This work looks at the history of adoption in American society and reveals how the practice and attitudes about it have evolved from colonial days to the 1990s. The author argues that it is ever more apparent that secrecy and disclosure are the defining issues in American adoptions. He discovers that openess used to be the norm before World War II and that this ceased due to a convergence of several unusual cultural, demographic, and social trends.

The passage of Measure 58 in Oregon in 1998 was a milestone in adoption reform. For the first time in U.S. history a grassroots initiative restored the legal right of adopted adults to request and receive their original birth certificates. Within a day after the law went into effect, nearly 2,400 adoptees had applied for these previously sealed records, elevating their right to know over a birth mother's right to privacy.

E. Wayne Carp, a nationally respected authority on adoption history, now reveals the efforts of the radical adoptee rights organization Bastard Nation to pass this...

American political culture and military necessity were at odds during the War for American Independence, as demonstrated in this interpretation of Continental army administration. E. Wayne Carp shows that at every level of authority -- congressional, state, and county -- a localistic world-view, a deferential political order, and adherence to republican ideology impeded the task of supplying the army, even though independence demanded military strength.

Placing military history within the context of colonial and revolutionary historiography, Carp finds that the colonial American...