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The Strange Genius of Mr. O
The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity
by Carolyn Eastman
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
When James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as Mr. O, counting the nation's leading politicians and intellectuals among his admirers. And then, like so many meteoric American luminaries afterward, he fell from grace.
The Strange Genius of Mr. O is at once the biography of a remarkable performer--a gaunt Scottish orator who appeared in a toga--and a story of the United States during the founding era. Ogilvie's career featured many of the hallmarks of celebrity we recognize from later eras: glamorous friends, eccentric clothing, scandalous religious views, narcissism, and even an alarming drug habit. Yet he captivated audiences with his eloquence and inaugurated a golden age of American oratory. Examining his roller-coaster career and the Americans who admired (or hated) him, this fascinating book renders a vivid portrait of the United States in the midst of invention.
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Mining Language
Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World
by Allison Margaret Bigelow
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism.
By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.
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In Public Houses
Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts
by David W. Conroy
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
In this study of the role of taverns in the development of Massachusetts society, David Conroy brings into focus a vital and controversial but little-understood facet of public life during the colonial era. Concentrating on the Boston area, he reveals a popular culture at odds with Puritan social ideals, one that contributed to the transformation of Massachusetts into a republican society. Public houses were an integral part of colonial community life and hosted a variety of official functions, including meetings of the courts. They also filled a special economic niche for women and the poor, many of whom turned to tavern-keeping to earn a living. But taverns were also the subject of much critical commentary by the clergy and increasingly restrictive regulations. Conroy argues that these regulations were not only aimed at curbing the spiritual corruption associated with public houses but also at restricting the popular culture that had begun to undermine the colony's social and political hierarchy. Specifically, Conroy illuminates the role played by public houses as a forum for the development of a vocal republican citizenry, and he highlights the connections between the vibrant oral culture of taverns and the expanding print culture of newspapers and political pamphlets in the eighteenth century.
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Encyclopédie Noire
The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World
by Sara E. Johnson
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Mederic Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Mery is bound to appear. As a lawyer, philosophe, and Enlightenment polymath, Moreau created and compiled an immense archive that remains a vital window into the social, political, and intellectual fault lines of the Age of Revolutions. But the gilded spines and elegant designs that decorate his archive obscure the truth: Moreau's achievements were predicated upon the work of enslaved people and free people of color. Their labor afforded him the leisure to research, think, and write. Their rich intellectual and linguistic cultures filled the pages of his most applauded works. Every beautiful book Moreau produced contains an embedded story of hidden violence.
Sara Johnson's arresting investigation of race and knowledge in the revolutionary Atlantic surrounds Moreau with the African-descended people he worked so hard to erase, immersing him in a vibrant community of language innovators, forgers of kinship networks, and world travelers who strove to create their own social and political lives. Built from archival fragments, creative speculation, and audacious intellectual courage, Encyclopedie noire is a communal biography of the women and men who made Moreau's world.
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A Revolutionary People At War
The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783
by Charles Royster
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
In this highly acclaimed book, Charles Royster explores the mental processes and emotional crises that Americans faced in their first national war. He ranges imaginatively outside the traditional techniques of analytical historical exposition to build his portrait of how individuals and a populace at large faced the Revolution and its implications. The book was originally published by UNC Press in 1980.
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Saltwater
Grief In Early America
by Mary Eyring
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
Death is easy to locate in the archives of early America. Grief is not so easily pinned down. Yet it was a near constant companion for the men and women that settled in what is now New England. Their lives were a kaleidoscope of small-scale tragedies that suffused and colored everyday experiences. This pervasive suffering was exacerbated by unfamiliar environments and exposure to the anguish of Indigenous and Black Americans, unsettling well-worn frameworks to produce new dimensions of everyday grief. Mary Eyring traces these fleeting, often mundane, glimpses of grief in the archives-a note about a sailor maimed during a whaling voyage, the hint of a miscarriage in a court record, the suggestion of domestic violence within a tract on witchcraft, a house sent up in flames at the opening of a captivity narrative-to show how the cumulative weight of grief created a persistent mood that influenced public and private affairs in sweeping ways largely unexamined by previous scholars.
With piercing insights and evocative prose, Eyring follows grief across generations and oceans to reveal a language of suffering understood and shared across diverse early American communities.
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Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain
Migration and the Making of the United States
by Samantha Seeley
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
Who had the right to live within the newly united states of America?
In the country's founding decades, federal and state politicians debated which categories of people could remain and which should be subject to removal. The result was a white Republic, purposefully constructed through contentious legal, political, and diplomatic negotiation. But, as Samantha Seeley demonstrates, removal, like the right to remain, was a battle fought on multiple fronts. It encompassed tribal leaders' fierce determination to expel white settlers from Native lands and free African Americans' legal maneuvers both to remain within the states that sought to drive them out and to carve out new lives in the West. Never losing sight of the national implications of regional conflicts, Seeley brings us directly to the battlefield, to middle states poised between the edges of slavery and freedom where removal was both warmly embraced and hotly contested.
