In 1631, when the Dutch tried to develop plantation agriculture in the Delaware Valley, the Lenape Indians destroyed the colony of Swanendael and killed its residents. The Natives and Dutch quickly ne
In 1540, Zamumo, the chief of the Altamahas in central Georgia, exchanged gifts with the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. With these gifts began two centuries of exchanges that bound American In
From its founding, Martinique played an integral role in France's Atlantic empire. Established in the mid-seventeenth century as a colonial outpost against Spanish and English dominance in the Caribbe
John James Audubon's The Birds of America stands as an unparalleled achievement in American art, a huge book that puts nature dramatically on the page. With that work, Audubon became one of the most a
Reminders of death were everywhere in the New World, from the epidemics that devastated Indian populations and the mortality of slaves working the Caribbean sugar cane fields to the unfamiliar disease
Between the English Civil War of 1642 and the American Revolution, countless British missionaries announced their intention to "spread the gospel" among the native North American population. Despite t
Imperial Entanglements chronicles the history of the Haudenosaunee Iroquois in the eighteenth century, a dramatic period during which they became further entangled in a burgeoning market economy, part
'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
The settlers of New Netherland were obligated to uphold religious toleration as a legal right by the Dutch Republic's founding document, the 1579 Union of Utrecht, which stated that "everyone shall re
Since the early decades of the eighteenth century, European, and especially British, thinkers were preoccupied with questions of taste. Whether Americans believed that taste was innate—and therefore a
Dangerous Neighbors shows how the Haitian Revolution permeated early American print culture and had a profound impact on the young nation's domestic politics. Focusing on Philadelphia as both a repres
In 1796, as revolutionary fervor waned and the Age of Reason took hold, an eighty-five-year-old Massachusetts doctor was convicted of bestiality and sentenced to hang. Three years later and seventy mi
The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starva
Even as eighteenth-century thinkers from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson struggled to find effective means to restrain power, contemporary discussions of society gave increasing attention to ideals of
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
The American Revolution conjures a series of iconographic images in the contemporary American imagination. In these imagined scenes, defiant Patriots fight against British Redcoats for freedom and dem
During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bo
In The Threshold of Manifest Destiny, Laurel Clark Shire illuminates the vital role women played in national expansion and shows how gender ideology was a key mechanism in U.S. settler colonialism.Amo
When Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed Haitian independence on January 1, 1804, Haiti became the second independent republic, after the United States, in the Americas; the Haitian Revolution was the
