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In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825.

An intellectual dialogue of the highest plane achieved in America, the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson spanned half a century and embraced government, philosophy, religion, quotidiana, and family griefs and joys. This reissue of The Adams-Jefferson Letters brings to a broader audience one of the monuments of American scholarship.

Follows the Catawbas from their first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century until they carved out a place in the American republic three centuries later. This title tells the story of Native agency, creativity, resilience, and endurance.

Creolization describes the cultural adaptations that occur when a community moves to a new geographic setting. Exploring the consciousness of peoples defined as 'creoles' who moved from the Old World to the New World, this work investigates the creolization of literary forms and genres in the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries.

During French colonial rule in Louisiana, nuns from the French Company of Saint Ursula came to New Orleans, where they educated women and girls of different descents, in literacy, numeracy, and the Catholic faith. By incorporating their story into the history of early America, this work exposes the limits of the republican model of national unity.

At the close of the 18th century, the poet and clergyman Timothy Dwight waged a literary and intellectual war against the forces of ""infidelity"". This text re-examines this episode by focusing on ""The Triumph of Fidelity"" (1788), the verse satire that launched Dwight's campaign.

This volume looks at the life of Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, royal governor of New York and New Jersey from 1702 and 1708, whose range of alleged transgressions ranged from raiding the public treasury to scandalizing his subjects.

A study of the Anti-Federalist legacy. Saul Cornell argues that, while the Anti-Federalists won the battle over ratification of the Constitution in 1788, their ideas continue to define the soul of US politics. He explores the range and influence of Anti-Federalist thought on the early Republic.

Often compared unfavourably with colonial New England, the early Chesapeake has been portrayed as irreligious, unstable, and violent. This study challenges this view and looks across the Atlantic to assess the enduring influence of English attitudes, values, and behaviour on the early Chesapeake.

Examines the economic and cultural interactions among the Indians, Europeans, and African slaves of colonial Louisiana. Rather than focusing on a single cultural group or on a particular economic activity, this study traces the complex social linkages among Indian villages, colonial plantations, hunting camps, military outposts, and port towns across a large region of pre-cotton South.

Traces Freemasonry through its first century in America. The text follows the order from its origins in Britain and its introduction into North America in the 1730s to its near-destruction by a massive anti-Masonic movement and its reconfiguration into the brotherhood we know today.

In the wake of American independence, it was clear that the new United States required novel political forms. Moving beyond traditional accounts of social unrest, republican and liberal ideology, and the rise of the autonomous individual, this work offers an interpretation of the American Revolution as a transformation of self and society.

This work examines the British public's predominantly loyal reponse to its government's actions during the American revolution. Drawing on nearly 1000 political pamphlets, as well as broad sides, private memoirs and popular cartoons it offers an insight into 18th-century British political culture.

The origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender are examined in this book. The author argues that gender was both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, and assesses its role in the construction of racism in Virginia.

The traditional history of early America paints the colonies as a transplantation of European culture to a new continent - a 'virgin land' in which Native Americans were assigned the role of foil whose contribution was to stimulate the energy of European dispossessors. This book recasts the story of American colonization as a territorial invasion.

This Violent Empire traces the origins of American violence, racism, and paranoia to the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans' national sense of self.Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series of "Others" (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless) whose differences from European American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders. These "Others," dangerous and polluting, had to be excluded from the European American body politic. Feared, but also desired, they refused to be marginalized, incurring increasingly enraged enactments of their political and social exclusion that shaped our long history of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Close readings of political rhetoric during the Constitutional debates reveal the genesis of this long history.

In mid-17-century England, people were born into authority based on their social status. By the late 18th century, however, English and American law began to emphasize contractual relations based on informed consent. This work explores how the changing legal status of children illuminates the debates over consent and status in England and America.

Shows that men and women created a vibrant urban pleasure culture, including the eroticization of print culture. By reading representations of sex against actual behavior, the author reveals the clash of meanings given to sex and illuminates struggles to recast sexuality in order to eliminate its subversive potential.

Revisiting the origins of the British antislavery movement of the late eighteenth century, this book challenges scholarly arguments that locate the roots of abolitionism in economic determinism or bourgeois humanitarianism. It instead connects the shift from sentiment to action to changing views of empire and nation in Britain at that time.

William Byrd II (1674-1744) was an important figure in the history of colonial Virginia: a founder of Richmond, an active participant in Virginia politics, and the proprietor of one of the colony's greatest plantations. But Byrd is best known today for his diaries. Considered essential documents of private life in colonial America, they offer readers an unparalleled glimpse into the world of a Virginia gentleman. This book joins Byrd's Diary, Secret Diary, and other writings in securing his reputation as one of the most interesting men in colonial America. Edited and presented here for the first time, Byrd's commonplace book is a collection of moral wit and wisdom gleaned from reading and conversation. The nearly six hundred entries range in tone from hope to despair, trust to dissimulation, and reflect on issues as varied as science, religion, women, Alexander the Great, and the perils of love. A ten-part introduction presents an overview of Byrd's life and addresses such topics as his education and habits of reading and his endeavors to understand himself sexually, temperamentally, and religiously, as well as the history and cultural function of commonplacing. Extensive annotations discuss the sources, background, and significance of the entries.

Charles Carroll of Carrollton is most often remembered as the sole Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. In this study of the Carrolls in Ireland and America, that act vindicates a family's determination to triumph without compromising lineage and faith.

An examination of the origin and legacies of the captive exchange economy within and among the Native Americans and Euro-American communities throughout the Southwest borderlands from the Spanish colonial era to the end of the 19th century.