early american places is a collaborative series on · early american places is a collaborative...

n e w a n d r e c e n t ly p u b l i s h e d

Early amErican PlacEs is a collaborative series on the early history of North America supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The series focuses on the history of North America from contact to the Mexican War, locating historical developments in the specific places where they occurred and were contested. Though these developments often involved far-flung parts of the world, they were experienced in particular communities—the local places where people lived, worked, and made sense of their changing worlds. By restricting its focus to smaller geographic scales, but stressing that towns, colonies, and regions were part of much larger networks, Early American Places will combine up-to-date scholarly sophistication with an emphasis on local particularities and trajectories.

The collaborating presses’ responsibilities are divided geographically. University

of Georgia Press focuses on the southeastern colonies, the plantation economies of

the Caribbean, and the Spanish borderlands. New York University Press covers the

Northeastern and Middle Atlantic colonies, and French and British Canada. Northern

Illinois University Press covers the old Northwest. University of Nebraska Press

focuses on the American far West.

The collective goal is to establish Early American Places as one of the most

important homes for field-defining first books about early American history.

“This excellent initiative promises a series of strong books elaborating on one

of the major themes in recent early American scholarship: the importance

of place. The rationale for the collaboration in publication is sound, as is

the plan for the management of the series as a whole. An imaginative and

exciting approach to the well-known dilemmas of academic publishing.”

— Andrew Cayton, Distinguished Professor of History, Miami University

“The Early American Places series is an exciting development in scholarly

publishing, one that will highlight the most important part of the study

of history: the local and particular dimensions of global issues and trends.

This is where the rubber meets the road, where ordinary people’s lives help

to make, and are made by, the bustling wider world in which they live.

Early American Places is an original series, and it will publish important

scholarship.”—Stephanie M. H. Camp

u n i v e r s i t y o fg e o r g i a p r e s s

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remember Me to Miss louisaHidden Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum Americasharony green

200 pp | 21 illustrationscloth, $36.00 | 9780875804910Paper, $24.95 | 9780875807232Ebook available

sharony grEEn is assistant professor of American history at the University of Alabama.

“Dr. Green has done a great job combing together crumbs of historical evidence from disparate places and using them to weave together a credible set of narratives. I was impressed by how extensive her research was across time and topic. Remember Me to Miss Louisa promises to challenge the consensus that most relationships between enslaved women and white men were rooted in oppression, inequality, and exploitation.”—Nikki M. Taylor, author of Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868 and America’s First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark

It is generally recognized that antebellum interracial relationships were “notorious” at the neighbor-hood level. But we have yet to fully uncover the complexities of such relationships, especially from freedwomen’s and children’s points of view. While it is known that Cincinnati had the largest per capita population of mixed race people outside the South during the antebellum period, historians have yet to explore how geography played a central role in this outcome. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers made it possible for Southern white men to ferry women and children of color for whom they had some measure of concern to free soil with relative ease.

While the frequency with which Southern white men freed enslaved women and their children is now generally known, less is known about these men’s financial and emotional investments in them. Before the Civil War, a white Southern man’s pending marriage, aging body, or looming death often compelled him to free an African American woman and their children. And as difficult as it may be for the modern mind to comprehend, some kind of connection sometimes existed between these individuals. This study argues that such men—though they hardly stand excused for their ongo-ing claims to privilege—were hidden actors in freedwomen’s and children’s attempts to survive the rigors and challenges of life as African Americans in the years surrounding the Civil War. Green examines many facets of this phenomenon in the hope of revealing new insights about the era of slavery. Historians, students, and general readers of US history, African American studies, black urban history, and antebellum history will find much of interest in this fascinating study.

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privateers of the americasSpanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early RepublicDavid head

224 pp. | 8 b&w photos | 3 tables | 2 mapsPaper, $24.95 | 9780820348643cloth, $64.95 | 9780820344003Ebook available

DaviD hEaD is an assistant professor of history at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama.

The lucrative, extralegal business of privateering as a window into the Atlantic World

Privateers of the Americas examines raids on Spanish shipping conducted from the United States during the early 1800s. These activities were sanctioned by, and conducted on behalf of, republics in Spanish America aspiring to independence from Spain. Among the available histories of privateer-ing, there is no comparable work. Because privateering further complicated international dealings during the already tumultuous Age of Revolution, the book also offers a new perspective on the diplomatic and Atlantic history of the early American republic.

