- Adams Family Correspondence, Volume 7, January 1786-February 1787
- In their myriad letters to one another the Adamses interspersed observations about their own family life--births and deaths, illnesses and marriages, new homes and new jobs, education and finances--with commentary on the most important social and political events of their day, from the scandals in the British royal family to the deteriorating political situation in Massachusetts that eventually culminated in Shays' Rebellion.
- Hardcover 2005
- Barbaric Traffic
- Studying the rhetoric of various antislavery genres, Gould exposes the close relation between antislavery writings and commercial capitalism. By distinguishing between good commerce, or the importing of commodities that refined manners, and bad commerce, like the slave trade, the literature offered both a critique and an outline of acceptable forms of commercial capitalism. A challenge to the premise that objections to the slave trade were rooted in modern laissez-faire capitalism, Gould's work revises--and expands--our understanding of antislavery literature as a form of cultural criticism in its own right.
- Hardcover 2003
- Becoming America
- In his panoramic view of Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, Jon Butler reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural--the colonies in this epoch became a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001
- Benjamin Franklin
- Ever the chronicler and teacher, Franklin wrote an autobiography, ostensibly for his illegitimate son William. Apart from hurried additions when he was in his eighties, his story halts at 1757. Tracing his footsteps centuries later, Franklin's most celebrated biographer completes the last twenty-five years of the autobiography by drawing on Franklin's most personal and insightful letters and writings--even making additions within the interrupted Autobiography to give us the expository memoir that Franklin intended. Indeed, as he wrote it.
- Hardcover 1990 / Paperback 1996
- The Betrayal of Faith
- Anderson uses one man's compelling story to explore the collision of Christianity with traditional Native religion in colonial North America. Pastedechouan's story illuminates key struggles to retain and impose religious identity on both sides of the seventeenth-century Atlantic, even as it has a startling relevance to the contemporary encounter between native and nonnative peoples.
- Hardcover 2007
- Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade
- Hardcover 1980
- Circles and Lines
- John Demos offers an illuminating portrait of how colonial Americans viewed their life experiences. The earliest settlers lived in a traditional world of natural cycles that shaped their behavior: day and night; seasonal rhythms; the lunar cycle; the life cycle itself. During the transitional world of the American Revolution, people began to see their society in newer terms. Their cyclical frame of reference was coming unmoored, giving way to a linear world view.
- Hardcover 2004
- The Consent of the Governed
- What made the United States what it is began long before a shot was fired at a redcoat in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1775. It began quietly in homes and schoolrooms across the colonies in the reading lessons women gave to children. Just as the Protestant revolt originated in a practice of individual reading of the Bible, so the theories of reading developed by John Locke were the means by which a revolutionary attitude toward authority was disseminated throughout the British colonies in North America.
- Hardcover 2001
- The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661
- Between 1640 and 1660, England, Scotland, and Ireland faced civil war, invasion, religious radicalism, parliamentary rule, and the restoration of the monarchy. Pestana offers a sweeping history that systematically connects these cataclysmic events and the development of the infant plantations from Newfoundland to Surinam.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2007
- Facing East from Indian Country
- In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003
- The Faithful Shepherd
- This description of the Americanization of the Puritan ministry as it was transported to the New England colonies offers a host of new insights into American religious history. This book also affords the reader one of the freshest and most comprehensive histories of the seventeenth-century New England mind and society.
- Paperback 2006
- Fierce Communion
- Helena Wall shows what life was like in colonial America, a culture where individuals and family were subordinated to the demands of the community. Using local town, church, and especially court records from every colony, she examines the division of authority between family and community throughout colonial America.
- Hardcover 1990 / Paperback 1995
- From Puritan to Yankee
- Hardcover / Paperback
- The History of the Province of New York
- Hardcover 1972
- The Huguenots in America
- In this first modern history of the Huguenots' New World experience, Jon Butler traces the Huguenot diaspora across late seventeenth-century Europe, explores the causes and character of their American emigration, and reveals the Huguenots' secular and religious assimilation in three remarkably different societies--Boston, New York, and South Carolina.
