Results by title
212 books match the query 'Colonial Period (1600-1775)' and 13 start with c
COURTS AND COMMERCE
GENDER, LAW, AND THE MARKET ECONOMY IN COLONIAL NEW YORKDeborah A. Rosen
The Ohio State University Press, 1997
Illuminates the legal engine behind colonial America’s market economy, revealing how law and commerce intertwined to sideline women's participation and lay the groundwork for industrial capitalism.
In Courts and Commerce, Deborah A. Rosen offers a fresh, incisive look at the economic and legal foundations of colonial New York. Drawing on a wide array of 18th-century sources—probate inventories, court records, petitions, and more—Rosen uncovers how law and commerce intertwined to shape a market economy long before the rise of industrial capitalism.
Rosen challenges the romanticized view of colonial America as a bastion of communal values. Instead, she reveals a society already driven by arm’s-length transactions and legal mechanisms that empowered men to expand their economic reach while systematically limiting women’s participation. Her analysis spans both urban and rural settings, highlighting regional contrasts and the gendered impact of legal structures.
This book pushes back against the idea that the nineteenth century marked a sudden economic transformation. Rosen shows that many of the legal and economic patterns associated with industrialization were already in motion a century earlier. Engaging and deeply researched, Courts and Commerce is essential reading for scholars of colonial history, legal and economic development, and gender studies. It reframes our understanding of early American life—and the roots of inequality in the modern economy.
Captive Histories
English, French, and Native Narratives of the 1704 Deerfield RaidEvan Haefeli
University of Massachusetts Press, 2006
This volume draws together an unusually rich body of original sources that tell the story of the 1704 French and Indian attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts, from different vantage points. Texts range from one of the most famous early American captivity narratives, John Williams's The Redeemed Captive, to the records of French soldiers and clerics, to little-known Abenaki and Mohawk stories of the raid that emerged out of their communities' oral traditions. Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney provide a general introduction, extensive annotations, and headnotes to each text.
Although the oft-reprinted Redeemed Captive stands at the core of this collection, it is juxtaposed to less familiar accounts of captivity composed by other Deerfield residents: Quentin Stockwell, Daniel Belding, Joseph Petty, Joseph Kellogg, and the teenaged Stephen Williams. Presented in their original form, before clerical editors revised and embellished their content to highlight religious themes, these stories challenge long-standing assumptions about classic Puritan captivity narratives.
The inclusion of three Abenaki and Mohawk narratives of the Deerfield raid is equally noteworthy, offering a rare opportunity not only to compare captors' and captives' accounts of the same experiences, but to do so with reference to different Native oral traditions. Similarly, the memoirs of French military officers and an excerpt from the Jesuit Relations illuminate the motivations behind the attack and offer fresh insights into the complexities of French-Indian alliances.
Taken together, the stories collected in this volume, framed by the editors' introduction and the assessments of two Native scholars, Taiaiake Alfred and Marge Bruchac, allow readers to reconstruct the history of the Deerfield raid from multiple points of view and, in so doing, to explore the interplay of culture and memory that shapes our understanding of the past.
Cavalry of the American Revolution
Jim Piecuch
Westholme Publishing, 2012
Nine Historians and Writers Investigate the Role of Cavalry in the War for Independence
From the bitterly contested no-man’s-land between American and British lines in New York and New Jersey to the scorching pine forests of the South, the cavalry of both armies fought valiantly throughout the American Revolution. This volume explores several aspects of cavalry’s role in the war, which has often been overlooked in general histories. The topics covered include the development of the Continental Army’s cavalry arm, European influences on American cavalry training and tactics, accounts of several important cavalry raids and battles, and histories of mounted units such as the Continental Light Dragoons, American rangers in the South Carolina backcountry, and the British army’s Queen’s Rangers and “Black Dragoons,” the latter force composed entirely of former slaves. The essays also examine the roles of important commanders, including Brigadier General Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion, Lieutenant Colonel William Washington, and Colonel Anthony Walton White of the American army, and British cavalry leaders Banastre “Bloody Ban” Tarleton and John Graves Simcoe, as well as the American prisoners of war who switched sides and served in the “British Legion.” The authors of the essays include acclaimed military historians Gregory J. W. Urwin and Lawrence E. Babits. Readers with a general interest in military history, as well as those with more specific interests in the American Revolution or the history of the cavalry arm, and anyone who wishes to undertake further study of these subjects, will find the essays fresh, engaging, and informative.
