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212 books match the query 'Colonial Period (1600-1775)' and 13 start with s
Salvation in New England
Selections from the Sermons of the First PreachersEdited by Phyllis M. Jones and Nicholas R. Jones
University of Texas Press, 1977
The sermon as crafted by the early New England preachers was the most prominent literary form of its day, yet the earliest Puritan texts have as a rule been available only in rare-book collections. This anthology of sermons of the first generation of preachers fills a serious gap in American literature. The preachers collected here, the most widely published of their time, were among the eighty or more who emigrated to Massachusetts Bay during the 1630s. They are John Cotton of Boston, Thomas Shepard of Cambridge, and Thomas Hooker of Hartford, the three foremost "lights of the western churches," and two eminent colleagues, Peter Bulkeley of Concord and John Davenport, first of New Haven and later of Boston.
The selections are chosen to be representative of the lengthy works from which they are drawn, to reflect the major concerns and styles of the preachers' work as a whole, and to demonstrate the genre of the sermon as developed by the early American Puritans. Not only does this anthology represent an important contribution to literary history, but the sermons also illustrate a doctrine uniquely elaborated in this period—a consistent and emphatic narrative, mythlike in its repetition and heroics, of the progress of the soul from a state of nature to a state of salvation. This theme may be seen as a three-stage-development, although individual sermons may vary. These stages—preparation, vocation, and regeneration—determine the order of the selections.
The editors' introductory material supplies a comprehensive and thorough discussion of the early New England sermons, concentrating on their role, history, structure, style, and subject matter. A separate essay on the texts of the sermons describes the relationship between the early printed versions and their form as delivered in the pulpit. The introduction preceding each selection presents original research on the historical circumstances of the preaching and publication of the work from which the sermon is drawn. The editors have also provided brief biographies of the preacfiers represented here, an annotated list of recommended background reading, and the most exhaustive checklist available of authoritative editions of the sermons of these five preachers.
This book will be useful to colonial specialists as well as to students of early American literature, religion, and history. The texts are critically edited for readability, with modernized spelling and annotations of unfamiliar phrases and allusions.
Seized with the Temper of the Times
Identity and Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary AmericaAbby Chandler
Westholme Publishing, 2023
In Seized with the Temper of the Times Identity and Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary America, historian Abby Chandler explores, as never before, the complex local and transatlantic tensions which infused the early imperial crisis. She argues that colonial responses to the Stamp Act were rooted in local tensions and that the Regulator Rebellion was fueled by trans-Atlantic tensions. These two paradoxes, a local crisis cast as imperial affair and an imperial affair cast as local crisis, tell a very different story than the one to which we are accustomed. Without pre-existing local tensions, the fury of the Stamp Act crisis might not have spilled over during the summer of 1765, and, without the added strains of the imperial crisis, the Regulator Rebellion might not have lasted for five years. The questions about the intersecting roles of local and imperial/federal interests and identities raised during both the Stamp Act crisis and the Regulator Rebellion would also continue to inform political thought in Rhode Island and North Carolina in the coming decades. Both colonies had long histories of challenges to their autonomy and their residents embraced the coming revolution before many of their counterparts, but they would also be reluctant participants in the rising union envisioned by the framers of the Constitution.
Separate Paths
Lenapes and Colonists in West New JerseyJean R. Soderlund
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey is the first cross-cultural study of European colonization in the region south of the Falls of the Delaware River (now Trenton). Lenape men and women welcomed their allies, the Swedes and Finns, to escape more rigid English regimes on the west bank of the Delaware, offering land to establish farms, share resources, and trade. In the 1670s, Quaker men and women challenged this model with strategies to acquire all Lenape territory for their own use and to sell as real estate to new immigrants. Though the Lenapes remained sovereign and “old settlers” retained their Swedish Lutheran religion and ethnic autonomy, the West Jersey proprietors had considerable success in excluding Lenapes from their land. The Friends believed God favored their endeavor with epidemics of smallpox and other European diseases that destroyed Lenape families and communities. Affluent Quakers also introduced enslavement of imported Africans and Natives—and the violence that sustained it—to a colony they had promoted with the liberal West New Jersey Concessions of 1676-77. Thus, they defied their prior experience of religious persecution and their principles of peaceful resolution of conflict, equality of everyone before God, and the golden rule to treat others as you wish to be treated. Despite mutual commitment to peace by Lenapes, old settlers, and Friends, Quaker colonization had similar results to military conquests of Natives by English in Virginia and New England, and Dutch in the Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey. Still, in alliance with old settlers, Lenape communities survived in areas outside the focus of English colonization, in the Pine Barrens, upper reaches of streams, and Atlantic shore.
