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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.

This book analyzes representations of reading, writing, and recollecting texts – “literacy events” – in early America’s best-known literary genre. Captivity narratives reveal how colonial captives treasured the written word in order to distinguish themselves from their native captors and to affiliate with their distant cultural communities. Their narratives suggest that Indians recognized this value, sometimes with benevolence: repeatedly, they presented colonists with books. In this way and others, scriptures, saintly lives, and even Shakespeare were introduced into the diverse experiences of colonial captivity. Captivity narratives reflect lived allegories, the identification of one’s own unfolding story with the stories of others. Sources include the foundational New England narratives of Mary Rowlandson and John Williams, the French Jesuit accounts of the colonial saints Isaac Jogues and Kateri Tekakwitha, the Anglo-African John Marrant’s account of his sojourn in Cherokee territory, and the narratives of Colonel James Smith and other captives in the Great Lakes region during the late eighteenth century.

Patterns of pearl cultivation and circulation reveal vernacular practices that shaped emerging imperial ideas about value and wealth in the early modern world. Pearls’ variability and subjective beauty posed a profound challenge to the imperial impulse to order and control, underscoring the complexity of governing subjects and objects in the early modern world. Qualitative, evaluative language would play a prominent role in crown officials’ attempts to contain and channel this complexity. The book’s title reflects the evolving significance of the term barrueca (which became “baroque” in English), a word initially employed in the Venezuelan fisheries to describe irregular pearls. Over time, this term lost its close association with the jewel but came to serve as a metaphor for irregular, unbounded expression. Pearls’ enduring importance lies less in the revenue they generated than in the conversations they prompted about the nature of value and the importance of individual skill and judgment, as well as the natural world, in its creation and husbandry. The stories generated by pearls—an unusual, organic jewel—range globally, crossing geographic and imperial boundaries as well as moving across scales, linking the bounded experiences of individuals to the expansion of imperial bureaucracies. These microhistories illuminate the connections between these small- and large-scale historical processes, revealing the connections between empire as envisioned by monarchs, enacted in law, and experienced at sea and on the ground by individuals.

The American Revolution was not only a revolution for liberty and freedom, it was also a revolution of ethics, reshaping what colonial Americans understood as “honor” and “virtue.” As Craig Bruce Smith demonstrates, these concepts were crucial aspects of Revolutionary Americans’ ideological break from Europe and shared by all ranks of society. Focusing his study primarily on prominent Americans who came of age before and during the Revolution—notably John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington—Smith shows how a colonial ethical transformation caused and became inseparable from the American Revolution, creating an ethical ideology that still remains. By also interweaving individuals and groups that have historically been excluded from the discussion of honor—such as female thinkers, women patriots, slaves, and free African Americans—Smith makes a broad and significant argument about how the Revolutionary era witnessed a fundamental shift in ethical ideas. This thoughtful work sheds new light on a forgotten cause of the Revolution and on the ideological foundation of the United States.

Following the American Revolution, it was a cliché that the new republic's future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools--accessible, elementary education--that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites. By 1800, academies had become the most widely incorporated institutions besides churches and transportation projects in nearly every state.In this book, Mark Boonshoft shows how many Americans saw the academy as a caricature of aristocratic European education and how their political reaction against the academy led to a first era of school reform in the United States, helping transform education from a tool of elite privilege into a key component of self-government and citizenship. And yet the very anti-aristocratic critique that propelled democratic education was conspicuously silent on the persistence of racial and gender inequality in public schooling. By tracing the history of academies in the revolutionary era, Boonshoft offers a new understanding of political power and the origins of public education and segregation in the United States.

