"The subject of this book pertains to events, often unpleasant, in the domestic lives of the 17th-century Maryland colonists."—publisher's catalog description, 1938 Marylander Edward Erbery called members of the colony's proprietary assembly "rogues and puppies"; he was tied to an apple tree and received thirty-nine lashes. Jacob Lumbrozo, a Maryland Jew who suggested Christ's miracles were done by "magic," was imprisoned indefinitely, escaping execution only by the governor's pardon. Rebecca Fowler was accused of using witchcraft to cause her Calvert County neighbors to feel "very much the worse;" she was hanged on October 9, 1685. Mrs. Thomas Ward whipped a runaway maidservant with a peachtree rod, then rubbed salt into the girl's wounds; the girl died, and Mrs. Ward was fined three hundred pounds of tobacco. Now available in a new paperback edition, Raphael Semmes's classic Crime and Punishment in Colonial Maryland contains a wealth of colorful—though often disturbing—details about the law and lawbreakers in 17th-century Maryland. Semmes explains, for instance, that theft was rare among early Marylanders—if only because the colonists had little worth stealing. But what the colonists valued, they endeavored to protect: A 1662 law punished a person twice-convicted of hog-stealing by branding an "H" on his shoulder. (Widely perceived as being too lenient, the law was amended four years later: first offense, "H" on the forehead.) Men caught in adultery were often fined; women were often whipped. And knowing how to swim was so rare among 17th-century women that suggesting one could do so was tantamount to accusing her of witchcraft: a minister's son who claimed as much was sued by the woman for defamation of character. Crime and Punishment in Colonial Maryland offers fascinating and detailed case histories on such crimes as theft, libel, assault and homicide, as well as on adultery, profanity, drunkenness, and witchcraft. It also explores long-forgotten aspects of old English law, such as theftbote (an early form of "victim compensation"), deodand (an animal or article which, having caused the death of a human being, was forfeited to the Crown for "pious uses"), and the blood test for murderers.

When Columbus arrived in the Americas there were, it is believed, as many as 2,000 distinct, mutually unintelligible tongues spoken in the western hemisphere, encompassing the entire area from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. This astonishing fact has generally escaped the attention of historians, in part because many of these indigenous languages have since become extinct. And yet the burden of overcoming America's language barriers was perhaps the one problem faced by all peoples of the New World in the early modern era: African slaves and Native Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley; Jesuit missionaries and Huron-speaking peoples in New France; Spanish conquistadors and the Aztec rulers. All of these groups confronted America's complex linguistic environment, and all of them had to devise ways of transcending that environment - a problem that arose often with life or death implications. For the first time, historians, anthropologists, literature specialists, and linguists have come together to reflect, in the fifteen original essays presented in this volume, on the various modes of contact and communication that took place between the Europeans and the "Natives." A particularly important aspect of this fascinating collection is the way it demonstrates the interactive nature of the encounter and how Native peoples found ways to shape and adapt imported systems of spoken and written communication to their own spiritual and material needs. Edward G. Gray is Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University. Norman Fiering is the author of two books that were awarded the Merle Curti Prize for Intellectual History by the Organization of American Historians and of numerous. Since 1983, he has been Director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize A compelling, fresh account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to British North America, their involvements with each other, and their struggles with the indigenous peoples of the eastern seaboard. The immigrants were a mixed multitude. They came from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden, and Finland, and they moved to the western hemisphere for different reasons, from different social backgrounds and cultures. They represented a spectrum of religious attachments. In the early years, their stories are not mainly of triumph but of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize situations and recapture lost worlds. It was a thoroughly brutal encounter—not only between the Europeans and native peoples and between Europeans and Africans, but among Europeans themselves, as they sought to control and prosper in the new configurations of life that were emerging around them.

Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation's capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between America's expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification. But D.C. is more than just a seat of government, and authors Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove also highlight the city's rich history of local activism as Washingtonians of all races have struggled to make their voices heard in an undemocratic city where residents lack full political rights. Tracing D.C.'s massive transformations--from a sparsely inhabited plantation society into a diverse metropolis, from a center of the slave trade to the nation's first black-majority city, from "Chocolate City" to "Latte City--Asch and Musgrove offer an engaging narrative peppered with unforgettable characters, a history of deep racial division but also one of hope, resilience, and interracial cooperation.

Proof that the renaissance in colonial Chesapeake studies is flourishing, this collection is the first to integrate the immigrant experience of the seventeenth century with the native-born society that characterized the Chesapeake by the eighteenth century. Younger historians and senior scholars here focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people: why they came to the Chesapeake; how they adapted to their new world; who prospered and why; how property was accumulated and by whom. At the same time, the essays encompass broader issues of early American history, including the transatlantic dimension of colonization, the establishment of communities, both religious and secular, the significance of regionalism, the causes and effects of social and economic diversification, and the participation of Indians and blacks in the formation of societies. Colonial Chesapeake Society consolidates current advances in social history and provokes new questions.

The Susquehana River is the longest river in the eastern United States, running 444 miles from its headwaters in the Appalachian Mountains of New York to its outlet in Chesapeake Bay. Its storied history includes the early native populations of Susquehannock and Iroquois peoples, the key roles it played in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and environmental degradation brought on the by industrialization in the 19th century.

During the period between the publication of Pierre Esprit Radisson's Voyages by the Prince Society of Boston in 1885 and the appearance of Caesars of the Wilderness in 1943, scholarly journals and books were often enlivened by the historical controversy surrounding Radisson and his fellow explorer, Medard Chouart, Sieur Des Groseilliers. Often referred to as the "Radisson problem," the controversy called into question almost every aspect of the two men's lives, from the authenticity of parts of Radisson's narrative to the exact itinerary the men followed in their travels. The publication of Caesars in the Wilderness brought the historical debate to an end. Based on many years of research in repositories throughout France, England, and North America, the books, with its skillful presentation of new evidence, settled many of the questions that had long puzzled scholars.