Seafarers living in the United States secured commissions from Spanish American nations, attacked Spanish vessels, and returned to sell their captured cargoes (which sometimes included slaves) from bases in Baltimore, New Orleans, and Galveston and on Amelia Island. Privateers sold millions of dollars of goods to untold numbers of ordinary Americans. Their collective enterprise involved more than a hundred vessels and thousands of people—not only ships’ crews but investors, merchants, suppliers, and others. They angered foreign diplomats, worried American officials, and muddied U.S. foreign relations.

David Head looks at how Spanish American privateering worked and who engaged in it; how the U.S. government responded; how privateers and their supporters evaded or exploited laws and in-ternational relations; what motivated men to choose this line of work; and ultimately, what it meant to them to sail for the new republics of Spanish America. His findings broaden our understanding of the experience of being an American in a wider world.



insatiable appetitesImperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic WorldKelly l. Watson

288 pp. | 7 halftonescloth, $40.00 | 9780814763476Ebook available

KElly l. Watson is Assistant Professor of History and a member of the faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at Avila University in Kansas City.

”Insatiable Appetites is a well-crafted and fascinating book—an important read for students of race, gender, and sexuality in the early modern world. Readers won’t look at imperial discourses of ‘civili-zation’ and ‘savagery’ in quite the same way after consuming and digesting this wide-ranging history.” —Thomas A. Foster, DePaul University

“Insatiable Appetites offers a thoughtful and wide-ranging analysis of cannibalism as a crucial ingredient of European imperialism during the early modern period. . . Tracing the connections among cannibal-ism, savagery, and deviant sexual and gender practices, Watson provides a convincing account of how Europeans mobilized discourses about man-eating women and consumed men to distinguish them-selves from the populations they wished to dominate.”—Kathleen Brown, University of Pennsylvania

Cannibalism, for medieval and early modern Europeans, was synonymous with savagery. Humans who ate other humans, they believed, were little better than animals. The European colonizers who encountered Native Americans described them as cannibals as a matter of course, and they wrote extensively about the lurid cannibal rituals they claim to have witnessed.

In her close read of letters, travel accounts, artistic renderings, and other descriptions of cannibals and cannibalism, Watson focuses on how gender, race, and imperial power intersect within the figure of the cannibal. Watson reads cannibalism as a part of a dominant European binary in which civilization is rendered as male and savagery is seen as female, and she argues that as Europeans came to dominate the New World, they continually rewrote the cannibal narrative to allow for a story in which the savage, effeminate, cannibalistic natives were overwhelmed by the force of virile European masculinity. Original and historically grounded, Insatiable Appetites uses the discourse of cannibalism to uncover the ways in which difference is understood in the West.


race and rightsFighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830–1870Dana Elizabeth Weiner

325 pp. | 6 illustrationsPaper, $28.00 | 9780875807133Cloth, $38.00 | 9780875804576Ebook available

Dana ElizabEth WEinEr is an assistant professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario

“This well-written, deeply researched study of antislavery and proslavery actions in the Old North-west adds powerful new dimensions to our understanding of evolving antagonisms about human servitude in the decades before the Civil War.”—Journal of American History

“Anyone interested in the emergence of rights consciousness will benefit from reading this book.” —Ohio Valley History

In the Old Northwest from 1830-1870, a bold set of activists battled slavery and racial prejudice. This book is about their expansive efforts to eradicate southern slavery and its local influence in the con-tentious milieu of four new states carved out of the Northwest Territory: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. While the Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery in the region in 1787, in reality both it and racism continued to exert strong influence in the Old Northwest, as seen in the race-based limitations of civil liberties there. Indeed, these states comprised the central battleground over race and rights in antebellum America, in a time when race’s social meaning was deeply infused into all aspects of Americans’ lives, and when people struggled to establish political consensus.

Antislavery and anti-prejudice activists from a range of institutional bases crossed racial lines as they battled to expand African American rights in this region. Whether they were antislavery lecturers, journalists, or African American leaders of the Black Convention Movement, women or men, they formed associations, wrote publicly to denounce their local racial climate, and gave controversial lectures. In the process, they discovered that they had to fight for their own right to advocate for others. This bracing new history by Dana Elizabeth Weiner is thus not only a history of activism, but also a history of how Old Northwest reformers understood the law and shaped new conceptions of justice and civil liberties.

Race and Rights is a much-welcomed contribution to the study of race and social activism in 19th-century America.


caribbean crossingAfrican Americans and the Haitian Emigration Movementsara Fanning

192 pp.Cloth, $35.00 | 9780814764930Ebook available

sarah Fanning is Assistant Professor of History at Texas Woman’s University.

