This absorbing letterbook, meticulously edited and thoroughly annotated, provides remarkable insight into the life and concerns of 18th-century colonial Virginians. The letters are especially revealing about economic life, the material culture of colonial Virginia, and the treacherous legal and financial conditions in which even important planters operated. The correspondence clearly shows how a wealthy colonial planter uses and could be misused by the British mercantile system. The letters also provide a view of the personal side of the sober and overly frugal Custis: his fashionable passion for gardening (in which he was 'inferior to few if any in Virginia'); his strife-filled nine-year marriage to Frances Parke, before her death from smallpox; and his uneven relationships with his son and daughter.

For more than thirty years, the architectural research department at Colonial Williamsburg has engaged in comprehensive study of early buildings, landscapes, and social history in the Chesapeake region. Its painstaking work has transformed our understanding of building practices in the colonial and early national periods and thereby greatly enriched the experience of visiting historic sites. In this beautifully illustrated volume, a team of historians, curators, and conservators draw on their far-reaching knowledge of historic structures in Virginia and Maryland to illuminate the formation, development, and spread of one of the hallmark building traditions in American architecture. The essays describe how building design, hardware, wall coverings, furniture, and even paint colors telegraphed social signals about the status of builders and owners and choreographed social interactions among everyone who lived or worked in gentry houses, modest farmsteads, and slave quarters. The analyses of materials, finishes, and carpentry work will fascinate old-house buffs, preservationists, and historians alike. The lavish color photography is a delight to behold, and the detailed catalogues of architectural elements provide a reliable guide to the form, style, and chronology of the region's distinctive historic architecture.

In The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, Dan Robinson presents a new history of politics in colonial America and the imperial crisis, tracing how ideas of Europe and Europeanness shaped British-American political culture. Reconstructing colonial debates about the European states system, European civilisation, and Britain's position within both, Robinson shows how these concerns informed colonial attitudes towards American identity and America's place inside - and, ultimately, outside - the emerging British Empire. Taking in more than two centuries of Atlantic history, he explores the way in which colonists inherited and adapted Anglo-British traditions of thinking about international politics, how they navigated imperial politics during the European wars of 1740-1763, and how the burgeoning patriot movement negotiated the dual crisis of Europe and Empire in the between 1763 and 1775. In the process, Robinson sheds new light on the development of public politics in colonial America, the Anglicisation/Americanisation debate, the political economy of empire, early American art and poetry, eighteenth-century geopolitical thinking, and the relationship between international affairs, nationalism, and revolution. What emerges from this story is an American Revolution that seems both decidedly arcane and strikingly relevant to the political challenges of the twenty-first century.

In January 1982, archaeologists conducting a pre-construction excavation at 175 Water Street in Lower Manhattan found the remains of an eighteenth-century ship. Uncertain of what they had found or what its value might be, they called in two nautical archaeologists—Warren Riess and Sheli Smith—to direct the excavation and analysis of the ship’s remains. As it turned out, the mystery ship’s age and type meant that its careful study would help answer some important questions about the commerce and transportation of an earlier era of American history. The Ship that Held Up Wall Street tells the whole story of the discovery, excavation, and study of what came to be called the “Ronson ship site,” named for the site’s developer, Howard Ronson. Entombed for more than two hundred years, the Princess Carolina proved to be the first major discovery of a colonial merchant ship. Years of arduous analytical work have led to critical breakthroughs revealing how the ship was designed and constructed, its probable identity as a vessel built in Charleston, South Carolina, its history as a merchant ship, and why and how it came to be buried in Manhattan.

Based on a wealth of family papers, period images, and popular literature, this is the first book devoted to the broad history of sibling relations in America. Illuminating the evolution of the modern family system, Siblings shows how brothers and sisters have helped each other in the face of the dramatic political, economic, and cultural changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Hemphill demonstrates, siblings function across all races as humanity's shock-absorbers as well as valued kin and keepers of memory.

Women of the Constitution follows in the footsteps of the 1912 work devoted to biographical sketches of the spouses of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. This book will be the first work devoted exclusively to providing brief biographies of the forty-three wives o...

William Byrd II was a prominent eighteenth-century Virginian who at the time of his death owned over 180,000 acres and employed laborers and enslaved Africans to work his land. His letters, diaries, and surveying documents have become key texts in the study of American history, and he is one of the most quoted and discussed figures of his era. Byrd himself was perhaps the early colonial epitome of a patriarch, and typically, when historians examine Byrd and the prominence of patriarchal thought in colonial Virginia, they examine his relationships with his immediate family. In this book, however, Dennis Todd examines the patriarchal relations between Byrd and the workers on his plantations—his apprentices, his wageworkers, his overseers, his white servants, and especially his slaves. In doing so, this book illuminates a neglected stage in the formation of slavery in Virginia. Todd argues that patriarchal principles, which are often assumed to have justified slavery and to have offered a template for slave management, in fact did neither. Byrd was not the only Virginian to wrestle with the contradictions between patriarchal values and the realities of slavery, but few were as articulate. In examining Byrd through the twin lens of slavery and patriarchy, Patriarchy in Peril makes an important contribution to our understanding of the man and his place in Virginia society as well as the contentious formation of early America.

16. 1763: Unraveling Empire -- Coda: 1791 -- Note on Sources and Methodology -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W

Here is the story of the fateful marriage of the richest woman in Virginia and the man who could have been king. In telling their story, Chadwick explains not only their remarkable devotion to each other, but why the wealthiest couple in Virginia became revolutionaries who risked the loss of their vast estates and their very lives. "One of George Washington's secret weapons in his rise to power and immortality was the extraordinary woman he married. The story of the half-century-long married love affair of George and Martha Washington is truly inspiring." —Willard Sterne Randall, author of George Washington, A Life "Chadwick puts a more human face on Washington by creating a very detailed portrait of how he and the outgoing Martha lived: their food, their slaves and servants, their health, their furniture, their daily life together."—USA Today

This volume offers a complete listing and description of books published on early America between 2001 and 2005. An extraordinary research tool, Books on Early American History and Culture, 2001-2005: An Annotated Bibliography is part of a series listing materials on the history of North America and the Caribbean from 1492 to 1815. This volume includes monographs, reference works, exhibition catalogs, and essay collections published between 2001 and 2005. Each entry provides the name of the work, its author(s) or editor(s), publisher, date of publication, ISBN and/or OCLC number(s), and the Library of Congress call number. Following each detailed citation, there is a brief summary of the work and a list of journals in which it has been reviewed. Organized thematically, the book covers, among many other topics, exploration and colonization; maritime history; environment; Native Americans; race, gender, and ethnicity; migration; labor and class; business; families; religion; material culture; science; education; politics; and military affairs.