In Unfreedom, Jared Ross Hardesty examines the lived experience of slaves in eighteenth-century Boston. Instead of relying on the traditional dichotomy of slavery and freedom, Hardesty argues we should understand slavery in Boston as part of a continuum of unfreedom. In this context, African slavery existed alongside many other forms of oppression, including Native American slavery, indentured servitude, apprenticeship, and pauper apprenticeship. In this hierarchical and inherently unfree world, enslaved Bostonians were more concerned with their everyday treatment and honor than with...
In Unfreedom, Jared Ross Hardesty examines the lived experience of slaves in eighteenth-century Boston. Instead of relying on the traditional...
Historians have written expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early American economic life. In Dark Work, Christy Clark-Pujara tells the story of one state in particular whose role was outsized: Rhode Island. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this business so important. During the colonial period trade with West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key ingredient for their number one export: rum. More than 60 percent...
Historians have written expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early American economic life. In Dark Work, Christy Clark-P...
Too often, says Jennifer L. Goloboy, we equate being middle class with "niceness"--a set of values frozen in the antebellum period and centered on long-term economic and social progress and a close, nurturing family life. Goloboy's case study of merchants in Charleston, South Carolina, looks to an earlier time to establish the roots of middle-class culture in America. She argues for a definition more applicable to the ruthless pursuit of profit in the early republic. To be middle class then was to be skilled at survival in the market economy.
What prompted cultural shifts in the...
Too often, says Jennifer L. Goloboy, we equate being middle class with "niceness"--a set of values frozen in the antebellum period and centered on ...
Slavery on the Periphery focuses on nineteen counties on the Kansas-Missouri border, tracing slavery's rise and fall from the earliest years of American settlement through the Civil War along this critical geographical, political, and social fault line. Kristen Epps explores slavery's emergence from an upper South slaveholding culture and its development into a small-scale system characterized by slaves' diverse forms of employment, close contact between slaves and slaveholders, a robust hiring market, and the prevalence of abroad marriages. She demonstrates that space and place...
Slavery on the Periphery focuses on nineteen counties on the Kansas-Missouri border, tracing slavery's rise and fall from the earliest years...
The Dred Scott suit for freedom, argues Kelly M. Kennington, was merely the most famous example of a phenomenon that was more widespread in antebellum American jurisprudence than is generally recognized. The author draws on the case files of more than three hundred enslaved individuals who, like Dred Scott and his family, sued for freedom in the local legal arena of St. Louis. Her findings open new perspectives on the legal culture of slavery and the negotiated processes involved in freedom suits. As a gateway to the American West, a major port on both the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers,...
The Dred Scott suit for freedom, argues Kelly M. Kennington, was merely the most famous example of a phenomenon that was more widespread in antebel...
By following key families in Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Anglo-American societies from the Seven Years' War through 1845, this study illustrates how kinship networks--forged out of natal, marital, or fictive kinship relationships--enabled and directed the actions of their members as they decided the futures of their nations. Natalie R. Inman focuses in particular on the Chickasaw Colbert family, the Anglo-American Donelson family, and the Cherokee families of Attakullakulla (Little Carpenter) and Major Ridge. Her research shows how kinship facilitated actions and goals for people in early...
By following key families in Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Anglo-American societies from the Seven Years' War through 1845, this study illustrates how k...
Stories of witchcraft and demonic possession from early modern England through the last official trials in colonial New England.
Those possessed by the devil in early modern England usually exhibited a common set of symptoms: fits, vomiting, visions, contortions, speaking in tongues, and an antipathy to prayer. However, it was a matter of interpretation, and sometimes public opinion, if these symptoms were visited upon the victim, or if they came from within. Both early modern England and colonial New England had cases that blurred the line between witchcraft and...
Stories of witchcraft and demonic possession from early modern England through the last official trials in colonial New England.
A comparative history of cross-cultural encounters and the critical role of cannibalism in the early modern period.
Cannibalism, for medieval and early modern Europeans, was synonymous with savagery. Humans who ate other humans, they believed, were little better than animals. The European colonizers who encountered Native Americans described them as cannibals as a matter of course, and they wrote extensively about the lurid cannibal rituals they claim to have witnessed.
In this definitive analysis, Kelly L. Watson argues that the...
A comparative history of cross-cultural encounters and the critical role of cannibalism in the early modern period.
George Washington's Washington is not simply a history of the city during the first president's life but a history of his vision for the national capital and of the local and national conflicts surrounding this vision's acceptance and implementation.
George Washington's Washington is not simply a history of the city during the first president's life but a history of his vision for the national capi...