- Hardcover 1984 / Paperback
- The Jamestown Project
- Despite the original settlers' dependence on the Chesapeake Algonquians and strained relations with their London backers, they forged a colony that survived where others had failed. Reconfiguring the myth of Jamestown's failure, Kupperman shows how the settlement's messy first decade actually represented a period of ferment in which individuals were learning how to make a colony work.
- Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2008
- The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649
- For 350 years Governor John Winthrop's journal has been recognized as the central source for the history of Massachusetts in the 1630s and 1640s. This full-scale, unabridged edition uses the manuscript volumes of the first and third notebooks, and James Savage's transcription of the middle notebook (accidentally destroyed in 1825).
- Hardcover 1996
- The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, Abridged Edition
- The abridged edition of Winthrop's journal, which incorporates about 40 percent of the governor's text, includes a lively introduction and complete annotation.
- Paperback 1997 / Hardcover 1997
- The Journal of Samuel Curwen, Loyalist
- Oliver, combining painstaking documentation with an abundance of illustrations, provides a colorful, complete work which ranks as a valuable source of English social history from 1775 to 1784. It was during these years that Curwen, a Salem merchant, after fleeing from the harassment incurred by his loyalist activities, migrated to England and kept this journal.
- Hardcover 1972
- The Letters of the Republic
- The subject of Michael Warner's book is the rise of a nation. America, he shows, became a nation by developing a new kind of reading public, where one becomes a citizen by taking ones place as writer or reader. At heart, the United States is a republic of letters, and its birth can be dated from changes in the culture of printing in the early eighteenth century. The new and widespread use of print media transformed the relations between people and power in a way that set in motion the republican structure of government we have inherited.
- Paperback / Hardcover
- Making Manhood
- Countering our image of early Anglo-American families as dominated by harsh, austere patriarchs, Anne Lombard challenges long-held assumptions about the history of family life by casting a fresh look at the experience of growing up male in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England. Drawing upon sources ranging from men's personal writings to court records to medical literature, Lombard finds that New England's Puritan settlers and their descendants shared a distinctive ideal of manhood that decisively shaped the lives of boys and men.
- Hardcover 2003
- Making the Empire Work
- Hardcover
- Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World
- England's seventeenth-century colonial empire in North America and the Caribbean was created by migration, as captured in the London port register of 1635, the largest extant port register for any single year in the colonial period and unique in its record of migration to America and to the European continent. Alison Games analyzes the 7,500 people who traveled from London in that year, recreating individual careers, exploring colonial societies at a time of emerging viability, and delineating a world sustained and defined by migration. Together, the migrants' stories offer a new social history of the seventeenth century.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001
- A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders
- In this compelling book, James Delbourgo traces the path of electricity through early American culture, exploring the relationship between human, natural, and divine powers in the eighteenth century. By examining the lives and visions of natural philosophers, showmen, preachers, and medical therapists, he shows how electrical experiences of terror and awe were connected to a broad array of cultural concerns that defined the American Enlightenment.
- Hardcover 2006
- The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century
Drawing on source material from many fields—business records, religious and political data, literary remains, and genealogical information—Mr. Bailyn has discovered much that is new about the merchants, and has brought it all together into a composite portrait of our economic founding fathers that is fascinating in itself and that will reorient our thinking about many aspects of early New England history.
- Paperback
- Okfuskee
- This unique, detailed perspective on local life in a Native society allows us to truly understand both the pervasiveness of colonialism's influence and the inventiveness of Native responses. At the same time, by comparing the Okfuskees' experiences to those of their contemporaries in colonial British America, the book provides a nuanced discussion of the ways in which Native and Euro-American histories intersected with, and diverged from, each other.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2006
- On Religious Liberty
- Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven in Rhode Island for those persecuted in the name of the religious establishment. Davis gathers together important selections from Williams's public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state.
- Paperback 2008 / Hardcover 2008
- The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson
- Hardcover / Paperback
- The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson
- Hardcover / Paperback
- Out of Smalle Beginnings
- Harvard College in the seventeenth century was one of America's largest and most continuous economic enterprises. Its financing is a record of resourceful extemporization. This is the first recorded notice of the institution which was to become Harvard University, and significantly, Margery Somers Foster comments, "it is a notice concerned with finance."
