n e w a n d r e c e n t ly p u b l i s h e d
E a r ly A m e r i c a n P l a c e s 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
university of
georgia press
“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
Remember Me to Miss Louisa
Hidden Black-White Intimacies in
Antebellum America
Sharony Green
200 pp | 21 illustrations
Cloth, $36.00 | 9780875804910
Paper, $24.95 | 9780875807232
Ebook 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 neighborhood 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 ongoing 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.
e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g | 2
university of
georgia press
Privateers of the Americas
Spanish American Privateering from the
United States in the Early Republic
David Head
224 pp. | 8 b&w photos | 3 tables | 2 maps
Paper, $24.95 | 9780820348643
Cloth, $64.95 | 9780820344003
Ebook 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 privateering, 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 international 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.
3 | e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g
Insatiable Appetites
Imperial Encounters with Cannibals
in the North Atlantic World
Kelly L. Watson
288 pp. | 7 halftones
Cloth, $40.00 | 9780814763476
Ebook 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 ‘civilization’ 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 cannibalism, 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 themselves 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.
e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g | 4
Race and Rights
Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in
the Old Northwest, 1830–1870
Dana Elizabeth Weiner
325 pp. | 6 illustrations
Paper, $28.00 | 9780875807133
Cloth, $38.00 | 9780875804576
Ebook 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 Northwest 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 contentious 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.
5 | e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g
Caribbean Crossing
African Americans and the Haitian
Emigration Movement
Sara Fanning
192 pp.
Cloth, $35.00 | 9780814764930
Ebook 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.
e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g | 6
university of
georgia press
Natchez Country
Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of
Race in French Louisiana
George E. Milne
312 pp.
Paper, $26.95 | 9780820347509
Cloth, $84.95 | 9780820347493
Ebook 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., author 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 order. 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.
7 | e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g
Four Steeples over the City Streets
Religion and Society in New York’s
Early Republic Congregations
Kyle T. Bulthuis
320 pp. | 22 halftones
Cloth, $39.00 | 9781479814275
Ebook 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 Manhattan’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.
e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g | 8
Against Wind and Tide
The African American Struggle against
the Colonization Movement
Ousmane K. Power-Greene
304 pp.
Cloth, $35.00 | 9781479823178
Ebook 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 alternative 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 history 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 Colonization 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.
9 | e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g
Faithful Bodies
Performing Religion and Race in the
Puritan Atlantic
Heather Miyano Kopelson
416 pp. | 6 maps | 16 halftones | 6 figures | 1 table
Cloth, $45.00 | 9781479805006
Ebook 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 defining 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: Bermuda, 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.
e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g | 1 0
university of
georgia press
Slavery, Childhood, and Abolition
in Jamaica, 1788–1838
Colleen A. Vasconcellos
160 pp.
Paper, $24.95 | 9780820348056
Cloth, $59.95 | 9780820348025
Ebook 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 amelioration 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. Vasconcellos 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 experience 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.
1 1 | e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g
Senator Benton and the People
Master Race Democracy on the Early
American Frontiers
Ken S. Mueller
328 pp.
Paper, $29.95 | 9780875807003
Cloth, $45.00 | 9780875804798
Ebook available
ken s. mueller received his PhD in history 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 biographies 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.
e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g | 1 2
university of
georgia press
Everyday Life in the
Early English Caribbean
Irish, Africans, and the
Construction of Difference
Jenny Shaw
256 pp. | 18 b&w photos | 1 map
Paper, $24.95 | 9780820346625
Cloth, $74.95 | 9780820345055
Ebook 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 preordained.”—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 seventeenth 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 subjects—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.
1 3 | e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g
Parading Patriotism
Independence Day Celebrations in the
Urban Midwest, 1826-1876
Adam Criblez
288 pp. | 12 illustrations
Paper, $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, transmitted 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.
e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g | 1 4
Slavery Before Race
Europeans, Africans, and Indians at
Long Island’s Sylvester Manor Plantation
1651–1884
Katherine Howlett Hayes
240 pp. | 20 halftone images | 1 table
Cloth, $30.00 | 9780814785775
Ebook 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.
“A skillful and captivating take on some of the big issues in contemporary historical and anthropological scholarship: race, community, material culture, memory, and heritage.”—Stephen W. Silliman,
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 collaboration 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 significance 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.
1 5 | e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g
Confronting Slavery
Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery
Politics in Nineteenth-Century America
Suzanne Cooper Guasco
265 pp. | 12 illus.
Paper, $28.95 | 9780875806891
Ebook 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 nineteenth-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 legalization 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 attempt 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.
e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g | 1 6
Colonization and Its Discontents
Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery
in Antebellum Pennsylvania
Beverly C. Tomek
304 pp. | 11 halftone images
Paper, $24.00 | 9780814764534
Cloth, $65.00 | 9780814783481
Ebook available
beverly c. tomek is an assistant professor of history at the University of HoustonVictoria in Victoria, Texas.