“Most Americans know about the ‘return to Africa’ movement among free blacks in the US, which resulted in the formation of a new African nation, the Republic of Liberia, in 1847. Probably far fewer know about the slave rebellion against French colonial masters. To African Americans in the early 19th century, Haiti embodied racial equality and freedom from intense, institutionalized racial discrimination and insufferable white supremacy. Fanning provides the first comprehensive account of this forgotten chapter in US and African American history.”—Choice

Shortly after winning its independence in 1804, Haiti’s leaders realized that if their nation was to survive, it needed to build strong diplomatic bonds with other nations. Haiti’s first leaders looked especially hard at the United States, which had a sizeable free black population that included vocal champions of black emigration and colonization. In the 1820s, President Jean-Pierre Boyer helped facilitate a migration of thousands of black Americans to Haiti with promises of ample land, rich commercial prospects, and most importantly, a black state. His ideas struck a chord with both blacks and whites in America. Journalists and black community leaders advertised emigration to Haiti as a way for African Americans to resist discrimination and show the world that the black race could be an equal on the world stage, while antislavery whites sought to support a nation founded by liberated slaves. Black and white businessmen were excited by trade potential, and racist whites viewed Haiti has a way to export the race problem that plagued America. By the end of the decade, black Americans migration to Haiti began to ebb as emigrants realized that the Caribbean republic wasn’t the black Eden they’d anticipated. Caribbean Crossing documents the rise and fall of the campaign for black emigration to Haiti, drawing on a variety of archival sources to share the rich voices of the emigrants themselves. Using letters, diary accounts, travelers’ reports, newspaper articles, and American, British, and French consulate records, Sara Fanning profiles the emigrants and analyzes the diverse motivations that fueled this unique early moment in both American and Haitian history.


natchez countryIndians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisianageorge E. milne

312 pp. Paper, $26.95 | 9780820347509Cloth, $84.95 | 9780820347493Ebook available

gEorgE EDWarD milnE is associate professor of early American history at Oakland University.

“George Milne’s book offers not only an ambitiously researched and vigorously argued reinterpretation of Natchez-French relations in colonial Louisiana but also plenty of guidance and insight for scholars working on other regions of conflict and exchange in early American history.”—Daniel H. Usner Jr., au-thor of Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783

At the dawn of the 1700s the Natchez viewed the first Francophones in the Lower Mississippi Valley as potential inductees to their chiefdom. This mistaken perception lulled them into permitting these outsiders to settle among them. Within two decades conditions in Natchez Country had taken a turn for the worse. The trickle of wayfarers had given way to a torrent of colonists (and their enslaved Africans) who refused to recognize the Natchez’s hierarchy. These newcomers threatened to seize key authority-generating features of Natchez Country: mounds, a plaza, and a temple. This threat inspired these Indians to turn to a recent import—racial categories—to reestablish social or-der. They began to call themselves “red men” to reunite their polity and to distance themselves from the “blacks” and “whites” into which their neighbors divided themselves. After refashioning their identity, they launched an attack that destroyed the nearby colonial settlements. Their 1729 assault began a two-year war that resulted in the death or enslavement of most of the Natchez people.

In Natchez Country, George Edward Milne provides the most comprehensive history of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Natchez to date. From La Salle’s first encounter with what would become Louisiana to the ultimate dispersal of the Natchez by the close of the 1730s, Milne also analyzes the ways in which French attitudes about race and slavery influenced native North American Indians in the vicinity of French colonial settlements on the Mississippi River and how Native Americans in turn adopted and resisted colonial ideology.



Four steeples over the city streetsReligion and Society in New York’s Early Republic CongregationsKyle t. bulthuis

320 pp. | 22 halftonesCloth, $39.00 | 9781479814275Ebook available

KylE t. bulthuis is Assistant Professor of History at Utah State University.

“For too long, historians have treated early American religion as a rural phenomenon, shaped by the pressures of the frontier more than the hustle and bustle of urban seaports. Kyle Bulthuis’s Four Steeples over the City Streets challenges these assumptions, recovering the rich stories of some of Man-hattan’s oldest congregations over the tumultuous period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. . . . Bulthuis has done for New York’s African American religious communities what Gary Nash and Richard Newman have done for Philadelphia’s: He has recovered forgotten founders, wrenching moments of crisis, and inspiring stories of perseverance in the face of persistent societal racism. . . . A distinctly New York story, reflective of the opportunities and challenges facing that city as it emerged as the nation’s commercial center by the eve of the Civil War.”—Kyle Roberts, Loyola University Chicago

