In Frontier Country, Patrick Spero addresses one of the most important and controversial subjects in American history: the frontier. Countering the modern conception of the American frontier as an are
When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential to bear children, who by law would become t
Historian Eric R. Schlereth places religious conflict at the center of early American political culture. He shows ordinary Americans--both faithful believers and Christianity's staunchest critics--str
The Dutch, through the directors of the West India Company, purchased Manhattan Island in 1625. They had come to the New World as traders, not expecting to assume responsibility as the sovereign posse
Domestic Intimacies upends histories of the family, sexuality, and liberalism in nineteenth-century America by placing incest at the center of all of them, arguing that the simultaneous valorization o
'A very fine book. Painstakingly researched, deeply detailed, and carefully argued."u William and Mary Quarterly"An admirable historical study whose treatments of early national religion and politics
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleDuring the eighteenth century, North American colonists began to display an increasing appetite for professional and amateur theatrical perf
In 1678, the Puritan minister Samuel Nowell preached a sermon he called "Abraham in Arms," in which he urged his listeners to remember that "Hence it is no wayes unbecoming a Christian to learn to be
'Twas Honest old Noah first planted the VineAnd mended his morals by drinking its Wine.—from a drinking song by Benjamin FranklinThere were, Peter Thompson notes, some one hundred and fifty
Born in 1788, Eleazer Williams was raised in the Catholic Iroquois settlement of Kahnawake along the St. Lawrence River. According to some sources, he was the descendant of a Puritan minister whose da
In Florida, land and water frequently change places with little warning, dissolving homes and communities along with the very concepts of boundaries themselves. While Florida's landscape of saturated
Warner Mifflin—energetic, uncompromising, and reviled—was the key figure connecting the abolitionist movements before and after the American Revolution. A descendant of one of the pioneering families
During America's founding period, poets and balladeers engaged in a series of literary "wars" against political leaders, journalists, and each other, all in the name of determining the political cours
