In January of 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense; the book inflamed its readers and ignited the American Revolution. In truth the fires of dissent were already smoldering, but Paine's impassioned writing gave focus to the many disparate voices and united a country. One cannot over estimate the importance of this book in shaping the destiny of United States of America, as it was here that our constitutional form of government was first suggested.

A controversial figure in his own day (1474-1566), Las Casas might well be the New World's first political activist. Championing the cause of the Indians in "Overseas Spain," Las Casas threw his heart, soul, and fortune into a highly volatile movement. He became the "Protector of the Indians" and devoted fifty years to the destruction of Indian slavery. Friede and Keen's collection of essays increases the understanding of the man and his work by presenting English translations of the findings of leading modern European and Latin American specialists on Las Casas.

The Northwood Conspiracy is one that was originated at the highest levels of the United States Government. From the time of the American Revolution until the latest war in Iraq, there is a hidden cabal that has orchestrated our involvement in every war in which American troops have been deployed. Their purpose-amassing undreamed of fortunes on the blood of brave American soldiers.

Before Benedict Arnold was branded a traitor, he was one of the colonies' most valuable leaders. In September 1775, eleven hundred soldiers boarded ships in Massachusetts, bound for the Maine wilderness. They had volunteered for a secret mission, under Arnold's command to march and paddle nearly two hundred miles and seize British Quebec. Before they reached the Canadian border, hundreds died, a hurricane destroyed canoes and equipment and many deserted. In the midst of a howling blizzard, the remaining troops attacked Quebec and almost took Canada from the British simultaneously weakening the British hand against Washington. With the enigmatic Benedict Arnold at its center, Tom Desjardin has written one of the great American adventure stories.

A dual portrait of robber baron John Brown and his social reformist Quaker brother, Moses, traces their lives in pre-revolutionary war America and provides coverage of their political partnership, disparate views on slavery, and co-founding of Brown University.

In The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer uncovers the lost world of American women's classicism during its glory days from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Overturning the widely held belief that classical learning and political ideals were relevant only to men, she follows the lives of four generations of American women through their diaries, letters, books, needlework, and drawings, demonstrating how classicism was at the center of their experience as mothers, daughters, and wives. Importantly, she pays equal attention to women from the North and from the South, and to the ways that classicism shaped the lives of black women in slavery and freedom.

In a strikingly innovative use of both texts and material culture, Winterer exposes the neoclassical world of furnishings, art, and fashion created in part through networks dominated by elite women. Many of these women were at the center of the national experience. Here readers will find Abigail Adams, teaching her children Latin and signing her letters as Portia, the wife of the Roman senator Brutus; the Massachusetts slave Phillis Wheatley, writing poems in imitation of her favorite books, Alexander Pope's Iliad and Odyssey; Dolley Madison, giving advice on Greek taste and style to the U.S. Capitol's architect, Benjamin Latrobe; and the abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child, who showed Americans that modern slavery had its roots in the slave societies of Greece and Rome.

Thoroughly embedded in the major ideas and events of the time the American Revolution, slavery and abolitionism, the rise of a consumer society this original book is a major contribution to American cultural and intellectual history."

Now in paperback, this first full length treatment of the Revolutionary War battle recounts British general Charles Grey's brutal attack on Anthony Wayne's division of 1,500 Continentals in September 1777.

In early America, every sound had a living, wilful force at its source. Sometimes these forces were not human or even visible. In this innovative work of cultural history, Richard Cullen Rath recreates in rich detail a world remote from our own, one in which sounds were charged with meaning and power. human-made sounds other than language were central to the lives of the inhabitants of colonial America. Rath considers the multiple soundscapes shaped by European Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans from 1600 to 1770, and particularly the methods that people used to interpret and express their beliefs about sound. In the process he shows how sound shaped identities, bonded communities, and underscored - or undermined - the power of authorities. the highly literate New England Puritans - reminds us of a time before a world dominated by the visual, a young country where hearing was a more crucial part of living.

