You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"This is a study in the history of capitalism in the context of colonial New England. The author argues that colonial women's skilled labor undergirded the workings of financial networks and was instrumental in shaping the development of economic and legal systems. The author shows that the economies of the colonial port cities of Boston and Newport could not have functioned without women's labor and credit relationships"--
As winter turned to spring in the year 1699, Sebastian and Jane embarked on a campaign of persuasion. The two wished to marry, and they sought the backing of their community in Boston. Nothing, however, could induce Jane’s enslaver to consent. Only after her death did Sebastian and Jane manage to wed, forming a long-lasting union even though husband and wife were not always able to live in the same household. New England is often considered a cradle of liberty in American history, but this snippet of Jane and Sebastian’s story reminds us that it was also a cradle of slavery. From the earliest years of colonization, New Englanders bought and sold people, most of whom were of African desce...
Revolution and Regeneration is a book about the aging of the “young men of 1776,” the men who came to adulthood with the American Revolution, found their identity merged with the new republic they had created, and grew old as the nation matured. As they identified themselves with their nation’s past, so they used that past to judge their own lives and what they had accomplished, or failed to accomplish. Revolution and Regeneration is a marriage of psychohistory and intellectual history, applying the principles of the psychology of maturation to a generation whose experiences were crucial to our history—the generation of Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison. Their need for identity drove them to demand independence for themselves and their communities. Revolution and Regeneration tells their stories, from youth to old age. The Georgia Open History Library has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this collection, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
America’s War for Independence dramatically affected the speed and nature of broader social, cultural, and political changes including those shaping the place and roles of women in society. Women fought the American Revolution in many ways, in a literal no less than a figurative sense. Whether Loyalist or Patriot, Indigenous or immigrant enslaved or slave-owning, going willingly into battle or responding when war came to their doorsteps, women participated in the conflict in complex and varied ways that reveal the critical distinctions and intersections of race, class, and allegiance that defined the era. This collection examines the impact of Revolutionary-era women on the outcomes of the...
Mutiny on the Rising Sun is a deeply human history of smuggling that demonstrates how interconnected the future United States was with the wider world, how illegal trade created markets for exotic products like chocolate, and how slavery and smuggling were key factors in the development of American capitalism.
"This handbook contains 38 essays that provide up-to-date scholarship on all aspects of the globally important Seven Years' War (1756-1763). The volume carefully examines the three major areas of conflict in the war-Europe, South Asia, and the Americas-treating each theater as distinct from each other but often linked in ways that helped create a new geopolitics from the 1760s onward. Chapters trace the causes of the war in the interior of America; outline the triumphs of Britain and Prussia in fierce fighting across Europe; and explain how the British under the East India Company came to play an important role in South Asian politics and commerce. The handbook pays due attention to military...
An engrossing and powerful story about the influence of printers, who used their commercial and political connections to directly shape Revolutionary political ideology and mass mobilization. Honorable Mention, St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize, Bibliographical Society of America During the American Revolution, printed material, including newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and broadsides, played a crucial role as a forum for public debate. In Revolutionary Networks, Joseph M. Adelman argues that printers—artisans who mingled with the elite but labored in a manual trade—used their commercial and political connections to directly shape Revolutionary political ideology and mass mobilization....
A history of the struggle for debtors’ rights from the Civil War to the Great Depression What can be taken from someone who has borrowed money and cannot repay? What do the victims of misfortune owe to their lenders, and what can they keep for themselves? The answers to those questions, immensely important for debtors, creditors, and society at large, have changed over time. The Price of Misfortune examines the cause of debtors’ rights in the modern United States and the struggles of reformers who fought to establish financial freedoms in law. Daniel Platt shows how, in the wake of the Civil War, a range of advocates drew potent analogies between slavery, imprisonment for debt, and the e...
Only the Clothes on Her Back illuminates the ways in which women, men of color, and poor people used textiles as a form of property that enabled them to gain access to the legal system and to exercise political power.
Reveals how, through auctions, early Americans learned capitalism As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer follows this ubiquitous but largely overlooked institution to reveal how, across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, price became an accepted expression of value. From the earliest days of colonial conquest, auctions put Native land and human beings up for bidding alongside material goods, normalizing new economic practices that turned social relations into economic calculations and eventually became recognizable as nineteenth-century American capitalism. Starting in the eighteenth century, neighbors collectively turned speculative...