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Accolades for Early America’s Widening Compass

Steven W. Hackel’s Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 has earned recognition for the integration of colonial California into United States history, for a significant achievement in its core subject area of ethnohistory, and for its contribution to Latin American history. At their July meeting in Montreal, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic awarded Hackel the 2006 SHEAR James Broussard Best First Book Prize; at the November conference of the American Society for Ethnohistory, he accepted the 2006 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Prize, given for the best book-length work in the field of ethnohistory. And the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies bestowed on Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis its 2006 Hubert Herring Book Award for outstanding work on Latin America. Holly Brewer garnered a second award for By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority. In November the American Society for Legal History announced that she had won the 2006 Cromwell Prize from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, recognizing excellence in scholarship in the field of American legal history by a junior scholar. By Birth or Consent will be available in a paper edition at the beginning of 2007. In December Susan Scott Parrish received for American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, which honors outstanding scholarly contributions to interpreting the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.

Interventions

Clare A. Lyons received the 2007 James Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic for Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830. At this year's meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Martin Brückner was presented with the Louis Gottschalk Prize for The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity. The award recognizes an outstanding historical or critical study on the eighteenth century. Christopher Leslie Brown won two prizes from the American Historical Association for Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism: the James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize in the field of British, British Imperial, or British Commonwealth history.

The Old Dominion and New Orleans

Michael A. McDonnell’s The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia chronicles Virginia’s mobilization movements during the Revolutionary War. Virginia’s defense against British tyranny brought all of the colony’s disparate groups into action; the author weaves an interesting and complex narrative that emphasizes the interactions and reactions of all groups, from the enslaved to elite planters. By examining stories illustrating inequalities, class tensions, and differences in this heterogeneous and hierarchical society, the book focuses on the primary problems and anxieties of Virginia’s elite leadership. The Politics of War demonstrates how ordinary citizens changed the course of mobilization in Virginia, affecting the war in general and Virginia politics in particular. At times they paralyzed organized mobilization efforts, petitioned for changes in related laws, and violently and successfully protested against unjust statutes. The book uncovers and explicates shifting political power in the fledgling state and the emerging political culture of the war and postwar era.

In Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834, Emily Clark studies a female missionary enterprise in early America to illuminate the intersection of religion, gender, and race in the development of a French and Spanish colonial society. She considers the ramifications of cultural contact between a Catholic colony and the young American, Protestant Republic in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Masterless Mistresses describes the early modern French origins of Ursuline teaching nuns, traces the ways in which they and the people they taught were changed in the New World, and suggests how the encounter between nuns and republicanism in early national New Orleans complicated the history of American anti-Catholicism. It is the first full study of Catholic religious women in early America to investigate their role in social, cultural, racial, and political developments. Venturing beyond recent scholarship on the conversion of enslaved African Americans to evangelical Protestantism, Masterless Mistresses examines the emergence of a black Catholic community. The book pushes past parallel mainland colonial narratives to consider the juxtaposition and entwining of multiple colonial legacies that occurred in the early national United States.

Warren M. Billings has revamped an Institute classic, and we are pleased to present his new edition of The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1700. Since its appearance thirty years ago, the volume has achieved authority as a standard source of pri mary materials that early Americanists routinely cite in their own work. Using the observations, descriptions, and legal records of the English colonists themselves, this collection makes it possible to reconstruct the process by which Anglo-Virginians established order in Virginia during its first century of existence. Billings has carefully selected and brought together more than two hundred documents and organized them topically into ten chapters, each of which is introduced with an interpretive essay. Taken together, the brief, cogently written essays constitute a concise history of Virginia during the years 1606-1700. The 2007 edition boasts the addition of about thirty documents, an extended chronological reach, new chapter introductions, expanded lists of suggested readings, more illustrations, and an index.

With transatlantic history coming into its own and the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown this year, the appearance of The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624 is especially timely. These essays survey the Atlantic littoral on the eve of England's colonization of Virginia, as did the 2004 Institute conference for which they were originally drafted. Within the Ottoman Empire, West African kingdoms, European nations, the British Isles, and North and Central America, shifting forces and internal contests for political, economic, and cultural domination produced displacements and consolidations of power. Competition over resources and peoples had consequences for the convergence of Europeans, Indians, and Africans in the western hemisphere. The geopolitical realignments and socioeconomic reorganizations that occurred in these circum-Atlantic territories shaped the contacts between peoples of the eastern and western hemispheres and influenced the formation of New World societies. Edited by Peter C. Mancall, this volume creates a mosaic of the regions and influences in play that formed the context and impetus for the settlement at Jamestown in 1607.

Mendy C. Gladden
Acting Editor of Publications

New in Paper

Brendan McConville's The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 is now available in paperback. McConville's provocative study argues for a colonial political culture dominated by fervid attachment to British monarchs, not demands for rights or democracy.

All books are available from the University of North Carolina Press

  • Peter C. Mancall, ed., The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624. Cloth: $65.00 (Associates, $52.00); Paper: $27.50 (Associates, $22.00).
  • Warren M. Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1700. Revised edition. Cloth: $65.00 (Associates, $52.00); Paper: $24.95 (Associates, $19.96).
  • Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834. Cloth: $59.95 (Associates, $47.96); Paper: $22.50 (Associates, $18.00).
  • Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia. Cloth: $45.00 (Associates, $36.00).
  • Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776. Cloth: $39.95 (Associates, $31.96).
  • Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic. Cloth: $39.95 (Associates, $31.96).
  • Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America. Cloth: $45.00 (Associates, $36.00); Paper: $19.95 (Associates, $15.96).
  • 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 Saint 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).
New and Recent Paperback Edition
  • Brendan McConville, The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (2006). Paper: $21.95 (Associates, $17.56).
  • Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (2005). Paper: $24.95 (Associates, $19.96).
  • E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776-1790 (1961). Paper: $27.50 (Associates, $22.00).
  • 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 T. Thomas, UNCP, 116 South Boundary Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27515-2288. For credit card orders by phone: 800-848-6224; by fax: 800-272-6817. Associates should specify their Associate membership for discount. Please add $5.00 postage/.handling for first book, $1.00 for each additional book. North Carolina residents should add 6.5% sales tax.