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In 1752 an enslaved Pennsylvania ironworker named Ned purchased his freedom and moved to Virginia on the upper James River. Taking the name Edward Tarr, he became the first free black landowner west of the Blue Ridge. Tarr established a blacksmith shop on the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia to the Carolinas and helped found a Presbyterian congregation that exists to this day. Living with him was his white, Scottish wife, and in a twist that will surprise the modern reader, Tarr's neighbors accepted his interracial marriage. It was when a second white woman joined the household that some protested. Tarr's already dramatic story took a perilous turn when the predatory son of his last master, a Charleston merchant, abruptly entered his life in a fraudulent effort to reenslave him. His fate suddenly hinged on his neighbors, who were all that stood between Tarr and a return to the life of a slave. This remarkable true story serves as a keyhole narrative, unlocking a new, more complex understanding of race relations on the American frontier. The vividly drawn portraits of Tarr and the women with whom he lived, along with a rich set of supporting characters in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia, provide fascinating insight into the journey from slavery to freedom, as well as the challenges of establishing frontier societies. The story also sheds light on the colonial merchant class, Indian warfare in southwest Virginia, and slavery's advent west of the Blue Ridge. Contradicting the popular view of settlers in southern Virginia as poor, violent, and transient, this book--with its pathbreaking research and gripping narrative--radically rewrites the history of the colonial backcountry, revealing it to be made up largely of close-knit, rigorously governed communities.

Although commonly regarded as a prejudice against Roman Catholics, anti-popery is both more complex and far more historically significant than this common conception would suggest. As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, anti-popery is a powerful lens through which to interpret the culture and politics of the British-American world.

Like merchant ships flying flags of convenience to navigate foreign waters, traders in the northern borderlands of the early American republic exploited loopholes in the Jay Treaty that allowed them to avoid border regulations by constantly shifting between British and American nationality. In Citizens of Convenience, Lawrence Hatter shows how this practice undermined the United States' claim to nationhood and threatened the transcontinental imperial aspirations of U.S. policymakers.The U.S.-Canadian border was a critical site of United States nation- and empire-building during the first forty years of the republic. Hatter explains how the difficulty of distinguishing U.S. citizens from British subjects on the border posed a significant challenge to the United States' founding claim that it formed a separate and unique nation. To establish authority over both its own nationals and an array of non-nationals within its borders, U.S. customs and territorial officials had to tailor policies to local needs while delineating and validating membership in the national community. This type of diplomacy-balancing the local with the transnational-helped to define the American people as a distinct nation within the Revolutionary Atlantic world and stake out the United States' imperial domain in North America.

By the mid-eighteenth century, observers of the emerging overseas British Empire thought that Jamaica was the most valuable of the American colonies. Based on a unique set of historical lists and maps, along with a variety of other contemporary materials, Jack Greene's study provides unparalleled detail about the character of Jamaica's settler society during the decade of the 1750s.

Viewing the early American republic from an imperial-revolutionary perspective, the essays in this collection consider subjects as far-ranging as merchants, winemaking, slavery, sex, and chronology to nostalgia, fort construction, and urban unrest. They move from the very centre of the empire in London to the far western frontier, offering a new way to consider America's most formative period.

A farmer, evangelical, and political activist, Herman Husband (1724-1795) played a crucial role in some of the most important anti-establishment movements in eighteenth-century America. Redemption from Tyranny explores the life of this leader among revolutionaries.

Argues that the American Revolution was not just the product of the Imperial Crisis, brought on by Parliament's attempt to impose a new idea of empire on the American colonies. To an equal or greater degree, it was a response to the inability of individual colonial governments to deliver basic services, which undermined their legitimacy.

Between 1632 and 1748, Virginia's General Assembly revised the colony's statutes seven times. Warren Billings presents a series of snapshots that depict the revisions of the corpus juris the General Assembly undertook. In so doing, he highlights the good, the corrupt, and the loathsome applications of legislative authority in the colonial era.

As the United States is experiencing another, ongoing crisis of governance, reexamining the various ways in which elites and common Americans alike imagined and constructed their new nation offers fresh insights into matters whose legacies reverberated through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the present day.

As the United States is experiencing another, ongoing crisis of governance, reexamining the various ways in which elites and common Americans alike imagined and constructed their new nation offers fresh insights into matters whose legacies reverberated through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the present day.

A fundamental component of Britain's early success, naval impressment not only kept the Royal Navy afloat-it helped to make an empire. In total numbers, impressed seamen were second only to enslaved Africans as the largest group of forced laborers in the eighteenth century. In The Evil Necessity, Denver Brunsman describes in vivid detail the experience of impressment for Atlantic seafarers and their families. Brunsman reveals how forced service robbed approximately 250,000 mariners of their livelihoods, and, not infrequently, their lives, while also devastating Atlantic seaport communities and the loved ones who were left behind. Press gangs, consisting of a navy officer backed by sailors and occasionally local toughs, often used violence or the threat of violence to supply the skilled manpower necessary to establish and maintain British naval supremacy. Moreover, impressments helped to unite Britain and its Atlantic coastal territories in a common system of maritime defense unmatched by any other European empire. Drawing on ships' logs, merchants' papers, personal letters and diaries, as well as engravings, political texts, and sea ballads, Brunsman shows how ultimately the controversy over impressment contributed to the American Revolution and served as a leading cause of the War of 1812.Early American HistoriesWinner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an Outstanding Work of Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Studies

<p><p> <i>Dunmore's New World</i> tells the stranger-than-fiction story of Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, whose long-neglected life boasts a measure of scandal and intrigue rare in the annals of the colonial world. Dunmore not only issued the first formal proclamation of emancipation in American history; he also undertook an unauthorized Indian war in the Ohio Valley, now known as Dunmores War, that was instrumental in opening the Kentucky country to white settlement. In this entertaining biography, James Corbett David brings together a rich cast of characters as he follows Dunmore on his perilous path through the Atlantic world from 1745 to 1809.</p><p>Dunmore was a Scots aristocrat who, even with a family history of treason, managed to obtain a commission in the British army, a seat in the House of Lords, and three executive appointments in the American colonies. He was an unusual figure, deeply invested in the imperial system but quick to break with convention. Despite his 1775 proclamation promising freedom to slaves of Virginia rebels, Dunmore was himself a slaveholder at a time when the African slave trade was facing tremendous popular opposition in Great Britain. He also supported his daughter throughout the scandal that followed her secret, illegal marriage to the youngest son of George IIIa relationship that produced two illegitimate children, both first cousins of Queen Victoria.</p> <p>Within this single narrative, Dunmore interacts with Jacobites, slaves, land speculators, frontiersmen, Scots merchants, poor white fishermen, the French, the Spanish, Shawnees, Creeks, patriots, loyalists, princes, kings, and a host of others. This history captures the vibrant diversity of the political universe that Dunmore inhabited alongside the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. A transgressive imperialist, Dunmore had an astounding career that charts the boundaries of what was possible in the Atlantic world in the Age of Revolution.</p></p>