In Four Steeples over the City Streets, Kyle T. Bulthuis examines the histories of four famous church congregations in early Republic New York City—Trinity Episcopal, John Street Methodist, Mother Zion African Methodist, and St. Philip’s (African) Episcopal—to uncover the lived experience of these historical subjects, and just how religious experience and social change connected in the dynamic setting of early Republic New York. Drawing on a range of primary sources, Four Steeples over the City Streets reveals how these city churches responded to these transformations from colonial times to the mid-nineteenth century. Bulthuis also adds new dynamics to the stories of well-known New Yorkers such as John Jay, James Harper, and Sojourner Truth. More importantly, Four Steeples over the City Streets connects issues of race, class, and gender, urban studies, and religious experience, revealing how the city shaped these churches, and how their respective religious traditions shaped the way they reacted to the city.


against wind and tideThe African American Struggle against the Colonization Movementousmane K. Power-greene

304 pp. Cloth, $35.00 | 9781479823178Ebook available

ousmanE K. PoWEr-grEEnE is Assistant Professor of History at Clark University (MA).

“Against Wind and Tide probes more deeply into the history of black opposition to the American Colonization Society’s program of removal than any previous work. Power-Greene skillfully weaves together a number of important historical strands of the antebellum period that illuminate just how central the debate over Liberian colonization was in relationship to African American identity and presence in the United States. Significantly, he pays close attention to the place of Haiti as an alter-native site for African American migration and identity formation, detailing how crucial the black republic was to any discussion of Afro-Atlantic destiny.”—Claude Clegg, Indiana University

“Ousmane Power-Greene’s book is an important and much-needed corrective to the recent boom in the history of the American colonization movement. In recapitulating the long genealogy of African American opposition to colonization and carefully distinguishing colonization from independent black emigration and nationalist efforts, he has made an indispensable contribution to the early his-tory of the United States as well as the international efforts of black people to stem the tide of slavery and racism in the western world.”—Manisha Sinha, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Against Wind and Tide tells the story of African American’s battle against the American Coloniza-tion Society (ACS), founded in 1816 with the intention to return free blacks to its colony Liberia. Although ACS members considered free black colonization in Africa a benevolent enterprise, most black leaders rejected the ACS, fearing that the organization sought forced removal. As Ousmane K. Power-Greene’s story shows, these African American anticolonizationists did not believe Liberia would ever be a true “black American homeland.”

Power-Greene synthesizes debates about colonization and emigration, situating this complex and enduring issue into an ever broader conversation about nation building and identity formation in the Atlantic world.

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Faithful bodiesPerforming Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlanticheather miyano Kopelson

416 pp. | 6 maps | 16 halftones | 6 figures | 1 tableCloth, $45.00 | 9781479805006Ebook available

hEathEr miyano KoPElson is Assistant Professor of History and Affiliated Faculty in Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

“Offers a new way to understand religion, politics, and identity in the English Atlantic World. . . . This is an ambitious undertaking, and Kopelson has done it justice. Faithful Bodies really does it all, with a provocative argument, careful archival research, creative historiographical connections, and evocative, accessible writing.”—Ann M. Little, Colorado State University

“This is a fascinating and important new perspective on the body of Christ in early America. With meticulous research and illuminating insight, Kopelson reveals the chain of associations that bound religious communities and colonial societies to an emerging Protestant ethos committed to defin-ing and disciplining corporeal life. Finally, we have a satisfying account of the Puritan attitude to race and sex.”—Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of History, Harvard University

Faithful Bodies focuses on three communities of Protestant dissent in the Atlantic World: Ber-muda, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. In this “puritan Atlantic,” religion determined insider and outsider status: at times Africans and Natives could belong as long as they embraced the Protestant faith, while Irish Catholics and English Quakers remained suspect. Colonists’ interactions with indigenous peoples of the Americas and with West Central Africans shaped their understandings of human difference and its acceptable boundaries. Prayer, religious instruction, sexual behavior, and other public and private acts became markers of whether or not blacks and Indians were sinning Christians or godless heathens. As slavery became law, transgressing people of color counted less and less as sinners in English puritans’ eyes, even as some of them made Christianity an integral part of their communities. As Kopelson shows, this transformation proceeded unevenly but inexorably during the long seventeenth century.

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slavery, childhood, and abolition in Jamaica, 1788–1838colleen a. vasconcellos

160 pp.Paper, $24.95 | 9780820348056Cloth, $59.95 | 9780820348025Ebook available

collEEn a. vasconcEllos is an associate professor of history at the University of West Georgia. She is coeditor, with Jennifer Hillman Helgren, of Girlhood: A Global History.