Between 1690 and 1760, close to two thousand New Englanders were taken captive by French Canadians and their Native American allies during five intercolonial wars. Puritan propagandists reacted by evoking the vulnerability of New England's homes and Protestant faith with images of captive women in sexual peril, a titillating vision only amplified in popular Victorian and modern portrayals of female captives as stock literary figures. In The Captors' Narrative, William Henry Foster demonstrates that the majority of Anglo-American captives taken along the New England frontier were, in fact, men.

Free French Canadian women (both secular and monastic) routinely became the men's captors and benefited from their labor when they were brought to New France. In testimonials written by returning male captives, Foster finds fascinating instances of protest and resistance against the female authority that Protestant New England deemed "illegitimate." In the tales of Catholic women captors, Foster uncovers evidence that the control of male captive domestic labor expanded the public roles of the women in charge. The author painstakingly reconstructs the lived experience of both captors and captives to show that captivity was always intertwined with gender struggles. The Captors' Narrative provides a novel perspective on the struggles over female authority pervasive in the early modern Atlantic world.

"It was Rebecca's son, Thomas, who first realized the victim's identity. His eyes were drawn to the victim's head, and aided by the flickering light of a candle, he 'clapt his hands and cryed out, Oh Lord, it is my mother.' James Moills, a servant of Cornell . . . described Rebecca 'lying on the floore, with fire about Her, from her Lower parts neare to the Armepits.' He recognized her only 'by her shoes.'" from Killed Strangely

On a winter's evening in 1673, tragedy descended on the respectable Rhode Island household of Thomas Cornell. His 73-year-old mother, Rebecca, was found close to her bedroom's large fireplace, dead and badly burned. The legal owner of the Cornells' hundred acres along Narragansett Bay, Rebecca shared her home with Thomas and his family, a servant, and a lodger. A coroner's panel initially declared her death "an Unhappie Accident," but before summer arrived, a dark web of events rumors of domestic abuse, allusions to witchcraft, even the testimony of Rebecca's ghost through her brother resulted in Thomas's trial for matricide.

Such were the ambiguities of the case that others would be tried for the murder as well. Rebecca is a direct ancestor of Cornell University's founder, Ezra Cornell. Elaine Forman Crane tells the compelling story of Rebecca's death and its aftermath, vividly depicting the world in which she lived. That world included a legal system where jurors were expected to be familiar with the defendant and case before the trial even began. Rebecca's strange death was an event of cataclysmic proportions, affecting not only her own community, but neighboring towns as well.

The documents from Thomas's trial provide a rare glimpse into seventeenth-century life. Crane writes, "Instead of the harmony and respect that sermon literature, laws, and a hierarchical/patriarchal society attempted to impose, evidence illustrates filial insolence, generational conflict, disrespect toward the elderly, power plays between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, and] adult dependence on (and resentment of) aging parents who clung to purse strings." Yet even at a distance of more than three hundred years, Rebecca Cornell's story is poignantly familiar. Her complaints of domestic abuse, Crane says, went largely unheeded by friends and neighbors until, at last, their complacency was shattered by her terrible death."

The Punished Self describes enslavement in the American South during the eighteenth century as a systematic assault on Blacks' sense of self. Alex Bontemps focuses on slavery's effects on the slaves' framework of self-awareness and understanding. Whites wanted Blacks to act out the role "Negro" and Blacks faced a basic dilemma of identity: how to retain an individualized sense of self under the incredible pressure to be Negro? Bontemps addresses this dynamic in The Punished Self.

The first part of The Punished Self reveals how patterns of objectification were reinforced by written and visual representations of enslavement. The second examines how captive Africans were forced to accept a new identity and the expectations and behavioral requirements it symbolized. Part 3 defines and illustrates the tensions inherent in slaves' being Negro in order to survive.

Bontemps offers fresh interpretations of runaway slave ads and portraits. Such views of black people expressing themselves are missing entirely from other historical sources. This book's revelations include many such original examples of the survival of the individual in the face of enslavement.

