What is household government? To the vast majority of those living in America from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century it was the government. The head of a household, invariably an adult male, had authority over the property, labor, and mobility of not only his minor children but also his wife, servants, slaves, and the occasional debtors, indigents, or orphans the county paid him to board in the absence of institutional facilities.

A History of Household Government in America tells the story of the seldom noted expansion and then dramatic contraction in household authority and the effects these changes had on the governmental system. The disintegration of household powers during the mid-nineteenth century--the household's "civil war"--is much more central to what makes that period seem modern than industrialization or urbanization.

Carole Shammas offers new explanations for why the American household head became such an early victim of household egalitarianism. Previous theories involving the frontier or the Revolution have ignored other factors unique to the American household system such as testamentary freedom, weak lineage controls, and the lack of an established church, all of which left the head vulnerable to challenges by dependents. These factors also affected the development of social services: In the United States, public and private welfare agencies originated largely out of concerns about the adequacy of household management and discipline. Religious rivalries eventually forced a partial return to household solutions through a welfare state system. That history helps explain why even today any departure from heterosexual two-parent family units continues to be viewed as dysfunctional by a significant portion of the population.

Was the British Atlantic shaped more by imperial rivalries or by the actions of subnational groups with a variety of economic, social, and religious agendas? The Creation of the British Atlantic World analyzes the inter-relationship between these competing explanations for the development of the British Atlantic by examining migration patterns on both the macro and micro level. It also scrutinizes the roles played by trade, religion, ethnicity, and class in linking Atlantic borders and the increasingly complicated legal, intellectual and emotional relationship between the British sovereign and colonial charter holders. Its contributors include: Joyce E. Chaplin, John E. Crowley, David Barry Gaspar, April Lee Hatfield, James Horn, Ray A. Kea, Elizabeth Mancke, Philip D. Morgan, William M. Offutt, Robert Olwell, Carole Shammas, Wolfgang Splitter, Mark L. Thompson, Karin Wulf, and, Avihu Zakai.

While scholars of traditional imperial history see the formation of the larger British Atlantic world as a consequence of competing European powers' efforts at nation-building, Atlantic historians see the transatlantic empire shaped more by the motives of a wide variety of subnational groups. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas have compiled a volume that reflects these different viewpoints concerning the transatlantic experience during Britain's rise to world dominance between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the book's opening chapters, contributors consider the effect of transatlantic emigration, discussing European and African migration and slave trade; the enslavement of Native American peoples; and the ways individuals adapted their national and religious identities in a world of expanding cultural influences. The second section addresses the roles played by trade, religion, ethnicity, and class in linking the Atlantic borders, with essays examining how mariners circulated political and religious news along with trade goods; how British common law supplanted the diverse legal systems of the early colonies; and how Protestant leaders in the colonies challenged the theological assumptions of their European contemporaries. The chapters in the final section address the increasingly complicated legal relationships between the British sovereign and colonial charterholders; the simultaneous establishment of a British colonial government in East Florida and the Royal Gardens of Kew; the popularity of imperial landscape art in eighteenth-century Britain; and the British roots of Pennsylvania Quakers.

"The Creation of the British Atlantic World" provides insight into the competing forces that forged the Atlantic world as well as the reciprocal relationships between the growing British Empire and the individuals, groups, and subnations within that empire.