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.