sources, many of them never before made accessible outside of Germany, Fogleman emphasizes the importance of German immigration to colonial America, the European context of the Germans' emigration, and the importance of networks to their success in America
These innovative essays probe the underlying unities that bound the early modern Atlantic world into a regional whole and trace some of the intellectual currents that flowed through the lives of the people of the four continents. Drawn together in a comprehensive Introduction by Bernard Bailyn, the essays include analyses of the climate and ecology that underlay the slave trade, pan-Atlantic networks of religion and of commerce, legal and illegal, inter-ethnic collaboration in the development of tropical medicine, science as a product of imperial relations, the Protestant international that linked Boston and pietist Germany, and the awareness and meaning of the Atlantic world in the mind of that preeminent intellectual and percipient observer, David Hume. In his Introduction, Bailyn explains that the Atlantic world was never self-enclosed or isolated from the rest of the globe but suggests that experiences in the early modern Atlantic region were distinctive in ways that shaped the course of world history.
By the early eighteenth century, the rapid expansion of the British empire had created a technological problem: communication and networking became increasingly vital yet harder to maintain. As colonial possessions and populations grew and more individuals moved around the globe, Britons both at home and abroad required a constant and reliable means of communication to conduct business, plumb intellectual concerns, discuss family matters, run distant estates, and exchange news. As face-to-face communication became more intermittent, men and women across the early modern British world relied on letters. In The Opened Letter, historian Lindsay O'Neill explores the importance and impact of netw...
Two days after Christmas in 1738, a British merchant ship traveling from Rotterdam to Philadelphia grounded in a blizzard on the northern tip of Block Island, twelve miles off the Rhode Island coast. The ship carried emigrants from the Palatinate and its neighboring territories in what is now southwest Germany. The 105 passengers and crew on board-sick, frozen, and starving-were all that remained of the 340 men, women, and children who had left their homeland the previous spring. They now found themselves castaways, on the verge of death, and at the mercy of a community of strangers whose language they did not speak. Shortly after the wreck, rumors began to circulate that the passengers had ...
By focusing on law, this book offers new insights into the history of religious liberty in colonial America.
This book tells the story of the Rev. Benjamin Colman (1673-1747), one of eighteenth-century America’s most influential ministers, and his transatlantic social world of letters. Exploring his epistolary network reveals how imperial culture diffused through the British Atlantic and formed the Dissenting Interest in America, England, and Scotland. Traveling to and living in England between 1695-1699, Colman forged enduring connections with English Dissenters that would animate and define his ministry for nearly a half century. The chapters reassemble Colman’s epistolary web to illuminate the Dissenting Interest’s broad range of activities through the circulation of Dissenting histories, libraries, missionaries, revival news, and provincial defenses of religious liberty. This book argues that over the course of Colman’s life the Dissenting Interest integrated, extended, and ultimately detached, presenting the history of Protestant Dissent as fundamentally a transatlantic story shaped by the provincial edges of the British Empire.
Cross-disciplinary perspectives on responses to material and spiritual loss in early modern Germany trace how individuals and communities registered, coped with, and made sense of deprivation through a spectrum of activities, often turning loss into gain and acquiring agency.