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In the early years of the Republic, as Americans tried to determine what it meant to be an American, they also wondered what it meant to be an American child. A defensive, even fearful, approach to childhood gave way to a more optimistic campaign to integrate young Americans into the Republican experiment. This book unearths the experiences of and attitudes about children and youth during the decades following the American Revolution. Beginning with the Revolution itself, the book explores a broad range of topics, from the ways in which American children and youth participated in and learned from the revolt and its aftermaths, to developing notions of “ideal” childhoods as they were imagined by new religious denominations and competing ethnic groups, to the struggle by educators over how the society that came out of the Revolution could best be served by its educational systems. The book concludes by foreshadowing future “child-saving” efforts by reformers committed to constructing adequate systems of public health and child welfare institutions. Rooted in the historical literature and primary sources, the book is a key resource in our understanding of origins of modern ideas about children and youth and the conflation of national purpose and ideas related to child development.

Cowboys are an American legend, but despite ubiquity in history and popular culture, misperceptions abound. Technically, a cowboy worked with cattle, as a ranch hand, while his boss, the cattleman, owned the ranch. This book casts aside romantic and one-dimensional images of cowboys by analyzing the class, gender, and labor histories of ranching in Texas during the second half of the nineteenth century. As working-class men, cowboys showed their masculinity through their skills at work as well as public displays in town. But what cowboys thought was manly behavior did not always match those ideas of the business-minded cattlemen, who largely absorbed middle-class masculine ideals of restraint. Real men, by these standards, had self-mastery over their impulses and didn't fight, drink, gamble, or consort with “unsavory” women. The book explores how, in contrast to the mythic image, from the late 1870s on, as the Texas frontier became more settled and the open range disappeared, the real cowboys faced increasing demands from the people around them to rein in the very traits that Americans considered the most masculine.

This book is about slavery, emancipation, and black freedom in the North, and Rhode Island in particular. It uses an economic lens to explore the ways the business begets experience, specifically investigating how the business of slavery (economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of the slaveholding in the Americas such as the buying and selling of people, food, and goods) shaped the establishment and growth of life-long inheritable bondage in the North. Moreover, it explores how those businesses affected the process of emancipation, and black freedom. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders invested in the business of slavery; however, nowhere was this business more important. During the colonial period, West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses the key ingredient for their number one export—rum. Moreover, more than sixty percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode Island. In the antebellum era, Rhode Islanders were also the leading producers of “negro cloth,” a coarse wool-cotton material made especially for enslaved blacks in the American South. This book argues that business of slavery encouraged slaveholding, slowed emancipation and led to circumscribed black freedom; nevertheless, enslaved and free black people pushed back against their bondage and the restrictions placed on their freedom.

Throughout history the British Atlantic has often been depicted as a series of well-ordered colonial ports that functioned as nodes of Atlantic shipping, where orderliness reflected the effectiveness of the regulatory apparatus constructed to contain Atlantic commerce. Colonial ports were governable places where British vessels, and only British vessels, were to deliver English goods in exchange for colonial produce. Yet behind these sanitized depictions lay another story, one about the porousness of commercial regulation, the informality and persistent illegality of exchanges in the British Empire, and the endurance of a culture of cross-national cooperation in the Atlantic that had been forged in the first decades of European settlement and still resonated a century later. This book examines the networks that connected British settlers in New York and the Caribbean and Dutch traders in the Netherlands and in the Dutch colonies in North America and the Caribbean, demonstrating that these interimperial relationships formed a core part of commercial activity in the early Atlantic World, operating alongside British trade. The book provides unique consideration of how local circumstances shaped imperial development, reminding us that empires consisted not only of elites dictating imperial growth from world capitals, but also of ordinary settlers in far-flung colonial outposts, who often had more in common with—and a greater reliance on—people from foreign empires who shared their experiences of living at the edge of a fragile, transitional world.

In the seventeenth-century English Atlantic, religious beliefs and practices played a central role in creating racial identity. English Protestantism provided a vocabulary and structure to describe and maintain boundaries between insider and outsider. This book peels back the layers of conflicting definitions of bodies and competing practices of faith in the puritan Atlantic, demonstrating how the categories of “white,” “black,” and “Indian” developed alongside religious boundaries between “Christian” and “heathen” and between “Catholic” and “Protestant.” The book focuses on three communities of Protestant dissent in the Atlantic World: Bermuda, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. In this “puritan Atlantic,” religion determined insider and outsider status: at times Africans and natives could belong as long as they embraced the Protestant faith, while Irish Catholics and English Quakers remained suspect. Colonists' interactions with indigenous peoples of the Americas and with West Central Africans shaped their understandings of human difference and its acceptable boundaries. Prayer, religious instruction, sexual behavior, and other public and private acts became markers of whether or not blacks and Indians were sinning Christians or godless heathens. As slavery became law, transgressing people of color counted less and less as sinners in English puritans' eyes, even as some of them made Christianity an integral part of their communities. This transformation proceeded unevenly but inexorably during the long seventeenth century.