Possible Pasts represents a landmark in early American studies, bringing to that field the theoretical richness and innovative potential of the scholarship on colonial discourse and postcolonial theory. Drawing on the methods and interpretive insights of history, anthropology, history of art, folklore, and textual analysis, its authors explore the cultural processes by which individuals and societies become colonial. Rather than define early America in terms of conventional geographical, chronological, or subdisciplinary boundaries, their essays span landscapes from New England to Peru, time periods from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, and topics from religion to race and novels to nationalism.

In his introduction Robert Blair St. George offers an overview of the genealogy of ideas and key terms appearing in the book. Part I then challenges readers to rethink the meaning of "early America" and its relation to postcolonial theory. In Part II essays explore how both Europeans and native peoples viewed such concepts as dissent, witchcraft, family piety, and race. The construction of individual identity and agency in Philadelphia is the focus of Part III. Finally, Part IV considers the ways in which political authority and gendered resistance were established in early America.

Assembles more than forty speeches, lectures, and essays critical to the abolitionist crusade. Features William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. "An invaluable resource to students, scholars, and general readers alike."—Amazon.com.

Under the leadership of Samuel Adams, patriot propagandists deliberately and conscientiously kept the issue of slavery off the agenda as goals for freedom were set for the American Revolution.

By comparing coverage in the publications of the patriot press with those of the moderate colonial press, this book finds that the patriots avoided, misinterpreted, or distorted news reports on blacks and slaves, even in the face of a vigorous antislavery movement. The Boston Gazette, the most important newspaper of the Revolution, was chief among the periodicals that dodged or excluded abolition. The author of this study shows that The Gazette misled its readers about the notable Somerset decision that led to abolition in Great Britain. She notes also that The Gazette excluded antislavery essays, even from patriots who supported abolition. No petitions written by Boston slaves were published, nor were any writings by the black poet Phillis Wheatley. The Gazette also manipulated the racial identity of Crispus Attucks, the first casualty in the Revolution. When using the word slavery, The Gazette took care to focus it not upon abolition but upon Great Britain's enslavement of its American colonies.

Since propaganda on behalf of the Revolution reached a high level of sophistication, and since Boston can be considered the foundry of Revolutionary propaganda, the author writes that the omission of abolition from its agenda cannot be considered as accidental but as intentional.

By the time the Revolution began, white attitudes toward blacks were firmly fixed, and these persisted long after American independence had been achieved. In Boston, notions of virtue and vigilance were shown to be negatively embodied in black colonists. These devil's imps were long represented in blackface in Boston's annual Pope Day parade.

Although the leaders of the Revolution did not articulate a national vision on abolition, the colonial antislavery movement was able to achieve a degree of success but only in drives through the individual colonies.

Patricia Bradley is the former director of the American Studies program at Temple University and is currently Chair of the Temple University Department of Journalism, Public Relations, and Advertising.

Praised as "a lively and engaging invitation to early American history" (Ian K. Steele, author of Warpaths) and "a valuable addition to the literature of the American Iliad" (James M. McPherson, bestselling author of Battle Cry of Freedom), the In Their Own Words series takes readers into the hearts and minds of those who lived history.

In this latest--and final--addition to the series, historian T.J. Stiles brings to life in vivid detail the dramatic events of the Revolutionary War, skillfully interweaving his fast-paced narrative with the words of those who fought for our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. From the first rumblings of rebellion to the full-throated call-to-arms, from the provocative debates to the battlefields, this impressive volume includes first-hand stories and commentaries from our Founding Fathers--John Adams, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and Thomas Paine--as well as American and British soldiers.

"He was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town's seventeenth-century history." So begins Donna Merwick's fascinating tale of a Dutch notary who ended his life in his adopted community of Albany. In a major feat of historical reconstruction, she introduces us to Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam and the long-forgotten world he inhabited in Holland's North American colony. Her powerful narrative will make readers care for this quiet and studious man, an "ordinary" settler for whom the clash of empires brought tragedy.

