These thirteen original essays are provocative explorations in the construction and representation of self in America's colonial and early republican eras. Highlighting the increasing importance of interdisciplinary research for the field of early American history, these leading scholars in the field extend their reach to literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, and material culture. The collection is organized into three parts--Histories of Self, Texts of Self, and Reflections on Defining Self. Individual essays examine the significance of dreams, diaries, and carved chests, murder and suicide, Indian kinship, and the experiences of African American sailors. Gathered in celebration of the Institute of Early American History and Culture's fiftieth anniversary, these imaginative inquiries will stimulate critical thinking and open new avenues of investigation on the forging of self-identity in early America. The contributors are W. Jeffrey Bolster, T. H. Breen, Elaine Forman Crane, Greg Dening, Philip Greven, Rhys Isaac, Kenneth A. Lockridge, James H. Merrell, Donna Merwick, Mary Beth Norton, Mechal Sobel, Alan Taylor, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Richard White.

Annotation In this unique investigation of the everyday lives of men in colonial Massachusetts and Connecticut, Lisa Wilson brings to life the domestic world of pre-Revolutionary New England. She finds that colonial men spent most of their time in a multigendered home environment and, unlike the self-reliant men of the next century, sought interdependence with family and community.

In 1711, the imperious Virginia patriarch William Byrd II spitefully refused his wife Lucy's plea for a book; a century later, Lady Jean Skipwith placed an order that sent the Virginia bookseller Joseph Swan scurrying to please. These vignettes bracket a century of change in white southern women's lives. Claiming the Pen offers the first intellectual history of early southern women. It situates their reading and writing within the literary culture of the wider Anglo-Atlantic world, thus far understood to be a masculine province, even as they inhabited the limited, provincial social circles of the plantation South.Catherine Kerrison uncovers a new realm of female education in which conduct-of-life advice—both the dry pedantry of sermons and the risqué plots of novels—formed the core reading program. Women, she finds, learned to think and write by reading prescriptive literature, not Greek and Latin classics, in impromptu home classrooms, rather than colleges and universities, and from kin and friends, rather than schoolmates and professors. Kerrison also reveals that southern women, in their willingness to "take up the pen" and so claim new rights, seized upon their racial superiority to offset their gender inferiority. In depriving slaves of education, southern women claimed literacy as a privilege of their whiteness, and perpetuated and strengthened the repressive institutions of slavery.

This History explores the development of literary culture in Virginia from the founding of Jamestown to the twenty-first century.

The stories now being told about the colonial American past represent an "America" newly found, as scholars continue to evaluate and revise the longer-standing stories that have, across the centuries, held particular cultural and critical sway. This collection is a celebration of the widening of scholarly inquire in early American studies, and a tribute to a leading early Americanist whose scholarly career continues to contribute to the opening up of crucial questions of canon.

A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf represents a significant contribution to the study of the intellectual life of women in British North America. Kevin J. Hayes studies the books these women read and the reasons why they read them. As Hayes notes, recent studies on the literary tastes of early American women have concentrated on the post-revolutionary period, when several women novelists emerged. Yet, he observes, women were reading long before they began writing and publishing novels, and, in fact, mounting evidence now suggests that literacy rates among colonial women were much higher than previously supposed. To reconstruct what might have filled a typical colonial woman’s bookshelf, Hayes has mined such sources as wills and estate inventories, surviving volumes inscribed by women, public and private library catalogs, sales ledgers, borrowing records from subscription libraries, and contemporary biographical sketches of notable colonial women. Hayes identifies several categories of reading material. These range from devotional works and conduct books to midwifery guides and cookery books, from novels and travel books to science books. In his concluding chapter, he describes the tensions that were developing near the end of the colonial period between the emerging cult of domesticity and the appetite for learning many women displayed. With its meticulous research and rich detail, A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the complexities of life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America.

Reconstructing William Allen 1711-1799 is a combination history, biography, and genealogy of this immigrant from Northern Ireland who came to America in 1729. It explores not only the facts of his life, but places them within the context of the historical events of his time. It also attempts to build a picture of the communities within which he lived. In order to provide as broad a picture as possible, the book includes a social history of the Scots-Irish people, who spent a century or so in Northern Ireland before coming to America en masse during the 18th century. Also included: appendices with research notes, bibliography, and index. 518 pages, hardback.

Marital status was a fundamental legal and cultural feature of women's identity in the eighteenth century. Free women who were not married could own property and make wills, contracts, and court appearances, rights that the law of coverture prevented their married sisters from enjoying. Karin Wulf explores the significance of marital status in this account of unmarried women in Philadelphia, the largest city in the British colonies. In a major act of historical reconstruction, Wulf draws upon sources ranging from tax lists, censuses, poor relief records, and wills to almanacs, newspapers, correspondence, and poetry to recreate the daily experiences of women who were never-married, widowed, divorced, or separated. With its substantial population of unmarried women, eighteenth-century Philadelphia was much like other early modern cities, but it became a distinctive proving ground for cultural debate and social experimentation involving those women. Arguing that unmarried women shaped the city as much as it shaped them, Wulf examines popular literary representations of marriage, the economic hardships faced by women, and the decisive impact of a newly masculine public culture in the late colonial period.