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Set mostly within an expansive British imperial and transatlantic framework, this new selection of writings from the renowned historian Jack P. Greene draws on themes he has been developing throughout his distinguished career. In these essays Greene explores the efforts to impose Old World institutions, identities, and values upon the New World societies being created during the colonization process. He shows how transplanted Old World components—political, legal, and social—were adapted to meet the demands of new, economically viable, expansive cultural hearths. Greene argues that these transplantations and adaptations were of fundamental importance in the formation and evolution of the new American republic and the society it represented. The scope of this work allows Greene to consider in depth numerous subjects, including the dynamics of colonization, the development and character of provincial identities, the relationship between new settler societies in America and the emerging British Empire, and the role of cultural power in social and political formation.
"Studies the development of religious congregations in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from 1730 to 1820. Focuses on German Reformed, Lutherans, Moravians, Anglicans, and Presbyterians. Also examines how Roman Catholics, Jews, and African Americans were absorbed into this predominantly white Protestant society"--Provided by publisher.
With this book, Allan Kulikoff offers a sweeping new interpretation of the origins and development of the small farm economy in Britain's mainland American colonies. Examining the lives of farmers and their families, he tells the story of immigration to the colonies, traces patterns of settlement, analyzes the growth of markets, and assesses the impact of the Revolution on small farm society. Beginning with the dispossession of the peasantry in early modern England, Kulikoff follows the immigrants across the Atlantic to explore how they reacted to a hostile new environment and its Indian inhabitants. He discusses how colonists secured land, built farms, and bequeathed those farms to their children. Emphasizing commodity markets in early America, Kulikoff shows that without British demand for the colonists' crops, settlement could not have begun at all. Most important, he explores the destruction caused during the American Revolution, showing how the war thrust farmers into subsistence production and how they only gradually regained their prewar prosperity.
From Gone with the Wind to Designing Women, images of southern females that emerge from fiction and film tend to obscure the diversity of American women from below the Mason-Dixon line. In a work that deftly lays bare a myriad of myths and stereotypes while presenting true stories of ambition, grit, and endurance, Margaret Ripley Wolfe offers the first professional historical synthesis of southern women's experiences across the centuries. In telling their story, she considers many ordinary lives—those of Native-American, African-American, and white women from the Tidewater region and Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to the Gulf Coastal Plain, women whose varied economic and social circu...
An Alternate Selection of the History Book Club In 1695, John Miller, a clergyman traveling through New York, found it appalling that so many couples lived together without ever being married and that no one viewed "ante-nuptial fornication" as anything scandalous or sinful. Charles Woodmason, an Anglican minister in South Carolina in 1766, described the region as a "stage of debauchery" in which polygamy was "very common," "concubinage general," and "bastardy no disrepute." These depictions of colonial North America's sexual culture sharply contradict the stereotype of Puritanical abstinence that persists in the popular imagination. In Sexual Revolution in Early America, Richard Godbeer bol...
This volume brings together essays by leading German and American historians on the subject of German emigration in the eighteenth century when Germans were moving to a variety of destinations: Russia, Prussian Lithuania, and various other German territories as well as North America.What drove men and women from different regional and social backgrounds to leave their homes during this time? Some migrations were forced, as for the Mennonites, the Salzburger emigrants, and the French Huguenots; some were voluntary and determined by the wish for one's own land and greater social and economic opportunity. In all groups, religion was a prominent motivator and primary element of social identification and cohesion. Inevitably, migrants carried with them traditional skills and other indispensable cultural "baggage." A key strength of this book is that contributors emphasize the mutual exchanges that occurred among cultures.
Looks at the shift from the marketplace as an actual place to a theoretical idea and how this shaped the early American economy. When we talk about the economy, “the market” is often just an abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma Hart argues that Britain’s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market’s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy. Hart’s book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth...
Offering an interpretation of the Revolutionary period that places women at the center, Joan R. Gundersen provides a synthesis of the scholarship on women's experiences during the era as well as a nuanced understanding that moves beyond a view of the war as either a "golden age" or a disaster for women. Gundersen argues that women's lives varied greatly depending on race and class, but all women had to work within shifting parameters that enabled opportunities for some while constraining opportunities for others. Three generations of women in three households personalize these changes: Elizabeth Dutoy Porter, member of the small-planter class whose Virginia household included an African American enslaved woman named Peg; Deborah Franklin, common-law wife of the prosperous revolutionary, Benjamin; and Margaret Brant, matriarch of a prominent Mohawk family who sided with the British during the war. This edition incorporates substantial revisions in the text and the notes to take into account the scholarship that has appeared since the book's original publication in 1996.
How do towns come into existence? What circumstances determine whether they succeed or fail? In The Colonial Towns of Piedmont North Carolina, author Christopher E. Hendricks looks at one region in eighteenth-century America to explore answers to these questions. He examines the establishment and development of eleven towns in the Piedmont, classifying them into three types: county towns formed by the establishment of government institutions, such as a courthouse; trade towns formed around commercial opportunities; and religious towns such as the three towns developed in Wachovia, a region where Moravians settled. He uses these classifications to tell the stories of how these towns came into...
Toby Ditz explores the relationship among inheritance, kinship, and the commercialization of agriculture. Comparing four upland communities with a Connecticut River Valley town, she finds that inheritance practices in the late colonial era heavily favored some male heirs and created shared rights in property. These customs continued into the early nineteenth century in the upland, but in the commercialized river-valley town practices became more egalitarian and individualized. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.