Stephen Sayre's career was far more remarkable for its diversity than for its success. At one time or another, Sayre was a soldier, merchant, banker, shipbuilder, politician, speculator, propagandist, diplomat, and inventor. He was also considered by some, as John Alden relates, ""a wicked schemer, a fool, a madman, an embezzler, and a traitor."" Following the dizzying course of Sayre's career, this biography reveals a vast panorama of life, both high and low, in the era of the American Revolution. Sayre frequented the polite society of England, Europe, and New York; twice married into a wealthy English family; and was elected for a term as sheriff of London. He also consorted with the actress Sophia Baddeley, one of the most notorious women of the time; was arrested and confined in the Tower of London for allegedly plotting to kidnap the king; and spent twenty months in a debtors' prison. If there was one constant in Sayre's life, it was his involvement in revolutionary politics. He was a fearless advocate of colonial rights in England, and after the outbreak of war in America he traveled to Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia to seek support for the revolution. Years later, he was an enthusiastic supporter of France's revolution. Working as an agent for the new French regime, he tried to secure it financial aid, promoted a scheme to purchase American weapons for the French army, argued for a French attack on Spanish Louisiana, and was active in diplomatic efforts to stave off war between Britain and France. Eventually, the turmoil of events in Paris drove away even as devoted a supporter as Sayre. He returned to America, where he continued to argue the cause of the French Revolution and quickly gained a reputation as an extremist. Engaging in the politics of the new American republic, Sayre assailed conservative forces in the nation, in particular the emerging Federalist party. He devoted much of his energy in later years to a persistent but unrewarded attempt to secure a post within the federal government and to somewhat more successful attempts to obtain payment for his past services to his country. In time he moved to Virginia to live with his stepson; he died there in 1818. From the beginning of his career, Stephen Sayre aspired to wealth, social position, and political influence. At various points in his life he achieved each of these goals, but finally they all eluded him. An outstanding patriot, Sayre was far too erratic in his behavior, far too mercurial a personality ever to be counted as a father of his country. He is better remembered as a kind of principled rogue, an adventurer in the service of his own ambitions and those of his country.

Much has been written about the "southern lady", that pervasive and enduring icon of antebellum regional identity. But how did the lady get on her pedestal -- and were the lives of white southern women always so different from those of their northern contemporaries? In her ambitious new book, Cynthia A. Kierner charts the evolution of the lives of white southern women through the colonial, revolutionary, and early republican eras. Using the lady on her pedestal as the end -- rather than the beginning -- of her story, she shows how gentility, republican political ideals, and evangelical religion successively altered southern gender ideals and thereby forced women to reshape their public roles. Kierner concludes that southern women continually renegotiated their access to the public sphere -- and that even the emergence of the frail and submissive lady as icon did not obliterate women's public role.

Kierner draws on a strong overall command of early American and women's history and adds to it research in letters, diaries, newspapers, secular and religious periodicals, travelers' accounts, etiquette manuals, and cookery books. Focusing on the issues of work, education, and access to the public sphere, she explores the evolution of southern gender ideals in an important transitional era. Specifically, she asks what kinds of changes occurred in women's relation to the public sphere from 1700 to 1835. In answering this major question, she makes important links and comparisons, across both time and region, and creates a chronology of social and intellectual change that addresses many key questions in the history of women, the South, and early America.

The slave societies of the American colonies were quite different from the "Old South" of the early-nineteenth-century United States. In this engaging study of a colonial older South, Robert Olwell analyzes the structures and internal dynamics of a world in which both masters and slaves were also imperial subjects. While slavery was peculiar within a democratic republic, it was an integral and seldom questioned part of the eighteenth-century British empire.Olwell examines the complex relations among masters, slaves, metropolitan institutions, officials, and ideas in the South Carolina low country from the end of the Stono Rebellion through the chaos of the American Revolution. He details the interstices of power and resistance in four key sites of the colonial social order: the criminal law and the slave court; conversion and communion in the established church; market relations and the marketplace; and patriarchy and the plantation great house. Olwell shows how South Carolina's status as a colony influenced the development of slavery and also how the presence of slavery altered English ideas and institutions within a colonial setting. Masters, Slaves, and Subjects is a pathbreaking examination of the workings of American slavery within the context of America's colonial history.

