American History: early to 18th Century

This book tells the gripping story of American Indians’ attempts to wrestle with the ongoing realities of colonialism between the 1660s and 1820. By tracing the religious and cultural engagement of American Indians in Connecticut, Rhode Island, western Massachusetts, and Long Island, New York, this narrative pulls back the curtain on the often overlooked, dynamic interactions between Natives and whites. Native individuals and communities actively tapped into transatlantic structures of power to protect their land rights, welcomed educational opportunities for their children, and even joined local white churches during the First Great Awakening (1740s). Although these Native groups had successfully resisted evangelization in the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth century they showed an increasing interest in education and religion. Their sporadic participation in the First Great Awakening marked a continuation of prior forms of cultural engagement. More surprising, however, in the decades after the Awakening, Native individuals and subgroups asserted their religious and cultural autonomy to even greater degrees by leaving English churches and forming their own Indian Separate churches. In the realm of education, too, Natives increasingly took control, preferring local reservation schools and demanding Indian teachers whenever possible. In the 1780s, two small groups of Christian Indians moved to New York and founded new Christian Indian settlements, called Brothertown and New Stockbridge. But the majority of New England Natives—even those who affiliated with Christianity—chose to remain in New England, continuing to assert their own autonomous existence through leasing out land, farming, and working on and off the reservations.

The year 2000 marked the 30th anniversary of the publication of this title. The study examines the family in the context of the colony founded by the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower. Basing his work on physical artifacts, wills, estate inventories, and a variety of legal and official enactments, the author portrays the family as a structure of roles and relationships, emphasizing those of husband and wife, parent and child, and master and servant. The book's most startling insights come from a reconsideration of commonly held views of American Puritans and of the ways in which they dealt with one another. The author concludes that Puritan “repression” was not as strongly directed against sexuality as against the expression of hostile and aggressive impulses, and he shows how this pattern reflected prevalent modes of family life and child rearing. The result is an in-depth study of the ordinary life of a colonial community, located in the broader environment of seventeenth-century America. This second edition includes a new foreword and a list of further reading.

Miraculous Plagues reimagines New England’s literary history by tracing seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century epidemics alongside the era of early colonial expansion, the Antinomian controversy, the evolution of the halfway covenant and jeremiad, and Boston’s 1721 inoculation controversy. Moving beyond familiar histories of New World epidemics (often referred to as the “virgin soil” model), Miraculous Plagues identifies epidemiology as a generic category with specialized forms and conventions, and considers how regional and generational patterns of illness reposition our understanding of the relation between immunology and ideology in the formation of communal identity. Epidemiology functions as subject and method of analysis in Miraculous Plagues: it describes those narratives that represent modes of infection, population distribution, and immunity, but, more germane to the field of literary criticism, it also describes a set of analytical practices for theorizing the translation of epidemic events into narrative and generic terms. Without denying epidemiology’s usefulness in combating contemporary epidemics, Miraculous Plagues affirms its power to transform colonial spaces, and thus to reshape inquiries into the nature of community and identity; it offers critics new trajectories for analyzing late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first century epidemiology, and for rethinking illness and infection in terms of the geopolitics of medicine.

The cities of eighteenth‐century America were crucial for the coming of the American Revolution. This book focuses closely on political mobilization in colonial British America's five most populous cities, from 1740 to 1780. It particularly examines the Boston waterfront community, New York City taverns, Newport churches and congregations, the elite households of Charleston, and the gatherings outside the Philadelphia State House and State House Yard. Because of their tight concentrations of people and diverse mixture of inhabitants, the largest cities offered fertile ground for political consciousness, political persuasion, and political action. The book traces how everyday interactions in taverns, wharves, and elsewhere slowly developed into more serious political activity. Ultimately, the residents of cities became the first to voice their discontent. Merchants began meeting to discuss the repercussions of new laws, printers fired up provocative pamphlets, and protesters took to the streets. Indeed, the cities became the flashpoints for legislative protests, committee meetings, massive outdoor gatherings, newspaper harangues, boycotts, customs evasion, violence and riots‐all of which laid the groundwork for war. By focusing on some of the most pivotal events of the eighteenth century as they unfolded in the most dynamic places in America, this book illuminates how city dwellers joined in various forms of political participation that helped make the Revolution possible.