Reorienting the history of U.S. expansion around Native American and African American histories, Seeley provides a much-needed reconsideration of early nation building.
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Seeing Red
Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America
by Michael John Witgen
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and U.S. development in the Old Northwest. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves. Outnumbering white settlers well into the nineteenth century, they leveraged their political savvy to advance a dual citizenship that enabled mixed-race tribal members to lay claim to a place in U.S. civil society. Telling the stories of mixed-race traders and missionaries, tribal leaders and territorial governors, Witgen challenges our assumptions about the inevitability of U.S. expansion.
Deeply researched and passionately written, Seeing Red will command attention from readers who are invested in the enduring issues of equality, equity, and national belonging at its core.
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Benjamin Franklin and Polly Baker
by Max Hall
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
Hall has made the first detailed investigation of Polly Baker. It leads through the exciting world of eighteenth-century journalism, literature, and statecraft. Ben Franklin occupies a position in the story second only to Polly Baker herself. Evident throughout is the tendency of people, even in an age of enlightenment, to believe what they see--provided they see it in print.
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Adapting to a New World
English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake
by James Horn
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
Often compared unfavorably with colonial New England, the early Chesapeake has been portrayed as irreligious, unstable, and violent. In this important new study, James Horn challenges this conventional view and looks across the Atlantic to assess the enduring influence of English attitudes, values, and behavior on the social and cultural evolution of the early Chesapeake. Using detailed local and regional studies to compare everyday life in English provincial society and the emergent societies of the Chesapeake Bay, Horn provides a richly textured picture of the immigrants' Old World backgrounds and their adjustment to life in America. Until the end of the seventeenth century, most settlers in Virginia and Maryland were born and raised in England, a factor of enormous consequence for social development in the two colonies. By stressing the vital social and cultural connections between England and the Chesapeake during this period, Horn places the development of early America in the context of a vibrant Anglophone transatlantic world and suggests a fundamental reinterpretation of New World society.
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Voices of the Enslaved
Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana
by Sophie White
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded.
Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved draws us into Louisiana's courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators.
Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive.
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Captive Cosmopolitans
Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery
by Mary E. Hicks
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
From the bustling ports of Lisbon to the coastal inlets of the Bight of Benin to the vibrant waterways of Bahia, Black mariners were integral to every space of the commercial South Atlantic. Navigating this kaleidoscopic world required a remarkable cosmopolitanism-the chameleonlike ability to adapt to new surroundings by developing sophisticated medicinal, linguistic, and navigational knowledge. Mary E. Hicks shows how Portuguese slaving ship captains harnessed and exploited this hybridity to expand their own traffic in human bondage. At the same time, she reveals how enslaved and free Black mariners capitalized on their shipboard positions and cosmopolitan expertise to participate in small-scale commodity trading on the very coasts where they themselves had been traded as commodities, reshaping societies and cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, as Hicks argues, the Bahian slave trade was ruthlessly effective because its uniquely decentralized structure so effectively incorporated the desires and financial strategies of the very people enslaved by it. Yet taking advantage of such fraught economic opportunities ultimately enabled many enslaved Black mariners to purchase their freedom. And, in some cases, they became independent transatlantic slave traders themselves.
Hicks thus explores the central paradox that defined the lives of the captive cosmopolitans and, in doing so, reveals a new history of South Atlantic slavery centered on subaltern commercial and cultural exchange.
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Allegories of Encounter
Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities
by Andrew Newman
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
Presenting an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to colonial America's best-known literary genre, Andrew Newman analyzes depictions of reading, writing, and recollecting texts in Indian captivity narratives. While histories of literacy and colonialism have emphasized the experiences of Native Americans, as students in missionary schools or as parties to treacherous treaties, captivity narratives reveal what literacy meant to colonists among Indians. Colonial captives treasured the written word in order to distinguish themselves from their Native captors and to affiliate with their distant cultural communities. Their narratives suggest that Indians recognized this value, sometimes with benevolence: repeatedly, they presented colonists with books.
In this way and others, Scriptures, saintly lives, and even Shakespeare were introduced into diverse experiences of colonial captivity. What other scholars have understood more simply as textual parallels, Newman argues instead may reflect lived allegories, the identification of one's own unfolding story with the stories of others. In an authoritative, wide-ranging study that encompasses the foundational New England narratives, accounts of martyrdom and cultural conversion in New France and Mohawk country in the 1600s, and narratives set in Cherokee territory and the Great Lakes region during the late eighteenth century, Newman opens up old tales to fresh, thought-provoking interpretations.
