Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, the MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY series introduces readers to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in American history. The collection of essays and documents in MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN COLONIAL HISTORY introduces readers to American colonial history and, in this third edition, presents a radically new vision of the subject in accordance with developments in the way the subject is currently taught. Most importantly, this new edition takes a more continental and thematic approach. Each chapter contains an introduction, headnotes, and suggestions for further reading.

Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, theMajor Problemsseries introduces students to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in U.S. history.Major Problems in American Women's Historyis the leading reader for courses on the history of American women, covering the subject's entire chronological span. While attentive to the roles of women and the details of women's lives, the authors are especially concerned with issues of historical interpretation and historiography. The Fourth Edition features greater coverage of the experiences of women in the Midwest and the West, immigrant women, and more voices of women of color. Key pedagogical elements of theMajor Problemsformat have been retained: 14 to 15 chapters per volume, chapter introductions, headnotes, and suggested readings. New!In Chapter 1, an exclusive essay by Kate Haulman examines the evolution of the field of women's history and the state of women's history today. New!Chapter 2 now focuses on Native American women, while a new Chapter 3 covers witches and their accusers in New England and the Salem witch trials. New!Chapter 6 draws on recent scholarship on the roles of ordinary and elite women in the numerous reform movements of the Early Republic. Revised!Chapter 7 rethinks and refocuses the text's coverage of women's roles in slavery and the Civil War, and more directly addresses the lives of African American women during and after slavery. New!Post-1960 coverage (in Chapters 15–16) has been thoroughly revised to highlight the women's movement, women's health, recent immigration, and economic changes affecting women.

This text introduces students to both primary sources and analytical essys on important topics in U.S. history. The book asks students to evaluate primary surces, test the interpretations and draw their own conclusions.

DOCUMENTS AND ESSAYS OF MAJOR PROBLEMS IN COLONIAL AMERICA.

This selection of source documents and analytical essays focuses on those issues in women's history about which there is substantial disagreement and discussion among historians. Topics include the status of white women in colonial America, family lives of enslaved women, the many varieties of feminism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and campaigns for suffrage and social reform. ISBN 0-669-14470-8 (pbk.): $14.00.

This carefully collected volume of eight essays and 24 supporting documents allows access to the best and latest scholarship on mainland British North America. This book demonstrates how differences in race, ethnicity, gender, and social status were continuously negotiated throughout England's North American colonies.

Introduces students to both primary sources and analytical essays on topics in US history.

This study analyzes the development of criminal law during the first several generations of American life. Its comparison of the substantive and procedural law among the colonies reveals the similarities and differences between the New England and the Chesapeake colonies. Bradley Chapin addresses the often-debated question of the “reception” of English law and makes estimates of the relative weight of the sources and methods of early American law. A main theme of his book is that colonial legislators and judges achieved a significant reform of the English criminal law at a time when a parallel movement in England failed. The analysis is made specific and concrete by statistics that show patterns of prosecutions and crime rates. In addition to the exciting and convincing theme of a “lost period” of great creativity in American criminal law, Chapin gives a wealth of detail on statutory and common-law rulings, noteworthy criminal cases, and judicial views of how the law was to be administered. He provides social and economic explanations of shifts and peculiarities in the law, using carefully arranged evidence from the records. His treatment of the Quaker cases in Massachusetts and the witchcraft prosecutions in New England throws new light on those frequently misunderstood episodes. Chapin's book will be of interest not only to scholars working in the field but also to anyone curious about early American legal history.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.