For the better part of two centuries, between 1720 and 1877, the Blackfoot (Niitsitapi) people controlled a vast region of what is now the U.S. and Canadian Great Plains. As one of the most expansive and powerful Indigenous groups on the continent, they dominated the northern imperial borderlands of North America. The Blackfoot maintained their control even as their homeland became the site of intense competition between white fur traders, frequent warfare between Indigenous nations, and profound ecological transformation. In an era of violent and wrenching change, Blackfoot people relied on their mastery of their homelands’ unique geography to maintain their way of life. With extensive archival research from both the United States and Canada, Ryan Hall shows for the first time how the Blackfoot used their borderlands position to create one of North America’s most vibrant and lasting Indigenous homelands. This book sheds light on a phase of Native and settler relations that is often elided in conventional interpretations of Western history, and demonstrates how the Blackfoot exercised significant power, resiliency, and persistence in the face of colonial change.

Although Spain was never a formal ally of the United States during the American Revolution, its entry into the war tipped the balance against Britain. Led by Bernardo de Gálvez, supreme commander of the Spanish forces in North America, Spanish military campaigns against British settlements on the Mississippi River—and later against Mobile and Pensacola—were crucial in preventing Britain from concentrating all its North American military and naval forces on the fight against George Washington’s Continental army. This first comprehensive biography of Gálvez (1746–86) examines in detail the commander’s considerable historical impact and expands our understanding of Spain’s contribution to the war. A man of both empire and the Enlightenment, Gálvez was also pivotal in the design and implementation of Spanish colonial reforms while viceroy of New Spain (1785–86),, which included the reorganization of Spain’s Northern Frontier that appeased the region for the duration of the Spanish presence in North America. Extensively researched through Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. archives, the book’s portrait of Gálvez reveals him as central to the histories of the Revolution and late eighteenth-century America and offers a reinterpretation of the international factors involved in the American War for Independence.

In pursuit of a more sophisticated and inclusive American history, the contributors to this book propose new directions for the study of the political history of the republic before the Civil War. In ways formal and informal, symbolic and tactile, this political world encompassed blacks, women, entrepreneurs, and Native Americans, as well as the Adamses, Jeffersons, and Jacksons, all struggling in their own ways to shape the new nation and express their ideas of American democracy. Taking inspiration from the new cultural and social histories, these political historians show that the early history of the United States was not just the product of a few “founding fathers,” but was also marked by widespread and passionate popular involvement; print media more politically potent than that of later eras; and political conflicts and influences that crossed lines of race, gender, and class.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French colonists and their Native allies participated in a slave trade that spanned half of North America, carrying thousands of Native Americans into bondage in the Great Lakes, Canada, and the Caribbean. This book reveals the dynamics of this system from its origins to the end of French colonial rule. Balancing a vast geographic and chronological scope with careful attention to the lives of enslaved individuals, it gives voice to those who lived through the ordeal of slavery and, along the way, shaped French and Native societies. Rather than telling a simple story of colonial domination and Native victimization, the author argues that Indian slavery in New France emerged at the nexus of two very different forms of slavery: one indigenous to North America and the other rooted in the Atlantic world. The alliances that bound French and Natives together forced a century-long negotiation over the nature of slavery and its place in early American society. Neither fully Indian nor entirely French, slavery in New France drew upon and transformed indigenous and Atlantic cultures in complex and surprising ways. Based on thousands of French and Algonquian-language manuscripts archived in Canada, France, the United States and the Caribbean, the book bridges the divide between continental and Atlantic approaches to early American history. By discovering unexpected connections between distant peoples and places, it sheds new light on a wide range of subjects, including intercultural diplomacy, colonial law, gender and sexuality, and the history of race.

Between 1819 and 1845, as veterans of the Revolutionary War were filing applications to receive pensions for their service, the government was surprised to learn that many of the soldiers were not men, but boys, many of whom were under the age of sixteen, and some even as young as nine. In Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution, Caroline Cox reconstructs the lives and stories of this young subset of early American soldiers, focusing on how these boys came to join the army and what they actually did in service. Giving us a rich and unique glimpse into colonial childhood, Cox traces the evolution of youth in American culture in the late eighteenth century, as the accepted age for children to participate meaningfully in society--not only in the military--was rising dramatically. Drawing creatively on sources, such as diaries, letters, and memoirs, Caroline Cox offers a vivid account of what life was like for these boys both on and off the battlefield, telling the story of a generation of soldiers caught between old and new notions of boyhood.