“Slavery, Childhood, and Abolition in Jamaica adds considerably to our understanding of how ameliora-tion altered the actions of slave owners in fundamental ways. Vasconcellos has a number of fresh ideas on the significance of childhood as a political and, to an extent, a social issue in the transition from slavery to freedom in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jamaica.”—Trevor Burnard, author of Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776

This study examines childhood and slavery in Jamaica from the onset of improved conditions for the island’s slaves to the end of all forced or coerced labor throughout the British Caribbean. As Colleen A. Vasconcellos discusses the nature of child development in the plantation complex, she looks at how both colonial Jamaican society and the slave community conceived childhood—and how those ideas changed as the abolitionist movement gained power, the fortunes of planters rose and fell, and the nature of work on Jamaica’s estates evolved from slavery to apprenticeship to free labor. Vascon-cellos explores the experiences of enslaved children through the lenses of family, resistance, race, status, culture, education, and freedom. In the half-century covered by her study, Jamaican planters alternately saw enslaved children as burdens or investments. At the same time, the childhood experi-ence was shaped by the ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse slave community.

Vasconcellos adds detail and meaning to these tensions by looking, for instance, at enslaved children of color, legally termed mulattos, who had unique ties to both slave and planter families. In addition, she shows how traditions, beliefs, and practices within the slave community undermined planters’ efforts to ensure a compliant workforce by instilling Christian values in enslaved children. These are just a few of the ways that Vasconcellos reveals an overlooked childhood—one that was often defined by Jamaican planters but always contested and redefined by the slaves themselves.



senator benton and the peopleMaster Race Democracy on the Early American FrontiersKen s. mueller

328 pp. Paper, $29.95 | 9780875807003Cloth, $45.00 | 9780875804798Ebook available

KEn s. muEllEr received his PhD in histo-ry from Saint Louis University and is associate professor and program chair of general studies, history, political science, and geography at Ivy Tech Community College in Lafayette, Indiana.

“I have read with much interest Ken Mueller’s political biography of Thomas Hart Benton. Mueller has provided a number of persuasive correctives to the extant biographies of Benton. He has also made a number of interesting, original contributions of his own. Benton was one colorful guy—irritating and infuriating to some but larger than life to others (including himself). An updated and comprehensive treatment of Benton’s politics is overdue.”—Michael A. Morrison, author of Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny Senator Thomas Hart Benton was a towering figure in Missouri politics. Elected in 1821, he was their first senator, and served in Washington, DC, for more than thirty years. Like Andrew Jackson, with whom he had a long and complicated relationship, Benton came out of the developing western section of the young American Republic. The foremost Democratic leader in the Senate, he claimed to represent the rights of “the common man” against “monied interests” of the East. “Benton and the people,” the Missourian was fond of saying, “are one and the same”—a bit of bombast that reveals a good deal about this seasoned politician who was himself a mass of contradictions. He possessed an enormous ego and a touchy sense of personal honor that led to violent results on several occasions. Yet this conflation of “the people” and their tribune raises questions not addressed in earlier biogra-phies of Benton.

Mueller provides a fascinating portrait of Senator Benton. His political character, while viewed as flawed by contemporary standards, is balanced by his unconditional devotion to his particular vision. Mueller evaluates Benton’s career in light of his attitudes toward slavery, Indian removal, and the Mexican borderlands, among other topics, and reveals Benton’s importance to a new generation of readers. He offers a more authentic portrait of the man than has heretofore been presented by either his detractors or his admirers.


everyday life in the early english caribbeanIrish, Africans, and the Construction of DifferenceJenny shaw

256 pp. | 18 b&w photos | 1 mapPaper, $24.95 | 9780820346625Cloth, $74.95 | 9780820345055Ebook available

JEnny shaW is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama.

“Jenny Shaw’s nuanced study illuminates how divisions originating in Europe—especially those that distinguished Irish Catholic servants from their English Protestant masters—shaped colonial society and ultimately the hierarchies of race that came to be the most important markers of difference. Shaw profitably lingers over the early period, when the early English Caribbean was in the process of becoming, and as a result she demonstrates that race and colonialism were negotiated, not preor-dained.”—Carla Gardina Pestana, author of Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World

“A nuanced and fascinating account of how Irish Catholics shaped the emergence of racial hierarchy in the English Caribbean. With meticulous attention to the constraints and possibilities of everyday life, Shaw explores the way that early settlers marked and ranked social difference, finding that status distinctions were surprisingly malleable, even in a society overwhelmingly organized by slavery and race. Offering close readings of fresh sources, this is both an important study and an impressive feat of the informed imagination.”—Vincent Brown, author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery

Set along both the physical and social margins of the British Empire in the second half of the seven-teenth century, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean explores the construction of difference through the everyday life of colonial subjects. Jenny Shaw examines how marginalized colonial sub-jects—Irish and Africans—contributed to these processes. By emphasizing their everyday experiences Shaw makes clear that each group persisted in its own cultural practices; Irish and Africans also worked within—and challenged—the limits of the colonial regime. Shaw’s research demonstrates the extent to which hierarchies were in flux in the early modern Caribbean, allowing even an outcast servant to rise to the position of island planter, and underscores the fallacy that racial categories of black and white were the sole arbiters of difference in the early English Caribbean.



parading patriotismIndependence Day Celebrations in the Urban Midwest, 1826-1876adam criblez

288 pp. | 12 illustrationsPaper, $28.95 | 9780875806921

aDam criblEz is an assistant professor of history at Southeast Missouri University.

