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At the American Historical Association meeting in January, Ronald Hoffman, Sally D. Mason, and Eleanor Darcy received the highest recognition for achievement in documentary editing, the 2005 J. Franklin Jameson Award, for Dear Papa, Dear Charley: The Papers of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, 1748–1782. The prize is given only every five years, which makes it a special mark of distinction. The Vernacular Architecture Forum awarded Bernard L. Herman the 2006 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award for Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City. This is the third time Bernie has taken home the Cummings prize. The Law and Society Association bestowed the 2006 James Willard Hurst Prize on Holly Brewer for By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority, as the best book in sociolegal history published in 2005.

In The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity, Martin Brückner argues that over the course of the eighteenth century, a transformation in geographic understanding occurred in Anglo-America. The proliferation of maps and geographic texts changed specialized knowledge of elites into a widespread culture of geographic literacy that served as a foundation for Anglo-American republican identity and then for new imperial expansion. Brückner argues that the rise of geographic literacy was instrumental in forming an American consciousness between 1680 and 1820. The mastery of modes of surveying, platting, and inscribing provided material, verbal, and visual texts through which Anglo-Americans described, located, and defined themselves. Geographic instruction became the path to literacy itself for increasing numbers of people, connecting a spatial sensibility with ideas of a discrete self, and the practices of geographic writing, in turn, exerted a profound influence on American literary forms, such as poems and natural histories, diaries and novels. By showing how the rhetoric and narrative structures of geography books affected the practices surrounding the production of literature, the book argues ultimately that the internalization of geography as a kind of language shaped the literary construction of the modern American subject.

A surprising picture of the Quaker City emerges in Clare A. Lyons’s Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830. Lyons finds a heterogeneous population in colonial Philadelphia with a wide array of sexual values that did not cohere to any norm and an emergent pleasure culture in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia that challenged male control over women of all classes. This development is placed in a transatlantic context of print culture and Enlightenment ideas that stimulated desires for self-fulfillment. The democratic political movements of the Revolutionary age encouraged further the undermining of hierarchies and the pursuit of individual autonomy. Philadelphia women of all classes claimed their share of freedom and sexual independence. In the post-Revolutionary reaction, white men in asserting their authority created a middle-class gender system in the early nineteenth century, restricting women’s self-possession and sexuality, strengthening family institutions, and bolstering social stability. Through a wide range of sources, including almanacs and popular literature, court bastardy and divorce records, and church marriage registers, Lyons traces the changing practices and representations of sexuality. Placing sexual culture at the center of power relations between women and men, blacks and whites, upper and lower classes and the emerging middle class, and different ethnic groups, she develops a dynamic model for analyzing shifting class and gender relations.

American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World, by Susan Scott Parrish, invites the prospective reader into a world of curiosity. In the eighteenth century, the word had multiple meanings. America as novel and wondrous was cast as a curiosity; its artifacts generated curiosity; European knowledge of its existence, products, and people stimulated scientific inquiry and was foundational to the formulation of empiricism and the new science. In linking together perceptions of supernatural wonder and rational natural order during this colonial period, American Curiosity suggests an Enlightenment perspective and scientific empiricism enriched by, indeed founded on, the prolix diversity of the Americas. Without the materials and informants of the western hemisphere, members of the Royal Society had nothing new to be curious about or to systematize. Even more, their curiosity made them dependent on those who could supply them with firsthand observations and artifacts. Rather than seeing a one-way flow of knowledge and power from metropole to peripheries of empire, Parrish reveals an interdependent and horizontal exchange of data and curious matter between the virtuosi at the center of learning, London, and colonial subjects of all stripes: colonial male correspondents, female collectors, Indian testifiers, and black adepts. Parrish’s book won the 2005 Jamestown Prize, and it challenges us to reconsider sources of authority and appropriations of power in the early Anglo-American world.

