Recently added articles from Early American Studies:
From the editor.
Sep 22, 2008; ... This issue of Early American Studies offers a range of articles that have unusual connections. For those absorbed by the complex issues involving cultural change and exchange, essays about New England and the Caribbean will command attention. Andrea Cremer and James Robertson focus on the ...
"Pretends he can read": runaways and literacy in colonial America, 1730-1776.(Report)
Sep 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT For half a century or more, historians have turned to runaway notices to make known the complexity of African American life during the colonial era. Although some, for example, have made use of them to illustrate instances of slave discontent or their understanding of the politics ...
Possession: Indian bodies, cultural control, and colonialism in the Pequot War.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT This essay interrogates key aspects of the Pequot War and its aftermath, when bodies became contested sites of cultural control that pivotally reshaped colonial New England. The rhetoric and justifications of an offensive English war against the Pequots relied on the image of ...
Late seventeenth-century Spanish Town, Jamaica: building an English City on Spanish foundations.(Report)
Sep 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT The English who captured Jamaica in 1655 found its Spanish colonial capital unfamiliar. Their adaptations of the Spanish cultural landscapes they occupied highlight alternative criteria for appraising townscapes. Spanish military resistance continued for five years, during which ...
The Port Royal earthquake and the world of wonders in seventeenth-century Jamaica.(Report)
Sep 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT This article examines the great Port Royal earthquake of 1692 in the context of other earthquakes that struck Jamaica in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It argues that although most commentators viewed the tremendous devastation caused by the 1692 disaster as a ...
Son of liberty: Johnny Tremain and the art of making American patriots.(Report)
Sep 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT Johnny Tremain, a figment of the writer Esther Forbes's imagination, has become real enough over the years. Created by Forbes to inspire American readers with the need for patriotic service during World War II, he was reincarnated by Walt Disney a decade later to perform that same ...
The Antinomian controversy did not take place.(Report)
Sep 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT The Antinomian Controversy that has preoccupied generations of early Americanists did not occur as a theological crisis in Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s. Instead, its status as a distinctive crisis in the history of early New England is an artifact of debates between apologists ...
American conservatism in historical perspective.(Report)
Sep 22, 2008; ... It may have come to your attention that there has been no love lost, since the beginning of the war in Iraq, between the French and the neo-conservative Bush administration. The French had the gall not to believe the poppy-cock that Cohn Powell presented to the UN about Iraq, weapons of ...
The diary of Horace C. Lee, 1841-1842 (Part 2).(Albany Tuesday July 20th-Sunday Jan y 9th 1842)(Critical essay)(Diary entry)
Sep 22, 2008; ... By the summer of 1842, halfway through the diary of Horace C. Lee, the nineteen-year-old diarist is making progress on his journey of self-definition in the midst of ever-changing religious, social, and economic conditions in Springfield, Massachusetts. He is drawing the map as he goes, ...
The diary of Horace C. Lee, 1841-1842 (Part 2).(Monday Jan 10th 1841-Conclusion)(Critical essay)(Diary entry)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Monday Jan 10th 1841 (32) A pleasant day. Business dull. saw Hancock about making me a new coat to day He agreed to make it this week. In the evening I went in to Sargants after shutting up & staid till 9 & then went to bed. Tuesday Jany 11th Staid in the ...
From the editor.
Mar 22, 2008; ... This issue of Early American Studies has something for everyone--everyone interested in early America, that is. From Jack Greene's account of the ways in which culture travels over time and place, to Maurice Jackson's exhaustively researched study of the effect of the Haitian Revolution on ...
The cultural dimensions of political transfers: an aspect of the European occupation of the Americas.(Report)
Mar 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT Looking broadly at the cultural dimensions of political transfers from one European power to another in the early modern Americas from the 1640s to the 1850s, this article attempts to categorize those transfers and to tease out a framework for examining why some established ...
Benjamin Franklin's interiors.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; ... Refinement hence even humblest life improves; Not the loose fair, that form and frippery loves; But she, whose mansion is the gentle mind, In thought, and action, virtuously refin'd. --Timothy Dwight, Greenfield Hill ABSTRACT This essay investigates the problem of ...
"Friends of the Negro! Fly with me, the path is open to the sea": remembering the Haitian Revolution in the History, Music, and Culture of the African American People.( )(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; ... To Hayti let us go, and then We may enjoy our natural rights, For negroes there are viewed as men And there thought as good as white. --William Wordsworth, "Toussaint Louverture" (1802) ABSTRACT This essay explores how the images, representations, and ideals of the ...
Stripped: clothing and identity in colonial captivity narratives.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT This article examines the preoccupation of English colonists with their state of dress during captivity by Indians as reflected in their subsequent narratives. This concern is linked to the conflation of clothing and person, and the anxieties exhibited by the colonists during ...
A "commercial view of this unfortunate war": economic roots of an American National State in the Ohio Valley, 1775-1795.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT This article argues that the roots of an American national state were forged in the wars with Native Americans for control of the Ohio Valley between 1775 and 1795. It examines how the new national government's use of its fiscal-military powers shifted and accelerated an economic ...
"The great improvement and civilization of that race": Jefferson and the "Amelioration" of Slavery, ca. 1770-1826.(Thomas Jefferson)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; ... ABSTRACT After the revolution Jefferson envisioned the gradual abolition of slavery, to be achieved by "amelioration." First, the slave trade would be abolished. Second, slaves and slavery would be "improved." Third, slaves would be emancipated and expatriated. But as soon as Jefferson ...
The diary of Horace C. Lee, 1841-1842: (Part 1).(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; ... In the diary of Horace C. Lee, 1841-42, a young dry goods clerk in Springfield, Massachusetts, explores both his own emerging ideals as he grows into adulthood and also the complex gender, religious, social, and economic dynamics of a midsize New England town as it develops into a city ....
The American Revolution, Wife Beating, and the Emergent Value of Privacy.(Era overview)
Sep 22, 2007; ... ABSTRACT Using Abigail Adams's famous plea "to remember the Ladies" as its starting point, this paper examines the legal treatment of wife beating between the colonial period and the mid-nineteenth century. Trends within judicial decisions, legal treatises, and justice of the peace manuals ...
Billy Blue: an African American journey through empire in the long eighteenth century.(Biography)
Sep 22, 2007; ... ABSTRACT This article traces the remarkable life of William Blue, who was probably born into slavery in colonial New York about 1737 and who died a much-celebrated founding figure in the colony of New South Wales (present-day Australia) in 1834. Like the recent biography of Equiano, so ...