@font-face { font-family: "Times New Roman";}@font-face { font-family: "HelveticaNeue-LightCond";}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }
Contents
Gregory J. W. Urwin: The Continental Light Dragoons, 1776-1783
Lee F. McGee: European Influences on Continental Cavalry
John M. Hutchins: Cavalry Action at Poundridge, New York
Donald J. Gara: Cavalry Battles in New York and New Jersey
Scott A. Miskimon: Anthony Walton White: A Revolutionary Dragoon
Michael C. Scoggins: South Carolina’s Backcountry Rangers
Lawrence E. Babits and Joshua B. Howard: Continentals in Tarleton’s
British Legion
Charles F. Price: Cavalry Operations at Eutaw Springs
Jim Piecuch: The “Black Dragoons”
Celebrating the Fourth
Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early RepublicLen Travers
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book
Public rituals have always held a vital place in American culture. By far the noisiest and most popular of these to emerge in the nation's early years was Independence Day. After a decade of fitful starts, the Fourth of July eclipsed local and regional patriotic observances to become the premier “American Jubilee.” Celebrating the Fourth provides a history of this holiday and explores its role in shaping a national identity and consciousness in three cities—Boston, Charleston, and Philadelphia—during the first fifty years of the American republic. Independence Day celebrations justified, validated, and helped maintain nationalism among people unused to offering political allegiance beyond their own state borders. As the observances became increasingly popular and symbolically important, political partisans competed hotly for the right to control the meaning of the festivals.
Colonial New Hampshire
A HistoryJere R. Daniell
University Press of New England, 2015
Colonial Search For A Southern Eden
Louis B. Wright
University of Alabama Press, 2008
European imperialists began to dream of other kinds of wealth besides gold in the New World
The Colonial Search for a Southern Eden compiles three insightful lectures delivered by renowned historian Louis B. Wright at the Dancy Foundation in 1951. Wright explores the 17th‑century English colonial vision for the American South—not as a gold rush, but as a fertile terrain primed for economic prosperity through well‑planned plantations and commercial crops.
Across its concise 75 pages, Wright charts the transformation of settlers’ aspirations—from hopes of quick wealth to cultivated visions of tobacco, silk, sugar, and cotton plantations meant to create a utopian "Southern Eden". These were carefully cultivated not just for their profitability but to establish structured, enduring societies complementary to English economic goals.
Wright—a Guggenheim Fellow, Benjamin Franklin Medalist, and former director of the Folger Shakespeare Library—brings scholarly precision and elegant prose to this study, making it accessible to both historians and general readers. Publishers and reviewers have praised it as “extremely interesting and well written,” highlighting its focused yet comprehensive interpretation of colonial Southern motivations and their long-term implications. This work stands as a pivotal contribution to early American economic and colonial history—offering a nuanced understanding of how idealistic and ideological goals shaped plantation culture and southern development in the Atlantic colonies.
With its concise structure and authoritative voice, The Colonial Search for a Southern Eden is ideal for historians, students, and enthusiasts seeking to understand the ideological underpinnings of colonial Southern society.
Colonial Ste. Genevieve
An Adventure on the Mississippi FrontierCarl J. Ekberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996
Colonial Wars, 1689-1762
Howard H. Peckham
University of Chicago Press, 1965
Mr. Peckham chronicles the events of these wars, summarizing the struggle for empire in America among France, England, and Spain. He indicates how the colonists applied the experience they gained from fighting Indians to their engagements with European powers. And what they learned from the colonial wars they translated into a political philosophy that led to independence and self-government.
The ready involvement of the colonies in European ambitions, the success and failure of co-operation between colony and mother country, the efforts of the English colonies together, and the growing differences between them and Britain give the narrative continuity and rising excitement.
Colonial Wars, 1689-1762
Howard H. Peckham
University of Chicago Press, 1965
Although the colonial wars consisted of almost continuous raids and skirmishes between the English and French colonists and their Indian allies and enemies, they can be separated into four major conflicts, corresponding to four European wars of which they were, in varying degrees, a part: King William's War (1689-97) (War of the League of Augsburg); Queen Anne's War (1702-13) (War of the Spanish Succession); King George's War (1744-48) (War of the Austrian Succession); and The French and Indian War (1755-62) (Seven Years' War).