Christopher Leslie Brown poses a simple question in Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. How in five short years did abolition of the slave trade go from being a theoretical issue in Great Britain to a popular national political movement? Yet identifying the causes that trigger individual action at a particular historical moment is one of the most perplexing problems a historian can confront. Brown locates people’s mindsets and the choices they made within the historical contingencies of the American Revolution, British imperial defeat, and rising evangelicalism. The political debates over subjects’ rights and the reaffirmation of English liberty and renovation of the imperial state in the aftermath of the war made targeting the abolition of the slave trade newly feasible. Conjointly, displaced black Loyalists agitated for land of their own, which coincided with imperial reformers’ interest in colonization in west Africa based on commerce and manufacturing, resulting in Sierra Leone. By embracing the cause of abolition, Anglican evangelicals and Quakers came to see the revitalization of personal and public morals as legitimating their involvement in politics, which led to the formation of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the 1787–1788 petition campaign that first put the issue for debate in Parliament. Brown concludes that the antislavery cause provided humanitarians, and ordinary English too, with moral capital that yielded its advocates prestige, authority, and a renewed sense of self-worth.

With the publication of The Papers of John Marshall, Volume XII: January 1831–August 1835, Charles F. Hobson has completed the editorial project of documenting Marshall’s life and career as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Covering his last four and a half years, this volume is particularly rich in glimpses of Marshall’s personal life and relationships—the loss of his beloved wife, Polly, the close, collegial friendship with Justice Joseph Story, dealings with his sons, and surgery for the removal of stones from his bladder. His sense of political devolution set in as he faced the ascendancy of Jacksonian democracy and presided over the last major cases of his career in 1831 and 1832, which concerned Cherokee removal.

Coming up this summer will be three new books for fall viewing. If you attended the Institute’s annual conference in Quebec in June or SHEAR in Montreal in July, you perhaps caught an early glimpse of these beauties.

Building on extensive archival research in court and other legal records, Sharon Block’s Rape and Sexual Power in Early America demonstrates that practices of sexual coercion were integral to marking racial, gender, and status hierarchies in British America.

In Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic, Mary Kelley recounts the creation of an educated class of women in the early Republic, who used the cultural, social, and economic capital of their schooling to redefine their own lives and the emerging civil society around them. Brendan McConville shatters historiographical icons in The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 by arguing that the Revolution’s prehistory is the story not of dawning republicanism but of waxing and waning monarchism and volatile emotional ties to the king.

Editor of Publications

Assistant Editor of Publications

All books are available from the University of North Carolina Press

• Charles F. Hobson, ed., The Papers of John Marshall, Volume XII: January 1831–August 1835. Cloth: $80.00 (Associates, $64.00).
• Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Cloth: $55.00 (Associates, $44.00); paper: $22.50 (Associates, $18.00).
• Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World.Cloth: $49.95 (Associates, $39.96); paper: $22.50 (Associates, $18.00).
• Clare A. Lyons, Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730! 1830. Cloth: $55.00 (Associates, $44.00); paper: $22.50 (Associates, $18.00).
• Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity. Cloth: $49.95 (Associates, $39.96); paper: $22.50 (Associates, $18.00).
• Bernard L. Herman, Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City. Cloth: $45.00 (Associates, $36.00).
• Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850. Cloth: $59.95 (Associates, $47.96); paper: $24.95 (Associates, $19.96).
• Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority. Cloth: $39.95 (Associates, $31.96).
• Peter E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century. Cloth: $59.95 (Associates, $47.96); paper: $24.95 (Associates, $19.96).
• Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. Cloth: $55.00 (Associates, $44.00); paper: $22.50 (Associates, $18.00).
• Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638. Cloth: $49.95 (Associates, $39.96).

• Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (1996). Paper: $27.50 (Associates, $22.00).
• Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 (1959).Paper: $22.50 (Associates, $18.00).
• Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781–1788 (1961), with a New Foreword by Edward Countryman. Paper: $19.95 (Associates, $15.96).

Order from Teresa Thomas, UNC Press, c/o Longleaf Services, Post Office Box 8895, Chapel Hill, NC 27515-8895. Please make your checks payable to Longleaf Services, Inc. For credit card orders by phone: (800) 848-6224 (8:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m. E.S.T.); by fax: (800) 272-6817. Associates should specify their Associate membership for discount. Please add postage: $5.00 USPS or $6.00 UPS for first book, plus $1.00 for each additional book. Overseas postage: $8.00 for first book plus $1.00 for each additional book. North Carolina residents should add appropriate state sales tax.