- Hardcover 1962
- Peoples of a Spacious Land
- Using original sources as well as the findings of demographers, ethnologists, and cultural anthropologists, Main compares the family life of the English colonists in Southern New England with the lives of comparable groups remaining in England and of native Americans. She looks at social organization, patterns of work, gender relations, sexual practices, childbearing and childrearing, demographic changes, and ways of dealing with sickness and death.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2004
- Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina
- This impressive scholarly debut deftly reinterprets one of America's oldest symbols--the southern slave plantation. S. Max Edelson examines the relationships between planters, slaves, and the natural world they colonized to create the Carolina Lowcountry. With a bold interdisciplinary approach, Plantation Enterprise reconstructs the environmental, economic, and cultural changes that made the Carolina Lowcountry one of the most prosperous and repressive regions in the Atlantic world.
- Hardcover 2006
- The Puritan Ordeal
- More than an ecclesiastical or political history, this book is a vivid description of the earliest American immigrant experience. It depicts the dramatic tale of the seventeenth-century newcomers to our shores as they were drawn and pushed to make their way in an unsettled and unsettling world.
- Hardcover 1989 / Paperback 1991
- Puritans among the Indians
- These eight reports by white settlers held captive by Indians gripped the imagination not only of early settlers but also of American writers through our history. Puritans among the Indians presents, in modern spelling, the best of the New England narratives. These both delineate the social and ideological struggle between the captors and the settlers, and constitute a dramatic rendition of the Puritans' spiritual struggle for redemption.
- Hardcover 1981 / Paperback
- The Puritans in America
- Exiled from England, the Puritans settled in what Cromwell called "a poor, cold, and useless" place--where they created a body of ideas and aspirations that were essential in the shaping of American religion, politics, and culture. In a felicitous blend of documents and narrative Heimert and Delbanco recapture the sweep and restless change of Puritan thought from its incipient Americanism through its dominance in New England society to its fragmentation in the face of dissent from within and without.
- Hardcover 1985 / Paperback
- The Reaper's Garden
- What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The Reaper's Garden, Brown asks this question about Jamaica, the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in America--and a human catastrophe. Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force.
- Hardcover 2008
- Religious Enthusiasm in the New World
- In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America, established society branded as "enthusiasts" those unconventional but religiously devout extremists who stepped across orthodox lines and claimed an intimate, emotional relationship with God. This book is a study of the enthusiasts who migrated to the American colonies as well as those who emerged there. It provides essential historical perspective to the current interest in popular religion.
- Hardcover 1985
- Saltwater Slavery
- This bold, innovative book promises to radically alter our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and the depths of its horrors. Stephanie E. Smallwood offers a penetrating look at the process of enslavement from its African origins through the Middle Passage and into the American slave market. Saltwater Slavery is animated by deep research and gives us a graphic experience of the slave trade from the vantage point of the slaves themselves. The result is both a remarkable transatlantic view of the culture of enslavement, and a painful, intimate vision of the bloody, daily business of the slave trade.
- Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2008
- Seven Wise Men of Colonial America
- Gummere explores the attitudes toward the classics of seven prominent colonial Americans--Hugh Jones, Robert Calef, Michael Wigglesworth, Samuel Davies, Henry Melhior Muhlenberg, Benjamin Rush, and Thomas Paine. Each of them was essentially pragmatic and judged the value of the classics not only on the basis of their intrinsic worth but also for their relevance to contemporary problems.
- Hardcover 1967
- The Transatlantic Constitution
- Departing from traditional approaches to colonial legal history, Mary Sarah Bilder argues that American law and legal culture developed within the framework of an evolving, unwritten transatlantic constitution that lawyers, legislators, and litigants on both sides of the Atlantic understood. The central tenet of this constitution--that colonial laws and customs could not be repugnant to the laws of England but could diverge for local circumstances--shaped the legal development of the colonial world.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2008
- The Urban Crucible
- Hardcover 1986 / Paperback
- Violence over the Land
- In this ambitious book that ranges across the Great Basin, Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples at the center of a dynamic story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West. Violence over the Land is a passionate reminder of the high costs that the making of American history occasioned for many indigenous peoples, written from the vantage point of an Indian scholar whose own family history is intimately bound up in its enduring legacies.
- Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008