In early America, traditional commercial interaction revolved around an entity known as the general store. Unfortunately, most of these elusive small-town shops disappeared from our society without leaving business-related documents behind for scholars to analyze. This gap in the historical knowledge of America has made it difficult to understand the nature of the networks and trade relationships that existed between cities and the surrounding countryside at the time.

Samuel Rex, however, left behind a vastly different legacy. A country storekeeper who operated out of Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Rex left a surprising array of documents exposing just how he ran his business. In this book, Diane Wenger analyzes the part Rex and others like him played in the overall commercial structure of the Atlantic region.

While Wenger's book has a strong foundation as a work of local history, it draws conclusions with much broader historical implications. The rich set of documents that Samuel Rex left behind provides a means for contesting the established model of how early American commerce functioned, replacing it with a more fine-grained picture of a society in which market forces and community interests could peacefully coexist.

Owen Wister is known to most Americans as the creator of the heroic cowboy in The Virginian (1902). Despite his success as a Western novelist, Wister's failure to write about his native city of Philadelphia has been lamented by many for the loss of a literary "might-have-been." If only, sighed Wister's contemporary Elizabeth Robins Pennell in 1914, the novelist could understand that Philadelphia was as good a subject as the Wild West. Hence the surprise when James Butler uncovered a substantial fragment of a Philadelphia novel, which Wister intended to call Romney. Here, published for the first time, is the complete fragment of Romney together with two of his other unpublished Philadelphia works.

Even in its incomplete state--nearly fifty thousand words--Romney is Wister's longest piece of fiction after The Virginian and Lady Baltimore. Writing at the express command of his friend Theodore Roosevelt, Wister set Romney in Philadelphia (called Monopolis in the novel) during the 1880s, when, as he saw it, the city was passing from the old to a new order. The hero of the story, Romney, is a man of "no social position" who nonetheless rises to the top because he has superior ability. It is thus a novel about the possibilities for meaningful social change in a democracy. Although, alas, the story breaks off before the birth of Romney, Wister gives us much to savor in the existing thirteen chapters. We are treated to delightful scenes at the Bryn Mawr train station, the Bellevue Hotel, and Independence Square, which yield brilliant insights into life on the Main Line, the power of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the insidious effects of political corruption.

Wister's acute analysis in Romney of what differentiates Philadelphia and Boston upper classes is remarkably similar to, but anticipates by more than half a century, the classic study by E. Digby Baltzell in Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (1979). Like Baltzell, Wister analyzes the urban aristocracy of Boston and Philadelphia, finding in Boston a Puritan drive for achievement and civic service but in Philadelphia a Quaker preference for toleration and moderation, all too often leading to acquiescence and stagnation.

Romney is undoubtedly the best fictional portrayal of "Gilded Age" Philadelphia, brilliantly capturing Wister's vision of old-money, aristocratic society gasping its last before the onrushing vulgarity of the nouveaux riches. It is a novel of manners that does for Philadelphia what Edith Wharton and John Marquand have done for New York and Boston.

This massive reference work is a useful tool for researching and discovering the leaders of the American Revolution. It covers both well-known and obscure figures from a variety of backgrounds including soldiers, politicians, plantation owners, farmers, and more. Information is included for officers of the Continental Army, Navy, and Marines; leaders of state militias, for whom much information has been previously inaccessible; the framers and signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; diplomats and governors; and, importantly, the women who were instrumental during the Revolution. Entries describe each individual from birth to death and provide genealogical information when available.

At the successful conclusion of the Revolutionary War, America could look back with pride on the accomplishments of the preceding three decades and look forward with excitement and trepidation to the challenges of shaping its new government. It was at this time that influential groups and people emerged and set the course for the young nation. "Shaping of America, 1783-1815" chronicles and illustrates this important period when America forged its place at home and on the international stage.

The two "Biographies "volumes focus on key figures of the time, with significant attention given to minorities and women.

This pioneering study confronts three main questions about this era in Mexico City: Were women's roles as narrow and unimportant as has been assumed? To what extent were women dominated by men? Can significant differences be found between younger and older women, married and single, upper class and lower class?

Although much has been written about the Old Northwest, "The Boundaries Between Us" fills a void in this historical literature by examining the interaction between Euro-Americans and native peoples, and their struggles to gain control of the region and its vast resources. Comprised of twelve original essays, "The Boundaries Between Us" formulates a comprehensive perspective on the history and significance of the contest for control of the Old Northwest. The essays examine the sociocultural contexts in which natives and newcomers lived, traded, negotiated, interacted, and fought, delineating the articulations of power and possibility, difference and identity, violence and war that shaped the struggle. The essays do not attempt to present a unified interpretation but, rather, focus on both specific and general topics, revisit and reinterpret well-known events, and underscore how cultural, political, and ideological antagonisms divided the native inhabitants from the newcomers. Together, these thoughtful analyses offer a broad historical perspective on nearly a century of contact, interaction, conflict, and displacement. This volume promises to be of great importance to unfolding discussions in the history of early America, the frontier, and cultural interaction.

Search the extensive U - X - L "World Religions Reference Library" with ease with this cumulative index to the entire set.

