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How much sex should a person have? With whom? What do we make of people who choose not to have sex at all? As present as these questions are today, they were subjects of intense debate in the early American republic. In this richly textured history, Kara French investigates ideas about, and practices of, sexual restraint to better understand the sexual dimensions of American identity in the antebellum United States. French considers three groups of Americans—Shakers, Catholic priests and nuns, and followers of sexual reformer Sylvester Graham—whose sexual abstinence provoked almost as much social, moral, and political concern as the idea of sexual excess. Examining private diaries and letters, visual culture and material artifacts, and a range of published works, French reveals how people practicing sexual restraint became objects of fascination, ridicule, and even violence in nineteenth-century American culture.

Roanoke. Manteo. Wanchese. Chicamacomico. These place names along today’s Outer Banks are a testament to the Indigenous communities that thrived for generations along the Carolina coast. Though most sources for understanding these communities were written by European settlers who began to arrive in the late sixteenth century, those sources nevertheless offer a fascinating record of the region’s Algonquian-speaking people. Here, drawing on decades of experience researching the ethnohistory of the coastal mid-Atlantic, Helen Rountree reconstructs the Indigenous world the Roanoke colonists encountered in the 1580s. Blending authoritative research with accessible narrative, Rountree reveals in rich detail the social, political, and religious lives of Native Americans before European colonization. Then narrating the story of the famed Lost Colony from the Indigenous vantage point, Rountree reconstructs what it may have been like for both sides as stranded English settlers sought to merge with existing local communities. Finally, drawing on the work of other scholars, Rountree brings the story of the Native people forward as far as possible toward the present. Featuring maps and original illustrations, Rountree offers a much needed introduction to the history and culture of the region’s Native American people before, during, and after the founding of the Roanoke colony.

Thirteen Clocks is about how the founding fathers mobilized political authority and military resistance to defeat their cultural cousins. This study examines how a discourse evolved delineating friends and enemies in the hopes of garnering support in the first year of the Revolutionary War. It focuses on how, through print, patriot leaders propagated certain representations they thought would resonate with a wide colonial audience. Because they had to make the familiar alien, those depictions centered on projecting representations of the British as the equals of dangerous populations within colonial society. To accomplish this vital, difficult task, they embraced the most powerful weapons in the colonial cultural arsenal: stereotypes, prejudices, expectations, and fears about violent Indians and Africans. This book is about the “dark side” of the common cause appeal, that America’s fight for independence was also a fight against the King’s assistants, namely Indians and the enslaved. Printed stories about Indians and slaves fighting with the British were the basis for much of the explanations patriot leaders gave for why Americans must resist, most importantly in the final grievance of the Declaration of Independence. They were the initial cement of the American union. Those stories then became codified in the first inchoate conceptions of what it meant to belong to the new American republic. The cultural and political exclusion of African Americans and Indians from the rights of American citizens started at the founding itself. The American creation of race and nation were inextricably intertwined from the very start of the American Revolution.