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Unfriendly to Liberty
In Unfriendly to
Liberty , Christopher F. Minty explores the
origins of loyalism in New York City between 1768 and 1776, and
revises our understanding of the coming of the American
Revolution.
Through detailed analyses of those who became loyalists, Minty
argues that would-be loyalists came together long before Lexington
and Concord to form an organized, politically motivated, and
inclusive political group that was centered around the DeLancey
faction. Following the DeLanceys' election to the New York Assembly
in 1768, these men, elite and nonelite, championed an inclusive
political economy that advanced the public good, and they strongly
protested Parliament's reorientation of the British Empire.
For New York loyalists, it was local politics, factions,
institutions, and behaviors that governed their political
activities in the build up to the American Revolution. By focusing
on political culture, organization, and patterns of allegiance,
Unfriendly to Liberty shows how the contending allegiances
of loyalists and patriots were all but locked in place by 1775 when
British troops marched out of Boston to seize caches of weapons in
neighboring villages.
Indeed, local political alignments that were formed in the
imperial crises of the 1760s and 1770s provided a critical platform
for the divide between loyalists and patriots in New York City.
Political and social disputes coming out of the Seven Years' War,
more than republican radicalization in the 1770s, forged the united
force that would make New York City a center of loyalism throughout
the American Revolution.
eBook
Slaves and Englishmen
Technically speaking, slavery was not legal in the English-speaking world before the mid-seventeenth century. But long before race-based slavery was entrenched in law and practice, English men and women were well aware of the various forms of human bondage practiced in other nations and, in less systematic ways, their own country. They understood the legal and philosophic rationale of slavery in different cultural contexts and, for good reason, worried about the possibility of their own enslavement by foreign Catholic or Muslim powers. While opinions about the benefits and ethics of the institution varied widely, the language, imagery, and knowledge of slavery were a great deal more widespread in early modern England than we tend to assume.In wide-ranging detail, Slaves and Englishmen demonstrates how slavery shaped the ways the English interacted with people and places throughout the Atlantic world. By examining the myriad forms and meanings of human bondage in an international context, Michael Guasco illustrates the significance of slavery in the early modern world before the rise of the plantation system or the emergence of modern racism. As this revealing history shows, the implications of slavery were closely connected to the question of what it meant to be English in the Atlantic world.
eBook
Early North America in global perspective
\"Early North American history is a field in flux. In the last thirty years, the field of Atlantic History has transformed scholarly studies of colonial America, bringing to light the many connections linking the Americas to Africa and Europe. Recently, though, historians have begun to question the utility of the Atlantic framework. Some suggest that it overlooks global phenomena, while others argue for a hemispheric or continental perspective on North America's early history.Early North America in Global Perspective collects the most interesting and innovative scholarly approaches to these questions. Anchored by a robust introduction that guides the reader through the various conceptual arguments, the fourteen essays gathered here introduce students to some of the finest historians of early America working in expansive and stimulating ways. These essays capture the complexity of North America's past and are in tune with the global influences that shape its present. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Captive's Position
Why do narratives of Indian captivity emerge in New England between 1682 and 1707 and why are these texts, so centrally concerned with women's experience, supported and even written by a powerful group of Puritan ministers? InThe Captive's Position, Teresa Toulouse argues for a new interpretation of the captivity narrative-one that takes into account the profound shifts in political and social authority and legitimacy that occurred in New England at the end of the seventeenth century. While North American narratives of Indian captivity had been written before this period by French priests and other European adventurers, those stories had focused largely on Catholic conversions and martyrdoms or male strategies for survival among the Indians. In contrast, the New England texts represented a colonial Protestant woman who was separated brutally from her family but who demonstrated qualities of religious acceptance, humility, and obedience until she was eventually returned to her own community. Toulouse explores how the female captive's position came to resonate so powerfully for traditional male elites in the second and third generation of the Massachusetts colony. Threatened by ongoing wars with Indians and French as well as by a range of royal English interventions in New England political and cultural life, figures such as Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and John Williams perceived themselves to be equally challenged by religious and social conflicts within New England. By responding to and employing popular representations of female captivity, they were enabled to express their ambivalence toward the world of their fathers and toward imperial expansion and thereby to negotiate their own complicated sense of personal and cultural identity. Examining the captivity narratives of Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Dustan, Hannah Swarton, and John Williams (who comes to stand in for the female captive), Toulouse asserts the need to read these gendered texts as cultural products that variably engage, shape, and confound colonial attitudes toward both Europe and the local scene in Massachusetts. In doing so,The Captive's Positionoffers a new story of the rise and breakdown of orthodox Puritan captivities and a meditation on the relationship between dreams of authority and historical change.
eBook
An Anxious Pursuit
In An Anxious Pursuit , Joyce Chaplin examines the impact
of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of
American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses
particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress,
tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia,
and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern,
improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice
as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates
the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life.
By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of
cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic
history.
Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private
papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton
cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a
modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to
improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive
anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The
basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties,
according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery.
Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of
the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower
South's ability to compete in the contemporary world.
Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some
of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues
that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the
antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a
reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an
outright rejection of those ideas.
eBook
Zamumo's Gifts
In 1540, Zamumo, the chief of the Altamahas in central Georgia, exchanged gifts with the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. With these gifts began two centuries of exchanges that bound American Indians and the Spanish, English, and French who colonized the region. Whether they gave gifts for diplomacy or traded commodities for profit, Natives and newcomers alike used the exchange of goods such as cloth, deerskin, muskets, and sometimes people as a way of securing their influence. Gifts and trade enabled early colonies to survive and later colonies to prosper. Conversely, they upset the social balance of chiefdoms like Zamumo's and promoted the rise of new and powerful Indian confederacies like the Creeks and the Choctaws.Drawing on archaeological studies, colonial documents from three empires, and Native oral histories, Joseph M. Hall, Jr., offers fresh insights into broad segments of southeastern colonial history, including the success of Florida's Franciscan missionaries before 1640 and the impact of the Indian slave trade on French Louisiana after 1699. He also shows how gifts and trade shaped the Yamasee War, which pitted a number of southeastern tribes against English South Carolina in 1715-17. The exchanges at the heart of Zamumo's Gifts highlight how the history of Europeans and Native Americans cannot be understood without each other.
eBook