“In offering this kind of careful and thoughtful history, relating both change and continuity over time, Criblez is to be commended.”—Paul A. Gilje, Journal of American History

“In thoroughly scholarly fashion, this book reflects the excitement and occasional conflicts and disasters that accompanied celebrations of Independence Day as the early American Northwestern frontier became the Middle West.”—Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society

“Parading Patriotism offers a new window into the political and cultural meaning of Independence Day as a tool of creating national identity in the United Sates, and it covers a region that is less understood than it should be.”—Sarah Purcell, Grinnell College, author of Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America

Parading Patriotism breaks new ground in revealing how Fourth of July celebrations in the urban Midwest between 1826 and 1876 helped define patriotic nationalism, bringing celebratory actions to life by demonstrat¬ing the importance of Independence Day commemorations in defining changing conceptions of what it meant to be an American. The book links two important historical genres by considering how historical memory and American nationalism coalesced on the Fourth of July as Midwesterners used the holiday as a time both to reflect on the past and forge ahead in constructing a unique national identity. Historian Adam Criblez uses the Midwest as a backdrop, but necessarily considers cultural developments transplanted from outside the region, both from Europe, trans-mitted by immigrants, and eastern states like New York, Virginia, and Massachusetts, brought by westward migrants. Readers, therefore, can expect a multitude of topics to be covered in this work. Ethnic conflict, racial turmoil, class struggle, and, perhaps most importantly, changing conceptions of American nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century all compose aspects of Parading Patriotism.


slavery before raceEuropeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island’s Sylvester Manor Plantation1651–1884Katherine howlett hayes

240 pp. | 20 halftone images | 1 tableCloth, $30.00 | 9780814785775Ebook available

KathErinE hoWlEtt hayEs is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. She holds a PhD in anthropology from UC Berkley, and an MA in historical archaeology from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

The study of slavery in the Americas generally assumes a basic racial hierarchy: Africans or those of African descent are usually the slaves, and white people usually the slaveholders. In this unique interdisciplinary work of historical archaeology, anthropologist Katherine Hayes draws on years of fieldwork on Shelter Island’s Sylvester Manor to demonstrate how racial identity was constructed and lived before plantation slavery was racialized by the legal codification of races. Using the historic Sylvester Manor Plantation site turned archaeological dig as a case study, Hayes draws on artifacts and extensive archival material to present a rare picture of northern slavery on one of the North’s first plantations. The Manor was built in the mid-17th century by British settler Nathaniel Sylvester, whose family owned Shelter Island until the early 18th century and whose descendants still reside in the Manor House. There, as Hayes demonstrates, white settlers, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans worked side by side. While each group played distinct roles on the Manor and in the larger plantation economy of which Shelter Island was part, their close collabora-tion and cohabitation was essential for the Sylvester family’s economic and political power in the Atlantic Northeast. Through the lens of social memory and forgetting, this study addresses the sig-nificance of Sylvester Manor’s plantation history to American attitudes about diversity, Indian land politics, slavery and Jim Crow, in tension with idealized visions of white colonial community.

“A skillful and captivating take on some of the big issues in contemporary historical and anthropo-logical scholarship: race, community, material culture, memory, and heritage.”—Stephen W. Silliman, University of Massachusetts, Boston


confronting slaveryEdward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century Americasuzanne cooper guasco

265 pp. | 12 illus.Paper, $28.95 | 9780875806891Ebook available

suzannE cooPEr guasco is the Robert Haywood Morrison Associate Professor and Chair of History at Queens University of Charlotte.

“The book’s major strengths lie in Guasco’s recognition that Coles’s life and antislavery politics span eras, regions, and ideologies that historians often examine in isolation, preventing them from seeing nine-teenth-century social and political histories as deeply intertwined. She effectively makes the case for Coles’s own trajectory, demonstrates the development of antislavery politics over several decades, and thereby brings Coles more fully into the historiography of antislavery.”—Thomas Bahde, Ohio Valley History

Edward Coles, who lived from 1786-1868, is most often remembered for his antislavery correspondence with Thomas Jefferson in 1814, freeing his slaves in 1819, and leading the campaign against the legaliza-tion of slavery in Illinois during the 1823-24 convention contest.

