The enthralling story of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, an innovative, highly regarded, and successful woman plantation owner during the Revolutionary eraEliza Lucas Pinckney (1722'Äì1793) reshaped the colonial South Carolina economy with her innovations in indigo production and became one of the wealthiest and most respected women in a world dominated by men. Born on the Caribbean island of Antigua, she spent her youth in England before settling in the American South and enriching herself t...

The history of the 1788 Virginia Ratification Convention explores the Constitutional debates that decided the nation's fate and still resonate today.In May 1788, elected delegates from every county in Virginia gathered in Richmond where they would either accept or reject the highly controversial United States Constitution. The rest of the country kept an anxious vigil, keenly aware that without Virginia—the young Republic's largest and most populous state—the Const...

Surprisingly, no previous book has ever explored how family life shaped the political careers of America's great Founding Fathers—men like George Mason, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. In this original and intimate portrait, historian Lorri Glover brings to life the vexing, joyful, arduous, and sometimes tragic experiences of the architects of the American Republic who, while building a nation, were also raising families.The costs and consequen...

Between the generations of Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, the culture of white Southerners experienced significant changes, including the establishment of a normative male identity that exuded confidence, independence, and power. Southern Sons, the first work in masculinity studies to concentrate on the early South, explores how young men of the southern gentry came of age between the 1790s and the 1820s. Lorri Glover examines how standards for manhood came about, how young...

"A rip-snortin' story of shipwreck, intrigue, horror, courage, risk, luck and will . . . The authors have brought the drama in the Chesapeake alive." — Publishers WeeklyThe English had long dreamed of colonizing America, especially after Sir Francis Drake brought home Spanish treasure and dramatic tales from his raids in the Caribbean. Ambitions of finding gold and planting a New World colony seemed within reach when in 1606 Thomas Smythe extended overseas...

America’s War for Independence dramatically affected the speed and nature of broader social, cultural, and political changes including those shaping the place and roles of women in society. Women fought the American Revolution in many ways, in a literal no less than a figurative sense. Whether Loyalist or Patriot, Indigenous or immigrant enslaved or slave-owning, going willingly into battle or responding when war came to their doorsteps, women participated in the conflict in complex and va...

An authoritative assessment of the early American republic through the lens of genderWhat does it mean to study early American history through gender? The essays in this collection, written by the best emerging and established historians in the field, bring together women’s history with masculinity studies to showcase the transformative impact of gender history on our understanding of the early American republic. In addition to state-of-the-field historiographical ...

This rich collection of original essays illuminates the causes and consequences of the South's defining experiences with death. Employing a wide range of perspectives, while concentrating on discrete episodes in the region's past, the authors explore topics from the seventeenth century to the present, from the death traps that emerged during colonization to the bloody backlash against emancipation and civil rights to recent canny efforts to commemorate - and capitalize on - the region's de...