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New York Times Editors' Choice Winner of the Bancroft Prize Winner
of the Francis Parkman Prize Winner of the Gotham Book Prize Winner
of the New York Society Library's New York City Book Award Journal
of the American Revolution Book of the Year Winner of the David J.
Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History A riveting
Revolutionary Era drama of the first published rape trial in
American history and its long, shattering aftermath, revealing how
much has changed over two centuries--and how much has not On a
moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the
back room of a New York brothel--the kind of crime that even
victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress
Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done
before: she charged a gentleman with rape. Her accusation sparked a
raw courtroom drama and a relentless struggle for vindication that
threatened both Lanah's and her assailant's lives. The trial
exposed a predatory sexual underworld, sparked riots in the
streets, and ignited a vigorous debate about class privilege and
sexual double standards. The ongoing conflict attracted the
nation's top lawyers, including Alexander Hamilton, and shaped the
development of American law. The crime and its consequences became
a kind of parable about the power of seduction and the limits of
justice. Eventually, Lanah Sawyer did succeed in holding her
assailant accountable--but at a terrible cost to herself. Based on
rigorous historical detective work, this book takes us from a
chance encounter in the street into the sanctuaries of the city's
elite, the shadows of its brothels, and the despair of its debtors'
prison. The Sewing Girl's Tale shows that if our laws and our
culture were changed by a persistent young woman and the power of
words two hundred years ago, they can be changed again. Includes
photographs
In this sweeping analysis of colonialism and its legacies, John
Wood Sweet explores how the ongoing interaction of conquered
Indians, English settlers, and enslaved Africans in New England
produced a closely interwoven, though radically divided, society.
The coming together of these diverse peoples profoundly shaped the
character of colonial New England, the meanings of the Revolution
in the North, and the making of American democracy writ large.
Critically engaged with current debates about the dynamics of
culture, racial identity, and postcolonial politics, this
innovative and intellectually capacious work is grounded in a
remarkable array of evidence. What emerges from this analysis of
colonial and early national censuses, newspapers, diaries, letters,
court records, printed works, and visual images are the dramatic
confrontations and subtle negotiations by which Indians, Africans,
and Anglo-Americans defined their respective places in early New
England. Citizenship, as Sweet reveals, was defined in meeting
houses as well as in courthouses, in bedrooms as well as on
battlefields, in land disputes as well as on streets. Bodies
Politic reveals how the legacy of colonialism shaped the emergence
of the nineteenth-century North and continues, even to this day, to
shape all our lives.
Envisioning an English Empire brings together leading historians
and literary scholars to reframe our understanding of the history
of Jamestown and the literature of empire that emerged from it. The
founding of an English colony at Jamestown in 1607 was no isolated
incident. It was one event among many in the long development of
the North Atlantic world. Ireland, Spain, Morocco, West Africa,
Turkey, and the Native federations of North America all played a
role alongside the Virginia Company in London and English settlers
on the ground. English proponents of empire responded as much to
fears of Spanish ambitions, fantasies about discovering gold, and
dreams of easily dominating the region's Natives as they did to the
grim lessons of earlier, failed outposts in North America.
Developments in trade and technology, in diplomatic relations and
ideology, in agricultural practices and property relations were as
crucial as the self-consciously combative adventurers who initially
set sail for the Chesapeake. The collection begins by exploring the
initial encounters between the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan
Indians and the relations of both these groups with London. It goes
on to examine the international context that defined English
colonialism in this period-relations with Spain, the Turks, North
Africa, and Ireland. Finally, it turns to the ways both settlers
and Natives were transformed over the course of the seventeenth
century, considering conflicts and exchanges over food, property,
slavery, and colonial identity. What results is a multifaceted view
of the history of Jamestown up to the time of Bacon's Rebellion and
its aftermath. The writings of Captain John Smith, the experience
of Powhatans in London, the letters home of a disappointed
indentured servant, the Moroccans, Turks, and Indians of the
English stage, the ethnographic texts of early explorers, and many
other phenomena all come into focus as examples of the envisioning
of a nascent empire and the Atlantic world in which it found a
hold.
In "Biography and the Black Atlantic," leading historians in the
field of Atlantic studies examine the biographies and
autobiographies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
African-descended people and reflect on the opportunities and
limitations these life stories present to studies of slavery and
the African diaspora. The essays remind us that historical
developments like slavery and empire-building were mostly
experienced and shaped by men and women outside of the elite
political, economic, and military groups to which historians often
turn as sources.Despite the scarcity of written records and other
methodological challenges, the contributors to "Biography and the
Black Atlantic" have pieced together vivid glimpses into lives of
remarkable, through previously unknown, enslaved and formerly
enslaved people who moved, struggled, and endured in different
parts of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. From the woman of Fulani
origin who made her way from Revolutionary Haiti to Louisiana to
the free black American who sailed for Liberia and the former slave
from Brazil who became a major slave trader in Angola, these
stories render the Atlantic world as a densely and sometimes
unpredictably interconnected sphere. "Biography and the Black
Atlantic" demonstrates the power of individual stories to
illuminate history: though the life histories recounted here often
involved extraordinary achievement and survival against the odds,
they also portray the struggle for self-determination and community
in the midst of alienation that lies at the heart of the modern
condition.Contributors: James T. Campbell, Vincent Carretta,
Roquinaldo Ferreira, Jean-Michel Hebrard, Martin Klein, Lloyd S.
Kramer, Sheryl Kroen, Jane Landers, Lisa A. Lindsay, Joseph C.
Miller, Cassandra Pybus, Joao Jose Reis, Rebecca J. Scott, Jon
Sensbach, John Wood Sweet.
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