In this new full-length biography Suzanne Cooper Guasco demonstrates for the first time how Edward Coles continued to confront slavery for nearly forty years after his time in Illinois. Not only did he at-tempt to shape the slavery debates in Virginia immediately before and after Nat Turner’s rebellion, he also consistently entered national political discussions about slavery throughout the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. On each occasion Coles promoted a vision of the nation that combined a celebration of America’s antislavery past with an endorsement of free labor ideology and colonization, a broad appeal that was designed to mollify his fellow-countrymen’s sense of economic self-interest and virulent anti-black prejudice. As Cooper Guasco persuasively shows, Coles’s antislavery nationalism, first crafted in Illinois in the 1820s, became the foundation of the Republican Party platform and ultimately contributed to the destruction of slavery.

By exploring his entire life, readers come to see Edward Coles as a vital link between the unfulfilled antislavery sensibility of men like Thomas Jefferson and the pragmatic antislavery politics of Abraham Lincoln. In Edward Coles’ life-long confrontation with slavery, as well, we witness the rise of antislavery politics in nineteenth-century America and come to understand the central role politics played in the fight against slavery.


colonization and its discontentsEmancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvaniabeverly c. tomek

304 pp. | 11 halftone imagesPaper, $24.00 | 9780814764534Cloth, $65.00 | 9780814783481Ebook available

bEvErly c. tomEK is an assistant profes-sor of history at the University of Houston-Victoria in Victoria, Texas.

Pennsylvania contained the largest concentration of early America’s abolitionist leaders and organi-zations, making it a necessary and illustrative stage from which to understand how national conver-sations about the place of free blacks in early America originated and evolved, and, importantly, the role that colonization—supporting the emigration of free and emancipated blacks to Africa—played in national and international antislavery movements. Beverly C. Tomek’s meticulous exploration of the archives of the American Colonization Society, Pennsylvania’s abolitionist societies, and coloni-zationist leaders (both black and white) enables her to boldly and innovatively demonstrate that, in Philadelphia at least, the American Colonization Society often worked closely with other antislavery groups to further the goals of the abolitionist movement.

In Colonization and Its Discontents, Tomek brings a much-needed examination of the complexity of the colonization movement by describing in depth the difference between those who supported colonization for political and social reasons and those who supported it for religious and humanitar-ian reasons. Finally, she puts the black perspective on emigration into the broader picture instead of treating black nationalism as an isolated phenomenon and examines its role in influencing the black abolitionist agenda.

“An enlightening examination of the role of colonization in the state and national controversies over slavery, abolition, and civil rights in antebellum America.”—Nicholas Wood, Pennsylvania History

“Tomek’s book constitutes an important contribution to the history of the nineteenth-century anti-slavery movement.”—Friederike Baer, American Historical Review


an empire of small placesMapping the Southeastern Anglo-American Trade, 1732–1795robert Paulett

264 pp. | 14 b&w imagesPaper, $24.95 | 9780820343471Cloth, $69.95 | 9780820343464

robErt PaulEtt is an assistant profes-sor of history at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

creolization and contrabandCuraçao in the Early Modern Atlantic Worldlinda m. rupert

296 pp. | 10 b&w images | 5 mapsPaper, $24.95 | 9780820343068Cloth, $69.95 | 9780820343051Ebook available

linDa m. ruPErt is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

“This is an important and insightful analysis of the devel-opment of colonial Augusta, the Indian trade, and the geography of the Southeast. Paulett convincingly dem-onstrates how the region was transformed geographically from a world where Natives and newcomers understood that they were interconnected by a series of paths to one where they believed they lived in discrete neighborhoods.

This ideological and physical transformation has tremendous explanatory value and will be of interest to historians of the early South, Native Americans, urban America, and the frontier in general.” —Andrew K. Frank, author of Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier

“Rupert’s rich analysis of multiethnic Curaçao is an original and substantial contribution to Atlantic and Caribbean history. Her book is an excellent case study of creolization and contraband trade—phenomena that informed most, if not all, societies in the colonial Americas—and scholars of the Atlantic world will turn

to it for comparative purposes.”—Wim Klooster, author of Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History




empire at the peripheryBritish Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713christian J. Koot

312 pp. | 19 imagesCloth, $39.00 | 9780814748831

christian J. Koot is an assistant professor of history at Towson University in Maryland.

