Each volume of this landmark series begins with a thorough introduction setting the historical context for the group of documents contained therein. An expansive index completed each volume. Includes much material not printed in the first Colonial Records series.

On an autumn day in 1866, Wiley Ambrose and Hepsey Saunders, two former slaves who lived as husband and wife, received a knock at their door. Three men from a plantation in Brunswick County, North Carolina, presented court-ordered apprenticeship papers authorizing the immediate seizure of the couple's daughters, fifteen-year-old Harriet and thirteen-year-old Eliza. After a brief stay in jail with other children, the sisters were sent to work as plantation servants and field hands until age twenty-one. With that startling example, Karin L. Zipf begins Labor of Innocents, the first comprehensive exploration of forced apprenticeship in North Carolina. Zipf refuses to nostalgically view apprenticeship as a benign form of vocational training for children and instead presents irrefutable evidence that the institution existed as a means to control the composition and character of families, to provide alternate sources of cheap labor, and to ensure a white patriarchal social order. Codified by law, involuntary apprenticeship allowed courts not only to define who was an unacceptable parent but also to indenture their children. Disproportionately affected were the poor. Zipf details the continual fluidity of the institution from its colonial origins to its twentieth-century demise. Over two hundred years, the definition of an unfit head of household variously included black men, any woman, and widowed or unmarried white women, depending upon the current social and political agenda of authorities. Parents of both races and sexes challenged the laws vigorously and repeatedly to no effect until progressive reforms ended apprenticeship in 1919 with passage of the Child Welfare Act. An impressive blend of legal, social, and labor history, Labor of Innocents illuminates past concepts of family and the realities families endured.

The one book every genealogist must have! Whether you're just getting started in genealogy or you're a research veteran, The Family Tree Sourcebook provides you with the information you need to trace your roots across the United States, including: • Research summaries, tips and techniques, with maps for every U.S. state • Detailed county-level data, essential for unlocking the wealth of records hidden in the county courthouse • Websites and contact information for libraries, archives, and genealogical and historical societies • Bibliographies for each state to help you further your research You'll love having this trove of information to guide you to the family history treasures in state and county repositories. It's all at your fingertips in an easy-to-use format–and it's from the trusted experts at Family Tree Magazine!

The dramatic account of a Revolutionary-era conspiracy in which a band of farmers opposed to military conscription and fearful of religious persecution plotted to kill the governor of North Carolina. Less than a year into the American Revolution, a group of North Carolina farmers hatched a plot to assassinate the colonyÕs leading patriots, including the governor. The scheme became known as the Gourd Patch or Llewellen Conspiracy. The men called themselves the Brethren. The Brethren opposed patriot leadersÕ demand for militia volunteers and worried that ÒenlightenedÓ deist principles would be enshrined in the state constitution, displacing their Protestant faith. The patriotsÕ attempts to ally with Catholic France only exacerbated the BrethrenÕs fears of looming heresy. Brendan McConville follows the Brethren as they draw up plans for violent action. After patriot militiamen threatened to arrest the Brethren as British sympathizers in the summer of 1777, the group tried to spread false rumors of a slave insurrection in hopes of winning loyalist support. But a disaffected insider denounced the movement to the authorities, and many members were put on trial. Drawing on contemporary depositions and legal petitions, McConville gives voice to the conspiratorsÕ motivations, which make clear that the Brethren did not back the Crown but saw the patriots as a grave threat to their religion. Part of a broader Southern movement of conscription resistance, the conspiracy compels us to appreciate the full complexity of public opinion surrounding the Revolution. Many colonists were neither loyalists nor patriots and came to see the Revolutionary government as coercive. The Brethren tells the dramatic story of ordinary people who came to fear that their Revolutionary leaders were trying to undermine religious freedom and individual libertyÑthe very causes now ascribed to the Founding generation.

In a comprehensive examination of rape and its prosecution in British America between 1700 and 1820, Sharon Block exposes the dynamics of sexual power on which colonial and early republican Anglo-American society was based. Block analyzes the legal, social, and cultural implications of more than nine hundred documented incidents of sexual coercion and hundreds more extralegal commentaries found in almanacs, newspapers, broadsides, and other print and manuscript sources. Highlighting the gap between reports of coerced sex and incidents that were publicly classified as rape, Block demonstrates that public definitions of rape were based less on what actually happened than on who was involved. She challenges conventional narratives that claim sexual relations between white women and black men became racially charged only in the late nineteenth century. Her analysis extends racial ties to rape back into the colonial period and beyond the boundaries of the southern slave-labor system. Early Americans' treatment of rape, Block argues, both enacted and helped to sustain the social, racial, gender, and political hierarchies of a New World and a new nation.

Ten years before the start of the American Revolution, backcountry settlers in the North Carolina Piedmont launched their own defiant bid for economic independence and political liberty. The Regulator Rebellion of 1766-71 pitted thousands of farmers, many of them religious radicals inspired by the Great Awakening, against political and economic elites who opposed the Regulators' proposed reforms. The conflict culminated on May 16, 1771, when a colonial militia defeated more than 2,000 armed farmers in a pitched battle near Hillsborough. At least 6,000 Regulators and sympathizers were forced to swear their allegiance to the government as the victorious troops undertook a punitive march through Regulator settlements. Seven farmers were hanged. Using sources that include diaries, church minutes, legal papers, and the richly detailed accounts of the Regulators themselves, Marjoleine Kars delves deeply into the world and ideology of free rural colonists. She examines the rebellion's economic, religious, and political roots and explores its legacy in North Carolina and beyond. The compelling story of the Regulator Rebellion reveals just how sharply elite and popular notions of independence differed on the eve of the Revolution.

Illuminates how the preservation of slavery was a motivating factor for the Revolutionary War The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt. For European colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. It was a real and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition throughout the colonies—a possibility the founding fathers feared would bring slave rebellions to their shores. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.