Building the British Atlantic World is the first book to articulate the shared architectural history of the British Atlantic world; the first to consider British, North American, Caribbean and African colonial architectures, spaces and places together as the products of a common British Atlantic culture. Atlantic History is a well-established field, however, of the numerous studies available buildings and their fundamental role in framing and maintaining public and private space are rarely considered. Building the British Atlantic World is architecture’s overdue contribution to Atlantic History. From the pioneer colonists of the early seventeenth-century through to American Independence and the maintenance of a very different, much smaller, disparate British Atlantic in the nineteenth century, this book introduces a shared history of building and buildings that transcends national narratives in order to outline a set of complex cultural exchanges between Britain (England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales), America (the North, Mid and Southern Atlantic states), Canada, the Caribbean, Bermuda and West Africa. The ‘British Atlantic World’ and ‘transatlanticism’ are relatively new terms to architectural history but are well-established fields/approaches within social and political History and Literary Studies. Therefore, a further aim of the book is to set out these concepts and, through case studies, demonstrate their value to architectural history.

Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, Caribbean New Orleans offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cécile Vidal reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city’s development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans’s rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city’s streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana’s capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America’s most intriguing city.

This book explores how the Anglo-Cherokee War reshaped the political and cultural landscape of the colonial South. The text chronicles the series of clashes that erupted from 1758 to 1761 between Cherokees, settlers, and British troops. The conflict, no insignificant sideshow to the French and Indian War, eventually led to the regeneration of a British-Cherokee alliance. The book reveals how the war destabilized the South Carolina colony and threatened the white coastal elite, arguing that the political and military success of the Cherokees led colonists to a greater fear of slave resistance and revolt and ultimately nurtured South Carolinians' rising interest in the movement for independence.

This book presents an exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States. It investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other Philadelphians, the book explores the range of illusions encountered in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, “Invisible Ladies,” and other spectacles of deception. The book reconstructs the elite and vernacular sites where such art and objects appeared and argues that early national exhibitions doubled as spaces of citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary culture troubled by the social and political consequences of deception, keen perception signified able citizenship. Setting illusions into dialogue with Enlightenment cultures of science, print, politics, and the senses, this book demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions functioned to cultivate but also to confound discernment.

This book explores the struggle within the young American nation over the extension of social and political rights after the Revolution. By closely examining the formation and interplay of political structures and civil institutions in the upper Hudson Valley, ot traces the debates over who should fall within and outside of the legally protected category of citizen. The story of Martin Van Buren—kingpin of New York's Jacksonian “Regency,” president of the United States, and first theoretician of American party politics—threads the narrative, since his views profoundly influenced American understandings of consent and civil society and led to the birth of the American party system. The book imbues local history with national significance, and its analysis of the revolutionary settlement as a dynamic and unstable compromise over the balance of power offers a window onto a local struggle that mirrored the nationwide effort to define American citizenship.

The Common Cause is about how the founding fathers mobilized political authority and military resistance to defeat their cultural cousins. This study examines the overall shape of mobilization in the Revolutionary War, how a discourse evolved delineating friends and enemies in the hopes of garnering support. 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, the founders embraced the most powerful weapons in the colonial cultural arsenal: stereotypes, prejudices, expectations, and fears about violent Indians and African Americans. 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 for the British were the basis for patriot leaders' explanations as to why Americans must resist, most importantly in the final grievance of the Declaration of Independence. These stories were the cement of the American union; they 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. American concepts of race and nation were inextricably intertwined from the very start of the American Revolution.