At the successful conclusion of the Revolutionary War, America could look back with pride on the accomplishments of the preceding three decades and look forward with excitement and trepidation to the challenges of shaping its new government. It was at this time that influential groups and people emerged and set the course for the young nation. "Shaping of America, 1783-1815" chronicles and illustrates this important period when America forged its place at home and on the international stage.

The "Primary Sources" volume uses documents, diaries, letters, speeches and other sources to explain large events as well as daily life of ordinary citizens.

At the Pilgrim's first Thanksgiving in 1621, chief among the honored guests was Massasoit, the sachem of the Wampanoag. Fifty-five years later, in 1676, colonial soldiers would walk through Plymouth with their horrible spoils of war: the severed head of Massasoits' son, King Philip, on a stake. Philip had just been shot at the end of a bloody conflict in which at least 10 percent of the colonists had been killed and half their towns destroyed. The Native Americans suffered even more in their pivotal struggle against the English. Less than a generation after King Philip's death, devastated by disease and famine and thousands slain or sold into slavery, the native peoples of New England were all but gone. Three hundred years later, their fight for freedom is all but erased from the history books.

King Philip's Indian War provides insight into a dark and formative period of America's past, being both an in-depth history and a guide to the sites where the great ambushes, raids, and bloody battles took place. What the colonists learned from the native warriors in the swamps and woods of New England would prove invaluable in their own fight for freedom 100 years later, and the colonist's retaliation for the war would become the model for how Americans would treat Native Americans for the next three centuries.

Hurricanes created unique challenges for colonists in the British Greater Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These storms were entirely new to European settlers and quickly became the most feared part of their physical environment, destroying staple crops and provisions, leveling plantations and towns, disrupting shipping and trade, and resulting in major economic losses for planters and widespread privation for slaves. Matthew Mulcahy examines how colonists made sense of hurricanes, how they recovered from them, and the role of the storms in shaping the development of the region's colonial settlements.

"Path-breaking and original... Mulcahy has creatively exploited the paper trails left by major seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hurricanes as probes into changing social relations in the British Caribbean." -- American Historical Review

"A rich and engaging study. Readers of Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean will add hurricanes to the list of characteristics that define the early modern Caribbean: sugar, slavery, disease, war." -- William and Mary Quarterly

"Mulcahy's vivid descriptions of Caribbean hurricanes, their impact on colonial economic and social life, and their effects on the larger Atlantic world is a most valuable contribution to the recent number of books on disasters in history." -- Environmental History

"This book will interest not only scholars interested in how past groups have addressed the challenges of new environmental phenomena but also those interested in how people have learned or failed to learn from these events and how many of the fears and misconceptions of the past still shape and distort our viewsof disasters today." -- Hispanic American Historical Review

Matthew Mulcahy is an associate professor and chair of the History Department at Loyola College in Maryland.

What can body measurements tell us about living standards in the past? In this collection of essays on height and weight data from eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, North America, and Asia, fourteen distinguished scholars explore the relation between physical size, economic development, and standard of living among various socioeconomic groups. Analyzing differences in physical stature by social group, gender, age, provenance, and date and place of birth, these essays illuminate urban and rural differences in well-being, explore the effects of market integration on previously agricultural societies, contrast the experiences of several segments of society, and explain the proximate causes of downturns and upswings in well-being. Particularly intriguing is the researchers' conclusion that the environment of the New World during this period was far more propitious than that of Europe, based on data showing that European aristocrats were in worse health than even the poorest members of American society. The most comprehensive and detailed gathering of this kind of anthropometric research to date, this book will be vital for demographers, economists, historians, physical anthropologists, sociologists, and human biologists.

"Fills a void in historical studies on American Indians. . . . A richly documented narrative that will surprise many readers with its revelations of the colonial period." —Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Traditionally, historians have thought of American society as a transplantation of European culture to a new continent—a "virgin land." In this important and disturbing book, Francis Jennings examines the real history of the relationships between Europeans and Indians in what is ordinarily called the colonial period of United States history. From the Indian viewpoint, it was the period of the invasion of America.

In Mr. Jennings' view, the American land during the period of discovery and settlement was more like a widow than a virgin. "Europeans did not find wilderness here," he writes, "rather, however involuntarity, they made one. . . . The so-called settlement of America was a resettlement, a reoccupation of a land made waste by the diseases and demoralization introduced by newcomers."

Basing his interpretations on an enormous amount of hitherto unused ethnographical and anthropological literature, Mr. Jennings summarizes what is now known about the Atlantic Coast Indians encountered by Europeans. He then concetrates on a single region, New England, as an illustrative case study. The result is a radically revisionist interpretation of Puritan history (both as the Puritans wrote and lived it) in relation to the aboriginal population.

At the successful conclusion of the Revolutionary War, America could look back with pride on the accomplishments of the preceding three decades and look forward with excitement and trepidation to the challenges of shaping its new government. It was at this time that influential groups and people emerged and set the course for the young nation. "Shaping of America, 1783-1815" chronicles and illustrates this important period when America forged its place at home and on the international stage.

The "Almanac" volume describes and interprets the economic, religious and political forces at play.