In the early decades of the American Republic, American soldiers demonstrated and defined their beliefs about the nature of American republicanism and how they, as citizens and soldiers, were participants in the republican experiment through their service. This book examines the relationship between soldier and citizen from the War of Independence through the first year of the Civil War. It analyzes an idealized republican ideology as a component of soldiering in both peace and war, and argues that American soldiers' belief system—the military ethos of republicanism—drew from the larger body of American political thought. This ethos illustrated and informed soldiers' faith in an inseparable connection between bearing arms on behalf of the republic, and earning and holding citizenship in it. Despite the undeniable existence of customs, organizations, and behaviors that were uniquely military, the officers and enlisted men of the regular army, states' militias, and wartime volunteers were the products of their society, and they imparted what they understood as important elements of American thought into their service. The book maps five broad, interrelated, and mutually reinforcing threads of thought constituting soldiers' beliefs: virtue; legitimacy; self-governance; glory, honor, and fame; and the national mission. Spanning periods of war and peace, these five themes constituted a coherent and long-lived body of ideas that informed American soldiers' sense of identity for generations.

In the fifty years after the Constitution was signed in 1787, New York City grew from a port town of 30,000 to a metropolis of over half a million residents. This rapid development transformed a once tightknit community and its religious experience. The effects were felt by Trinity Episcopal Church, which had presented itself as a uniting influence in New York, which connected all believers in social unity in the late colonial era. As the city grew larger, more impersonal, and socially divided, churches reformed around race and class-based neighborhoods. Trinity's original vision of uniting the community was no longer possible. This book examines the histories of four famous church congregations in early Republic New York City—Trinity Episcopal, John Street Methodist, Mother Zion African Methodist, and St. Philip's (African) Episcopal—to uncover the lived experience of these historical subjects, and just how religious experience and social change connected in the dynamic setting of early Republic New York. The book reveals how these city churches responded to the transformations from colonial times to the mid-nineteenth century. It also adds new dynamics to the stories of well-known New Yorkers such as John Jay, James Harper, and Sojourner Truth. More importantly, the book connects issues of race, class, and gender, urban studies, and religious experience, revealing how the city shaped these churches, and how their respective religious traditions shaped the way they reacted to the city.

During the Civil War, the Union army appeared cohesive enough to withstand four years of grueling war against the Confederates and to claim victory in 1865. But fractiousness bubbled below the surface of the North's presumably united front. Internal fissures were rife within the Union army: class divisions, regional antagonisms, ideological differences, and conflicting personalities all distracted the army from quelling the Southern rebellion. This book reveals that these internal battles were fought against the backdrop of manhood. Clashing ideals of manliness produced myriad conflicts, as when educated, refined, and wealthy officers (“gentlemen”) found themselves commanding a hard-drinking group of fighters (“roughs”)—a dynamic that often resulted in violence and even death. Based on extensive research into heretofore ignored primary sources, the book uncovers holes in our understanding of the men who fought the Civil War and the society that produced them.

Democracy is the rule of the people. But what exactly does it mean for a people to rule? Which practices and behaviors are legitimate, and which are democratically suspect? We generally think of democracy as government by consent; a government of, by, and for the people. This has been true from John Locke through Abraham Lincoln to the present day. Yet in understandably stressing the importance of popular consent, we commonly downplay or even denigrate the role of dissent in democratic governments. This book explores the idea that the people most important in a flourishing democracy are those who challenge the status quo. The American political radicals of the 1790s understood, articulated, and defended the crucial necessity of dissent to democracy. By returning to their struggles, successes, and setbacks, and analyzing their imaginative arguments, the book recovers a more robust approach to popular politics, one centered on the ever-present need to challenge the status quo and the powerful institutions that both support it and profit from it. Dissent has rarely been the mainstream of democratic politics. But the figures explored here—forgotten farmers as well as revered framers—understood that dissent is always the essential undercurrent of democracy and is often the critical crosscurrent. Only by returning to their political insights can we hope to reinvigorate our own popular politics.

Cannibalism, for medieval and early modern Europeans, was synonymous with savagery. Humans who ate other humans, they believed, were little better than animals. The European colonizers who encountered Native Americans described them as cannibals as a matter of course, and they wrote extensively about the lurid cannibal rituals they claim to have witnessed. This book argues that the persistent rumors of cannibalism surrounding Native Americans served a specific and practical purpose for European settlers. These colonizers had to forge new identities for themselves in the Americas and find ways to not only subdue but also co-exist with native peoples. They established hierarchical categories of European superiority and Indian inferiority upon which imperial power in the Americas was predicated. The book focuses on how gender, race, and imperial power intersect within the figure of the cannibal. It reads cannibalism as a part of a dominant European binary in which civilization is rendered as male and savagery is seen as female, and argues that as Europeans came to dominate the New World, they continually rewrote the cannibal narrative to allow for a story in which the savage, effeminate, cannibalistic natives were overwhelmed by the force of virile European masculinity.