“Employing fascinating examples from an impressive array of sources, Koot provides compelling evidence that English colonists’ economic ideologies drew in profound ways on their long-standing reliance on Dutch trade. Koot’s deep understanding of both conditions on the ground and of European political theory allows readers to see the evolution of particu-

larly colonial commercial cultures in Barbados, the Leeward Islands, and New York. He attends carefully to changes in local circumstances to argue that this history of Dutch trade was central to an eighteenth-century divergence in Caribbean and mainland theories of empire.”—April Hatfield, author of Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century

On slavery’s borderMissouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815–1865Diane mutti burke

368 pp. | 16 b&w images | 2 mapsPaper, $24.95 | 9780820336831Cloth, $69.95 | 9780820336367Ebook available

DianE mutti burKE is an assistant pro-fessor of history at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

“On Slavery’s Border tackles two important and under-studied subjects: the history of slavery in the South’s border states, and the nature of small-scale slavery. It is full of original and interesting and useful insight about many topics—from the forced and voluntary migrations that created Missouri’s patterns of slavery, to

white gender ideologies that resembled those of the midwestern farming communities to the north and east, to the labor, leisure, and familial interactions that shaped the material and affective worlds of whites and African Americans.”—Leslie A. Schwalm, author of Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest



cultivating regionalismHigher Education and the Making of the American MidwestKenneth Wheeler

208 pp. | 8 illustrations Cloth, $38.00 | 9780875804446

KEnnEth WhEElEr is a professor of history at Reinhardt University.

“More than an excellent social history of institutions of higher education in the nineteenth-century Midwest, this book is a thoughtful addition to a growing number of studies investigating the questions of regional iden-tity north and west of the Ohio River.” —Andrew Cayton, author of The Midwest and the Nation

“The value of this book is that it makes new and inter-esting arguments about three issues in American history: American preeminence in the natural sciences; the origins of Progressivism; and how the culture of the Old Northwest differed from that of the Northeast and the South.”—Thomas Hamm, Earlham College

Ordinary lives in the caribbeanReligion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of ProfitKristen block

Paper, $24.95 | 9780820338682Cloth, $69.95 | 9780820338675Ebook available

KristEn blocK is an assistant professor of history at Florida Atlantic University.

“Based on both a wide-ranging scholarly literature and a broad and deep archival base, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean raises important questions about the relation-ship between Christianity and profit seeking in the early modern Atlantic. Block’s use of personal stories to advance her arguments allows her to address big ques-tions with a clarity and specificity that should appeal to undergraduates and specialists alike.”—April Hatfield,

author of Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century



sounds americanNational Identity and the Music Cultures of the Lower Mississippi River Valley, 1800–1860ann ostendorf


ann ostEnDorF is an assistant profes-sor of history at Gonzaga University.

the year of the lashFree People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Worldmichele reid-vasquez


michElE rEiD-vasquEz is an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University.

“Sounds American is an excellent study of the role of music in the formation of national identity on the southern borderlands in the early nineteenth century. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and predict that it will interest a wide range of cultural historians of early America.”—Andrew McMichael, author of Atlantic Loyalties: Americans in Spanish West Florida, 1785-1810

“Reid-Vazquez sheds new light on the plight and resilience of Afro-Cuban exiles, and on the Atlantic anxieties triggered by the forced exodus of free people of color. Well written and rich in descriptive detail, her book is a significant contribution to the literature on Cuba and the African Diaspora in the Caribbean in the

nineteenth century.”—Javier Villa-Flores, author of Dangerous Speech: A Social History of Blasphemy in Colonial Mexico



author/editor index

Block, Kristen

Bulthuis, Kyle T.

Burke, Diane Mutti

Criblez, Adam

Fanning, Sara

Green, Sharony

Guasco, Suzanne Cooper

Hayes, Katherine Howlett

Head, David

Koot, Christian J.

Kopelson, Heather Miyano

Milne, George Edward

Mueller, Ken S.

Ostendorf, Ann

Watson, Kelly L.

Weiner, Dana Elizabeth

Paulett, Robert

Power-Greene, Ousmane K.

Reid-Vasquez, Michele

Rupert, Linda M.

Shaw, Jenny

Tomek, Beverly C.

Vasconcellos, Colleen A.

Wheeler, Kenneth

Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean

Four Steeples over the City Streets

On Slavery’s Border

Parading Patriotism

Caribbean Crossing

Remember Me to Miss Louisa

Confronting Slavery

Slavery Before Race

Privateers of the Americas

Empire at the Periphery

Faithful Bodies

Natchez Country

Senator Benton and the People

Sounds American

Insatiable Appetites

Race and Rights

An Empire of Small Places

Against Wind and Tide

The Year of the Lash

Creolization and Contraband

Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean

Colonization and Its Discontents

Slavery, Childhood, and Abolition in Jamaica

Cultivating Regionalism

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