“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 antislavery movement.”—Friederike Baer, American Historical Review
Pennsylvania contained the largest concentration of early America’s abolitionist leaders and organizations, making it a necessary and illustrative stage from which to understand how national conversations 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 colonizationist 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 humanitarian 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.
1 7 | e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g
An Empire of Small Places
Mapping the Southeastern
Anglo-American Trade, 1732–1795
Robert Paulett
264 pp. | 14 b&w images
Paper, $24.95 | 9780820343471
Cloth, $69.95 | 9780820343464
university of
georgia press
robert paulett is an assistant professor of history at Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville.
“This is an important and insightful analysis of the development of colonial Augusta, the Indian trade, and the
geography of the Southeast. Paulett convincingly demonstrates 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
Creolization and Contraband
Curaçao in the Early Modern
Atlantic World
Linda M. Rupert
296 pp. | 10 b&w images | 5 maps
Paper, $24.95 | 9780820343068
Cloth, $69.95 | 9780820343051
Ebook available
university of
georgia press
linda m. rupert is an assistant professor
of history at the University of North Carolina,
Greensboro.
“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
e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g | 1 8
Empire at the Periphery
British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch
Trade, and the Development of the
British Atlantic, 1621–1713
Christian J. Koot
312 pp. | 19 images
Cloth, $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 particularly 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 Border
Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households,
1815–1865
Diane Mutti Burke
368 pp. | 16 b&w images | 2 maps
Paper, $24.95 | 9780820336831
Cloth, $69.95 | 9780820336367
Ebook available
university of
georgia press
diane mutti burke is an assistant professor of history at the University of Missouri
at Kansas City.
“On Slavery’s Border tackles two important and understudied 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
1 9 | e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g
Cultivating Regionalism
Higher Education and the Making
of the American Midwest
Kenneth 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 identity 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 interesting 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 Caribbean
Religion, Colonial Competition,
and the Politics of Profit
Kristen Block
Paper, $24.95 | 9780820338682
Cloth, $69.95 | 9780820338675
Ebook available
university of
georgia press
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 relationship 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 questions 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
e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g | 2 0
Sounds American
National Identity and the Music
Cultures of the Lower Mississippi
River Valley, 1800–1860
Ann Ostendorf
Paper, $24.95 | 9780820339764
Cloth, $69.95 | 9780820339757
Ebook available
university of
georgia press
ann ostendorf is an assistant professor of history at Gonzaga 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
The Year of the Lash
Free People of Color in Cuba and the
Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
Michele Reid-Vasquez
Paper, $24.95 | 9780820340685
Cloth, $69.95 | 9780820335759
Ebook available
university of
georgia press
michele reid-vasquez is an
assistant professor of history at Georgia
State University.
“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
2 1 | e a r ly a m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g
author/editor index
Block, Kristen
Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean
20
Bulthuis, Kyle T.
Four Steeples over the City Streets
8
Burke, Diane Mutti
On Slavery’s Border
19
Criblez, Adam
Parading Patriotism
14
Fanning, Sara
Caribbean Crossing
6
Green, Sharony
Remember Me to Miss Louisa
2
Guasco, Suzanne Cooper
Confronting Slavery
16
Hayes, Katherine Howlett
Slavery Before Race
15
Head, David
Privateers of the Americas
3
Koot, Christian J.
Empire at the Periphery
19
Kopelson, Heather Miyano
Faithful Bodies
10
Milne, George Edward
Natchez Country
7
Mueller, Ken S.
Senator Benton and the People
12
Ostendorf, Ann
Sounds American
21
Watson, Kelly L.
Insatiable Appetites
4
Weiner, Dana Elizabeth
Race and Rights
5
Paulett, Robert
An Empire of Small Places
18
Power-Greene, Ousmane K. Against Wind and Tide
9
Reid-Vasquez, Michele
The Year of the Lash
21
Rupert, Linda M.
Creolization and Contraband
18
Shaw, Jenny
Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean
13
Tomek, Beverly C.
Colonization and Its Discontents
17
Vasconcellos, Colleen A.
Slavery, Childhood, and Abolition in Jamaica
11
Wheeler, Kenneth
Cultivating Regionalism
20
to o r de r contact each participating press through their websites:
n o rt h e r n i l l i n o i s u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s
n ew yo r k u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s
www.niupress.niu.edu
www.nyupress.org
university of georgia press
university of nebraska press
www.ugapress.org
www.nebraskapress.unl.edu
www. e a r lya m e r i c a n p l a c e s . o r g
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