It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters,...
It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the ...
Colonial America stretched from Quebec to Buenos Aires and from the Atlantic littoral to the Pacific coast. Although European settlers laid claim to territories they called New Spain, New England, and New France, the reality of living in those spaces had little to do with European kingdoms. Instead, the New World's holdings took their form and shape from the Indian territories they inhabited. These contested spaces throughout the western hemisphere were not unclaimed lands waiting to be conquered and populated but a single vast space, occupied by native communities and defined by the...
Colonial America stretched from Quebec to Buenos Aires and from the Atlantic littoral to the Pacific coast. Although European settlers laid claim t...
In colonial America, the system of "warning out" was distinctive to New England, a way for a community to regulate those to whom it would extend welfare. Robert Love's Warnings animates this nearly forgotten aspect of colonial life, richly detailing the moral and legal basis of the practice and the religious and humanistic vision of those who enforced it.
Historians Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger follow one otherwise obscure town clerk, Robert Love, as he walked through Boston's streets to tell sojourners, "in His Majesty's Name," that they were warned to depart the...
In colonial America, the system of "warning out" was distinctive to New England, a way for a community to regulate those to whom it would extend we...
In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance made the Ohio River the dividing line between slavery and freedom in the West, yet in 1861, when the Civil War tore the nation apart, the region failed to split at this seam. In Slavery's Borderland, historian Matthew Salafia shows how the river was both a physical boundary and a unifying economic and cultural force that muddied the distinction between southern and northern forms of labor and politics.
Countering the tendency to emphasize differences between slave and free states, Salafia argues that these systems of labor were not so much...
In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance made the Ohio River the dividing line between slavery and freedom in the West, yet in 1861, when the Civil War tor...
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 of William Penn's "Holy Experiment," Mifflin upheld the Quaker pacifist doctrine, carrying the peace testimony to Generals Howe and Washington across the blood-soaked Germantown battlefield and traveling several thousand miles by horse up and down the Atlantic seaboard to stiffen the spines of the beleaguered Quakers, harried and exiled for their neutrality during the war for independence....
Warner Mifflin--energetic, uncompromising, and reviled--was the key figure connecting the abolitionist movements before and after the American Revo...
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 swamps, shifting shorelines, coral reefs, and tiny keys initially impeded familiar strategies of early U.S. settlement, such as the establishment of fixed dwellings, sturdy fences, and cultivated fields, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans learned to inhabit Florida's liquid landscape in unconventional but no less transformative ways.
In Liquid...
In Florida, land and water frequently change places with little warning, dissolving homes and communities along with the very concepts of boundarie...
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 course of the new nation. Political poems and songs appeared regularly in newspapers (and as pamphlets and broadsides), commenting on political issues and controversies and satirizing leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Drawing on hundreds of individual poems--including many that are frequently overlooked--Poetry Wars reconstructs the world of literary-political struggle as...
During America's founding period, poets and balladeers engaged in a series of literary "wars" against political leaders, journalists, and each othe...
Atlantic slave societies were notorious deathtraps. In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another. Grounded in the nineteenth-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave societies and the last frontier of slavery in the British Caribbean, Browne argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to...
Atlantic slave societies were notorious deathtraps. In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar n...
In Revolutionary America, colonists surged across the Appalachians, Indians fought to preserve their land, and a bloodbath ensued-but why? Breaking with previous interpretations, Unsettling the West tells the story of a frontier where government initiatives, rather than pioneer independence, drove violence and colonization.
In Revolutionary America, colonists surged across the Appalachians, Indians fought to preserve their land, and a bloodbath ensued-but why? Breaking wi...
The Medical Imagination traces the practice of using imagination and literature to craft, test, and implement theories of health in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. This history of imaginative experimentation provides a usable past for conversations about the role of the humanities in health research and practice today.
The Medical Imagination traces the practice of using imagination and literature to craft, test, and implement theories of health in eighteenth- and ni...