Mr. Peckham chronicles the events of these wars, summarizing the struggle for empire in America among France, England, and Spain. He indicates how the colonists applied the experience they gained from fighting Indians to their engagements with European powers. And what they learned from the colonial wars they translated into a political philosophy that led to independence and self-government.
The ready involvement of the colonies in European ambitions, the success and failure of co-operation between colony and mother country, the efforts of the English colonies together, and the growing differences between them and Britain give the narrative continuity and rising excitement.
Community without Consent
New Perspectives on the Stamp ActEdited by Zachary McLeod Hutchins
Dartmouth College Press, 2016
Conquering the American Wilderness
The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial NortheastGuy Chet
University of Massachusetts Press, 2003
A study of military tactics and strategy before the War of Independence, this book reexamines the conquest of the North American wilderness and its native peoples by colonial settlers. Historians have long believed that the peculiar conditions of the New World, coupled with the success of Indians tactics, forced the colonists to abandon traditional European methods of warfare and to develop a new “American” style of combat. By combining firearms with guerrilla-like native tactics, colonial commanders were able not only to subdue their Indian adversaries but eventually to prevail against more conventionally trained British forces during the American Revolution. Yet upon closer scrutiny, this common understanding of early American warfare turns out to be more myth than reality.
As Guy Chet reveals, clashes between colonial and Indian forces during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not lead to a reevaluation and transformation of conventional military doctrine. On the contrary, the poor performance of the settlers during King Philip's War (1675–76) and King William's War (1689–1697) prompted colonial magistrates to address the shortcomings of their military forces through a greater reliance on British troops and imperial administrators. Thus, as the eighteenth century wore on, growing military success in the New England colonies reflected an increasing degree of British planning, administration, participation, and command. The colonies' military and political leadership, Chet argues, never rejected the time-tested principles of European warfare, and even during the American War of Independence, the republic's military leadership looked to Europe for guidance in the art of combat.
Contested Boundaries
Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious WorldTimothy D. Hall
Duke University Press, 1994
This book expands our understanding of evangelical itinerancy in the 1740s by viewing it within the context of Britain’s expanding commercial empire. As pro- and anti-revivalists tried to shape a burgeoning transatlantic consumer society, the itinerancy of the Great Awakening appears here as a forceful challenge to contemporary assumptions about the place of individuals within their social world and the role of educated leaders as regulators of communication, order, and change. The most celebrated of these itinerants was George Whitefield, an English minister who made unprecedented tours through the colonies. According to Hall, the activities of the itinerants, including Whitefield, encouraged in the colonists an openness beyond local boundaries to an expanding array of choices for belief and behavior in an increasingly mobile and pluralistic society. In the process, it forged a new model of the church and its social world.
As a response to and a source of dynamic social change, itinerancy in Hall’s powerful account provides a prism for viewing anew the worldly and otherworldly transformations of colonial society. Contested Boundaries will be of interest to students and scholars of colonial American history, religious studies, and cultural and social anthropology.
Countermemory
A Rhetoric of ResistanceApril L. O'Brien and James Chase Sanchez
University of Alabama Press, 2025
Investigates the interdisciplinary dimensions of countermemory through a rhetorical lens
Countermemory: A Rhetoric of Resistance by April L. O’Brien and James Chase Sanchez is a groundbreaking monograph that explores the concept of countermemory from an interdisciplinary and rhetorical perspective. The authors define “countermemory” as remembrance that resituates often overlooked or erased narratives of marginalized groups by positioning these memories as equally significant to dominant historical narratives. This work investigates how countermemories emerge in response to public memories, highlighting the tensions and resistance that arise when marginalized voices challenge mainstream historical accounts.
Through a mixed-methodological approach—incorporating site-based analysis, participant observation, textual analysis, and historiography—O’Brien and Sanchez examine countermemory in both physical and digital spaces. From memorial sites and museums to music videos, TV shows, and digital maps, they reveal the various ways countermemory operates and persists. The authors focus particularly on countermemory in the American South, centering on the experiences and histories of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities.
Countermemory is essential reading for scholars and students of rhetoric and public memory. The book also offers rich insights to readers who are passionate about addressing issues of racial inequality, people interested in examining their own experiences and the role they can play in promoting social change, and those interested in exploring the ways in which history is constructed and presented, and how marginalized perspectives are often excluded or distorted.