Settler Colonialism, Volume 107
Alex Lubin
Duke University Press, 0
Essays consider how race, sexuality and gender, and ethnicity shape experiences of settler colonialism, how public and private space are administered, how citizenship laws establish boundaries of national inclusion and exclusion, how religious motives drive settler colonialism, and how settler colonial regimes appropriate and “cleanse” indigenous cultures and histories. One essay investigates the interwoven ideological rationales for cultural pluralism, Zionism, and opposition to empire in the United States prior to World War I, highlighting the seemingly paradoxical call for the support of a Zionist settlement of Israel on grounds that establishing a Jewish state through colonial appropriation paralleled American development. Another contributor argues that white settler colonialism in the United States is articulated within the present-day constellation of neoliberalism and post–civil rights “color-blind” discourse, focusing on the intersections of the U.S. vote against the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York in 2005, and antisovereignty groups organizing against American Indian self-determination. Another offers the current situation in Darfur as a provocative rendering of postcolonial settler violence.
Settling the Frontier
Urban Development in America's Borderlands, 1600–1830Joseph P. Alessi
Westholme Publishing, 2025
In 1811, while escorting members of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company up the Columbia River, their Chinookan guide refused to advance beyond a particular point that marked a boundary between his people and another indigenous group. Long before European contact, Native Americans created and maintained recognized borders, ranging from family hunting and fishing properties to larger tribal territories to vast river valley regions. Within the confines of these respective borders, the native population often established permanent settlements that acted as the venues for the major political, economic, and social activities that took place in virtually every part of precolonial North America. It was the location of these native settlements that played a major role in the establishment of the first European, and later, American frontier towns.
In Settling the Frontier: Urban Development in America’s Borderlands, 1600–1830, historian Joseph P. Alessi examines how the Pecos, Mohawk, Ohioan, and Chinook tribal communities aided Europeans and Americans in the founding of five of America’s earliest border towns—Santa Fe (New Mexico), Fort Amsterdam (New York City), Fort Orange (Albany, New York), Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), and Fort Astoria (Portland, Oregon). Filling a void in scholarship about the role of Native American communities in the settlement of North America, Alessi reveals that, although often resistant to European and American progress or abused by it, Indians played an integral role in motivating and assisting Europeans with the establishment of frontier towns. In addition to the location of these towns, the native population was often crucial to the survival of the settlers in unfamiliar and unforgiving environments. As a result, these new towns became the logistical and economic vanguards for even greater development and exploitation of North America.
Shays' Rebellion
The Making of an Agrarian InsurrectionDavid P. Szatmary
University of Massachusetts Press, 1980
Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection is a landmark work of early American social and economic history that offers a comprehensive examination of one of the most consequential, and often misunderstood, uprisings in the history of the early American republic. Between 1786 and 1787, debt-ridden farmers across western Massachusetts, many of them veterans of the Revolutionary War, rose in armed protest against the state government's crushing tax and debt collection policies. Under the informal leadership of Daniel Shays, the rebels sought to prevent court foreclosures on their farms, demand tax relief, and reform a judicial system they saw as serving the interests of wealthy creditors at the expense of ordinary citizens. The uprising—ultimately suppressed by a privately funded state militia—sent shockwaves through the young nation, alarming leading figures including George Washington and James Madison, and powerfully accelerating the movement toward a stronger central government and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.
Szatmary frames the rebellion not as an isolated outbreak of lawlessness, but as a deeply rooted agrarian insurrection produced by the collision of two fundamentally different economic worlds in post-Revolutionary New England. His analysis begins by establishing the divergent economic realities of the region: on one side, the commercial and mercantile economy of New England's coastal towns, driven by creditors, merchants, and professional elites integrated into transatlantic trade networks; on the other, the subsistence farming communities of the interior, whose inhabitants operated largely outside the cash economy and bore a disproportionate burden of wartime debt and postwar taxation. Drawing on this structural conflict, Szatmary traces the chain of debt that left rural farmers increasingly unable to meet their obligations, the escalating cycle of court actions and property seizures that pushed them toward organized resistance, and the government's responses, ultimately military, to the protests.
The book is also attentive to the rebellion's broader political consequences, examining how Shays' Rebellion transformed the national debate about governance, federal authority, and the relationship between popular democracy and social order in the new republic. Described by one reviewer as a "well-balanced" study that "classifies Shays' Rebellion as the historical watershed it truly is," the book remains a standard reference in the historiography of the Early American Republic, the Articles of Confederation period, and the origins of the Constitutional Convention.