Among the thousands of political refugees who flooded into the United States during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, none had a greater impact On the early republic than the United Irishmen. They were, according to one Federalist, "the most God-provoking Democrats on this side of Hell". "Every United Irishman", insisted another, "ought to be hunted from the country, as much as a wolf or a tyger". David A. Wilson's lively book is the first to focus specifically on the experiences, attitudes, and ideas of the United Irishmen in the United States.

Wilson argues that America served a powerful symbolic and psychological function for the United Irishmen as a place of wish-fulfillment, where the broken dreams of the failed Irish revolution could be realized. The United Irishmen established themselves on the radical wing of the Republican Party, and contributed to Jefferson's "second American Revolution" of 1800; John Adams counted them among the "foreigners and degraded characters" whom he blamed for his defeat.

After Jefferson's victory, the United Irishmen set out to destroy the Federalists and democratize the Republicans. Some of them believed that their work was preparing the way for the millennium in America. Convinced that the example of America could ultimately inspire the movement for a democratic republic back home, they never lost sight of the struggle for Irish independence. It was the United Irishmen, writes Wilson, who originated the persistent and powerful tradition of Irish-American nationalism.

"Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the fourteenth day of the present month." With these words to the assembled members of the Senate and House of Representatives on April 30, 1789, George Washington inaugurated the American experiment. It was a momentous occasion and an immensely important moment for the nation. Never before had a people dared to invent a system of government quite like the one that Washington was preparing to lead, and the tensions between hope and skepticism ran high. In this book, distinguished scholar of early America Stephen Howard Browne chronicles the efforts of the first president of the United States of America to unite the nation through ceremony, celebrations, and oratory. The story follows Washington on his journey from Mount Vernon to the site of the inauguration in Manhattan, recounting the festivities-speeches, parades, dances, music, food, and flag-waving-that greeted the president-elect along the way. Considering the persuasive power of this procession, Browne captures in detail the pageantry, anxiety, and spirit of the nation to arrive at a more nuanced and richly textured perspective on what it took to launch the modern republican state. Compellingly written and artfully argued, The First Inauguration tells the story of the early republic-and of a president who, by his words and comportment, provides a model of leadership and democratic governance for today.

Reissued in new paperback format and design

"In hard, tight, and exact language, disciplined by close reasoning and close documentation, and seasoned with a sharp sense of character and drama, Hiller B. Zobel has written a definitive account. . . . Full of gripping detail, a good deal of myth-shattering, and some discriminating reappraisals." -Arthur B. Tourtellot, author of Lexington and Concord, in the New York Times Book Review

"Make[s] eighteenth-century courtroom scenes crackle with excitement."-Yale Review

"[Melvoin] writes with both grace and precision. . . . A terrific tale of frontier adventure." —William Pencak, American Historical Review

"[An] accessible, readable, and appealing study of New England's most famous frontier town. . . . One of the clearest, most persuasive analyses to date of how the relations between Indian tribes (and particularly inter-Indian warfare) influenced the processes of settlement in colonial America. . . . What this splendid book does is enable us to understand, in detail, the harrowing, extraordinary processes by which Deerfield—and by extension Lancaster, Haverhill, and many other places like it—became an 'ordinary' New England town at last. . . . Melvoin's narrative achieves the kind of compelling quality that Parkman managed in A Half-Century of Conflict; yet, it is in every sense analytically superior to that classic account." —Fred Anderson, Western Historical Quarterly

"An outstanding study that carefully examines the impact of religion, social class, and intertribal and international rivalry on a frontier community." —Choice

"In its frontier phase Deerfild was multicultural, decidedly nonindividualistic, and a creative blend of tradition and innovation. Throughout this provocative reinterpretation, Melvoin maintains a lively, dramatic, highly readable narrative. . . . [Points] the way toward a more dynamic view of both community and frontier." —Neal Salisbury, William and Mary Quarterly