The relationship between American Indians and Europeans on America's frontiers is typically characterized as one of profound cultural difference. This book contains six chapters titled “Land,” “Kings,” “Writing,” “Alliances,” “Gender,” and “Race,” showing that Indians and Europeans held common beliefs about their most fundamental realities. They used history and memory to conceive of land as national territory, constructed governments, kept records of important events, formed international alliances, made gender an important social category, and read meaning into the arms, legs, heart, and mind that made up the human body. Before they even met, Europeans and Indians shared perceptions of a landscape marked by mountains and rivers, a physical world in which the sun rose and set every day, and a human body with a distinct shape. They also shared in their ability to make sense of it all and to invent new, abstract ideas based on the tangible and visible experiences of daily life. Focusing on eastern North American up through the end of the Seven Years War, incidents, letters, and recorded speeches from the Iroquois and Creek Confederacies, the Cherokee Nation, and other Native groups alongside British and French sources are analyzed, paying particular attention to the language used in cross-cultural encounters. Paradoxically, the more American Indians and Europeans came to know each other, the more they came to see each other as different. By the end of the 18th century, it is argued that they abandoned an initial willingness to recognize in each other a common humanity and instead developed new ideas and identities rooted in the conviction that, by custom and perhaps by nature, Native Americans and Europeans were peoples fundamentally at odds.

On the way toward declaring independence, Americans saw themselves as a separate people in the process of birth. In 1774, the First Continental Congress drew up a highly specific code of behaviour banning cock-fighting, horse-racing, and theatre. Public executions took the place of drama, and strict regulations were placed on funerals. The book argues that Congress banned these activities because they were viewed as posing a threat to the values needed in order to make resistance to Britain successful. The book illustrates an example of cultural history, using activities like gambling and theatre to illuminate the popular attitudes and government policy that contributed to the move toward Independence.

Americans are deeply divided over the Second Amendment. Some assert that the Amendment protects an individual's right to own guns. Others, that it does no more than protect the right of states to maintain militias. This book gives a history of this bitter controversy. It shows that the Founders understood the right to bear arms as neither an individual nor a collective right, but as a civic right — an obligation citizens owed to the state to arm themselves so that they could participate in a well regulated militia. The book shows how the modern “collective right” view of the Second Amendment, the one federal courts have accepted for over a hundred years, owes more to Anti-Federalists than the Founders. Likewise, the modern “individual right” view emerged only in the 19th century. The modern debate, the book argues, has its roots in the 19th century, during America's first and now largely forgotten gun violence crisis, when the earliest gun control laws were passed and the first cases on the right to bear arms came before the courts. Equally important, it describes how the gun control battle took on a new urgency during Reconstruction, when Republicans and Democrats clashed over the meaning of the right to bear arms and its connection to the Fourteenth Amendment. When the Democrats defeated the Republicans, it elevated the “collective rights” theory to preeminence and set the terms for constitutional debate for the next century. The book aims to provide a clear historical road map that charts how America has arrived at its current impasse over guns.

Before the American Revolution, no state more seriously discriminated against and persecuted religious dissenters than Virginia. Over 50 dissenting ministers, primarily Baptists, were jailed, and numerous Baptists and Presbyterians were beaten or harassed. By the time the U.S. Constitution was adopted, no state provided more extensive protection to religious freedom, nor did so in terms nearly so elegant as Thomas Jefferson's Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom. This dramatic change occurred because Virginia's dissenters, constituting as much as one‐third or more of the population, demanded religious freedom before they would mobilize for the American Revolution; Virginia's establishment leaders, the same gentry leaders who led much of the persecution, had little choice but to acquiesce. In return, dissenting ministers played an important role in the fight against Britain. By comparison, British efforts to co‐opt religious dissent were wan. By the end of the war, though, religious liberty was not yet complete, and with the necessity of mobilization eliminated, establishment leaders, led by Patrick Henry, sought to reinvigorate the formerly established church through a general tax to benefit all Christian denominations. This proved too much for the dissenters; politicized by the negotiations during the Revolution and with James Madison coordinating legislative efforts, they rose up to quash the religious tax and insisted upon adoption of Jefferson's Statute. In doing so, the evangelicals demanded a strict separation of church and state. The impact of their joining the polity and the robust religious liberty which they left as a legacy still resonate today.

This book traces the historical experiences of Highland Scots and American Indians in dealing with colonial powers and with each other. It considers cultural similarities and identifies parallel experiences, and shows how both groups were perceived and treated as tribal peoples. It traces their strategies of resistance and accommodation in dealing with colonialism, cultural assault, and economic transformation; their participation in colonial wars; their involvement and patterns of intermarriage in the fur trade; their dispossession during the era of the Highland Clearances and Indian Removals, and how they responded to new situations and changing attitudes. Highlanders and Indians fought, traded, and lived together. Many Highland Scots were expelled from their lands in the Highland Clearances; children of Highland Scots who had married Indian women were expelled from their lands in the Indian Removals. Highland names are common in Native American and First Nations communities today. In the vast colonial collision of North American history, tribal peoples from different sides of the Atlantic sometimes found much in common and ways to get along. But Highland Scots also settled on Native American lands and participated in empire-building. Their paths diverged as Highland Scots shed their tribal status in the eyes of the dominant society and took their place on the side of history's winners, a transformation in status denied to Indian people.