Situation Critical
Critique, Theory, and Early American StudiesMax Cavitch and Brian Connolly, editors
Duke University Press, 2024
Contributors. Max Cavitch, Brian Connolly, Matthew Crow, John J. Garcia, Christopher Looby, Michael Meranze, Mark J. Miller, Justine S. Murison, Britt Rusert, Ana Schwartz, Joan W. Scott, Jordan Alexander Stein
Spain and the Plains
Myths and Realities of Spanish Exploration and Settlement on the Great PlainsRalph H. Vigil
University Press of Colorado, 2007
Spain and the Plains introduces and documents Spanish exploration of and migration to the Plains, examines the myths that shaped Spanish exploration and the pragmatic realities of exploration and settlement, and documents racism and misrepresentation that Hispanic groups encountered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributors show how early explorers, shaped by the intellectual context of the Renaissance, sought mythical locales: the fountain of youth, the straits of Anian, and the city of Quivira. They describe how exploration shifted to emphasize military and economic gains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Essays portray the diaspora of Spanish settlers and reconstruct daily life in their settlements on the Plains.
This unique collection paints a clear picture of a crucial but often misrepresented and neglected era in American and Spanish history.
The editors, all authors of previous books, are affiliated with the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where Frances W. Kaye is a professor of English, John R. Wunder is a professor of history and journalism, and Ralph H. Vigil is a professor emeritus of history and ethnic studies. Contributors include Félix D. Almaráz Jr., Thomas E. Chávez, Frances W. Kaye, Russell M. Magnaghi, Ralph H. Vigil, Waldo R. Wedel, and John R. Wunder.
St. Louis Rising
The French Regime of Louis St. Ange de BelleriveCarl J. Ekberg and Sharon K. Person
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Drawing on new source materials, the authors delve into the complexities of politics, Indian affairs, slavery, and material culture that defined the city's founding period. Their alternative version of the oft-told tale uncovers the imperial realities--as personified by St. Ange--that truly governed in the Illinois Country of the time, and provide a trove of new information on everything from the fur trade to the arrival of the British and Spanish after the Seven Years' War.
Stealing Indian Women
Native Slavery in the Illinois CountryCarl J. Ekberg
University of Illinois Press, 2009
Stephen Decatur
American Naval Hero, 1779-1820Robert J. Allison
University of Massachusetts Press, 2005
Born to a prominent Philadelphia family in 1779, Stephen Decatur at age twenty-five became the youngest man ever to serve as a captain in the U.S. Navy. His intrepid heroism, leadership, and devotion to duty made him a perfect symbol of the aspirations of the growing nation. Leading men to victory in Tripoli, the War of 1812, and the Algerian war of 1815, and coining the phrase “Our country, right or wrong,” Decatur created an enduring legend of bravery, celebrated in poetry, song, paintings, and the naming of dozens of towns—from Georgia to Alabama to Illinois.
After the War of 1812, Decatur moved to Washington to help direct naval policy. His close friendships with James Madison, John Quincy Adams, and other political leaders soon made him a rising star in national politics. He and his wife Susan made their elegant home on Lafayette Square near the White House a center of Washington society. The capital and the entire nation were shocked in 1820 when Decatur died at the age of forty-one in a duel with a rival navy captain.
In this carefully researched and well-written biography, historian Robert Allison tells the story of Decatur's eventful life at a time when the young republic was developing its own identity—when the American people were deciding what kind of nation they would become. Although he died prematurely, Decatur played a significant role in the shaping of that national identity.
Suffering Soldiers
Revolutionary War Veterans, Moral Sentiment, and Political Culture in the Early RepublicJohn Resch
University of Massachusetts Press, 1999
Surveying in Early America
The Point of Beginning, An Illustrated HistoryDan Patterson; Clinton Terry
Ohio University Press, 2020
Published by the University of Cincinnati Press
In Surveying in Early America: The Point of Beginning, An Illustrated History, award-winning photographer Dan Patterson and American historian Clinton Terry vividly examine the profession of surveying in the eighteenth century. Retracing the steps Washington and other surveyors took to map the Ohio River Valley, readers are immersed in historically accurate details of early surveying techniques and practices. Terry's narrative describes the practice of land and survey measurement—methods that did not substantially change until the invention of GPS technology 200 years later. Over 100 full color photographs exclusively shot for the book depict authentic and historically accurate reproductions of tools along with early American reenactors to provide an interpretive look at surveying as a primary means to building the American nation. Working with the Department of the Geographer, Patterson restages actual expeditions, brilliantly displaying the techniques and instruments Washington would have employed 260 years ago. Through the lens of Patterson's camera and Terry's accompanying narrative, readers see what Washington saw as he learned his trade, explored the vast American wilderness, and occasionally laid personal claim to great expanses of land along the way.