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Unmoored
The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America
by Ana Schwartz
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
New England's Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. In a remote, politically volatile frontier, settlers gambled that sincerity would reinforce social cohesion and shore up communal happiness. Sincere feelings and the discursive practices that manifested them promised a safe haven in a world of grinding uncertainty.
But as Ana Schwartz demonstrates, if sincerity promised much, it often delivered more: it bred shame and resentment among the English settlers and, all too often, extraordinary violence toward their Algonquian neighbors and the captured Africans who lived among them. Populating her "city on a hill" with the stock characters of Puritan studies as well as obscure actors, Schwartz breathes new life into our understanding of colonial New England.
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Race Traffic
Antislavery And The Origins Of White Victimhood, 1619-1819
by Gunther Peck
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
Fantasies of white slavery and the narratives of victimhood they spawn form the foundation of racist ideology. They also obscure the lived experience of trafficked servants and sailors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gunther Peck moves deftly between the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds to discover where and when people with light skin color came to see themselves as white. Separating fact from fiction, and paying close attention to the ideological work each performs, Peck shows how laboring women and men leveraged their newfound whiteness to secure economic opportunity and political power.
Peck argues that whiteness emerged not as a claim of racial superiority but as a byproduct of wide-ranging and rancorous public debate over trafficking and enslavement. Even as whiteness became a legal category that signaled privilege, trafficking and race remained tightly interwoven. Those advocating for the value of whiteness invoked emotionally freighted victimhood, claiming that so-called white slavery was a crime whose costs far exceeded those associated with the enslavement of African peoples across the Americas. Peck helps us understand the chilling history that produced the racist ideology that still poisons our politics in the present day.
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A Common Grave
Being Catholic In English America
by Susan Juster
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
From Nevis to Newfoundland, Catholics were everywhere in English America. But often feared and distrusted, they hid in plain sight, deftly obscuring themselves from the Protestant authorities. Their strategies of concealment, deception, and misdirection frustrated colonial census takers, and their presence has likewise eluded historians of religion, who have portrayed Catholics as isolated dots in an otherwise vast Protestant expanse.
Pushing against this long-standing narrative, Susan Juster provides the first comprehensive look at the lived experience of Catholics-whether Irish, African, French, or English-in colonial America. She reveals a vibrant community that, although often forced to conceal itself, maintained a rich sacramental life saturated with traditional devotional objects and structured by familiar rituals. As Juster shows, the unique pressures of colonial existence forced Catholics to adapt and transform these religious practices. By following the faithful into their homes and private chapels as they married, christened infants, buried loved ones, and prayed for their souls, Juster uncovers a confluence of European, African, and Indigenous spiritual traditions produced by American colonialism.
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Religion and the American Revolution
An Imperial History
by Katherine Carté
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
For most of the eighteenth century, British protestantism was driven neither by the primacy of denominations nor by fundamental discord between them. Instead, it thrived as part of a complex transatlantic system that bound religious institutions to imperial politics. As Katherine Carte argues, British imperial protestantism proved remarkably effective in advancing both the interests of empire and the cause of religion until the war for American independence disrupted it. That Revolution forced a reassessment of the role of religion in public life on both sides of the Atlantic. Religious communities struggled to reorganize within and across new national borders. Religious leaders recalibrated their relationships to government. If these shifts were more pronounced in the United States than in Britain, the loss of a shared system nonetheless mattered to both nations.
Sweeping and explicitly transatlantic, Religion and the American Revolution demonstrates that if religion helped set the terms through which Anglo-Americans encountered the imperial crisis and the violence of war, it likewise set the terms through which both nations could imagine the possibilities of a new world.
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Thirteen Clocks
How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence
by Robert G. Parkinson
Part of the Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and t series
In his celebrated account of the origins of American unity, John Adams described July 1776 as the moment when thirteen clocks managed to strike at the same time. So how did these American colonies overcome long odds to create a durable union capable of declaring independence from Britain? In this powerful new history of the fifteen tense months that culminated in the Declaration of Independence, Robert G. Parkinson provides a troubling answer: racial fear. Tracing the circulation of information in the colonial news systems that linked patriot leaders and average colonists, Parkinson reveals how the system's participants constructed a compelling drama featuring virtuous men who suddenly found themselves threatened by ruthless Indians and defiant slaves acting on behalf of the king.
Parkinson argues that patriot leaders used racial prejudices to persuade Americans to declare independence. Between the Revolutionary War's start at Lexington and the Declaration, they broadcast any news they could find about Native Americans, enslaved Blacks, and Hessian mercenaries working with their British enemies. American independence thus owed less to the love of liberty than to the exploitation of colonial fears about race. Thirteen Clocks offers an accessible history of the Revolution that uncovers the uncomfortable origins of the republic even as it speaks to our own moment.
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