This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England examines the experiences of ordinary men and women living through extraordinary times. Drawing on an unprecedented quantity of letters, diaries, and testimonies, Douglas Winiarski recovers the pervasive and vigorous lay piety of the early eighteenth century. George Whitefield’s preaching tour of 1740 called into question the fundamental assumptions of this thriving religious culture. Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit—visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions—countless New Englanders broke ranks with family, neighbors, and ministers who dismissed their religious experiences as delusive enthusiasm. The new converts of the so-called Great Awakening, the progenitors of today’s evangelical movement, bitterly assaulted the Congregational establishment. Conflict transformed inclusive parishes into exclusive networks of combative spiritual seekers. Then as now, evangelicalism emboldened ordinary people to question traditional authorities. Their challenge shattered whole communities.

"Aloha" is at once the most significant and the most misunderstood word in the Indigenous Hawaiian lexicon. For Kānaka Maoli people, the concept of "aloha" is a representation and articulation of their identity, despite its misappropriation and commandeering by non-Native audiences in the form of things like the "hula girl" of popular culture. Considering the way aloha is embodied, performed, and interpreted in Native Hawaiian literature, music, plays, dance, drag performance, and even ghost tours from the twentieth century to the present, Stephanie Nohelani Teves shows that misunderstanding of the concept by non-Native audiences has not prevented the Kānaka Maoli from using it to create and empower community and articulate its distinct Indigenous meaning. While Native Hawaiian artists, activists, scholars, and other performers have labored to educate diverse publics about the complexity of Indigenous Hawaiian identity, ongoing acts of violence against Indigenous communities have undermined these efforts. In this multidisciplinary work, Teves argues that Indigenous peoples must continue to embrace the performance of their identities in the face of this violence in order to challenge settler-colonialism and its efforts to contain and commodify Hawaiian Indigeneity.

In 1700, a young man named John Lawson left London and landed in Charleston, South Carolina, hoping to make a name for himself. For reasons unknown, he soon undertook a two-month journey through the still-mysterious Carolina backcountry. His travels yielded A New Voyage to Carolina in 1709, one of the most significant early American travel narratives, rich with observations about the region's environment and Indigenous people. Lawson later helped found North Carolina's first two cities, Bath and New Bern; became the colonial surveyor general; contributed specimens to what is now the British Museum; and was killed as the first casualty of the Tuscarora War. Yet despite his great contributions and remarkable history, Lawson is little remembered, even in the Carolinas he documented.In 2014, Scott Huler made a surprising decision: to leave home and family for his own journey by foot and canoe, faithfully retracing Lawson's route through the Carolinas. This is the chronicle of that unlikely voyage, revealing what it's like to rediscover your own home. Combining a traveler's curiosity, a naturalist's keen observation, and a writer's wit, Huler draws our attention to people and places we might pass regularly but never really see. What he finds are surprising parallels between Lawson's time and our own, with the locals and their world poised along a knife-edge of change between a past they can't forget and a future they can’t quite envision.

After his 1728 Virginia-North Carolina boundary expedition, Virginia planter and politician William Byrd II composed two very different accounts of his adventures. The Secret History of the Line was written for private circulation, offering tales of scandalous behavior and political misconduct, peppered with rakish humor and personal satire. The History of the Dividing Line, continually revised by Byrd for decades after the expedition, was intended for the London literary market, though not published in his lifetime. Collating all extant manuscripts, this edition of these two histories provides wide-ranging historical and cultural contexts for both, helping to recreate the social and intellectual ethos of Byrd and his time. Byrd enriched his narratives with material appropriated from earlier authors, many of whose works were in his library—the most extensive in the American colonies. This book identifies here many of Byrd's sources and raises the question: how reliable are histories that build silently upon antecedent texts and present borrowed material as firsthand testimony? In this analysis, the book demonstrates the need for a new category to assess early modern history writing: the hybrid, accretional narrative.