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Itinerant Observations in America presents a vivid record of life in colonial America that is filled with poetic imagery and realistic and original descriptions of towns, buildings, and fortifications. This and the complimentary poems Kimber wrote during his American excursion are highly crafted works. Kimber produced a delightful factual account interspersed with rhapsodic descriptions of the natural environment and containing a thrilling sea voyage.

Weaving Indian and Euro-American histories together in this groundbreaking book, Sami Lakomaki places the Shawnee people, and Native peoples in general, firmly at the center of American history. The book covers nearly three centuries, from the years leading up to the Shawnees' first European contacts to the post-Civil War era, and demonstrates vividly how the interactions between Natives and newcomers transformed the political realities and ideas of both groups. Examining Shawnee society and...

This book seeks to discover when, why, and how Delaware Valley communities, between 1621, when the Dutch West India Company issued instructions for the security and defense of the Delaware River until 1815, as the region abandoned its Committee of Defense of the Delaware at the end of the War of 1812, first used military force to repel invasion in times of war and suppress insurrection in peacetime. It traces how these mid-Atlantic communities confronted constant threats from real or imagined en...

In this sweeping history, leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the U.S. occupation in 1915. The Haitians also...

This annotated edition of The Scarlet Letter enhances student and reader comprehension of a standard work studied in literature classes, exploring names, places, objects, and allusions. Makes the novel more easily understandable for a 21st-century audienceProvides annotations that identify historical events, persons, and objects as well as allusions to the Bible and other texts familiar to Hawthorne's contemporariesPresents an account of Hawthorne's life and career that helps to explain his int...

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

This book argues that coffeehouses and the coffee trade were central to the making of the Atlantic world in the century leading up to the American Revolution. Fostering international finance and commerce, spreading transatlantic news, building military might, determining political fortunes and promoting status and consumption, coffeehouses created a web of social networks stretching from Britain to its colonies in North America. As polite alternatives to taverns, coffeehouses have been hailed...

By 1756 the wilderness war for control of North America that erupted two years earlier between France and England had expanded into a global struggle among all of Europe's Great Powers. Its land and sea battles raged across the North American continent, engulfed Europe and India, and stretched from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific waters. The new conflict, now commonly known as the Seven Years' War of 1756-1763, was a direct continuation of the last French and Indian War. T...

The Widow Washington is the first life of Mary Ball Washington, George Washington’s mother, based on archival sources. Her son’s biographers have, for the most part, painted her as self-centered and crude, a trial and an obstacle to her son. But the records tell a very different story. Mary Ball, the daughter of a wealthy planter and a formerly indentured servant, was orphaned very young and grew up in an atmosphere of work, frugality, and piety. She married the older planter Augustine Washingto...

The Salem Witch Crisis offers a readable narrative of events surrounding the Massachusetts witch trials of 1692. Studies of early American witchcraft in the past two decades have been specialized ones. They demonstrated the possibility that economic conflict, gender and generational hostility, religious divisions, fears of witch cults, and challenges to the legal system sometimes were involved in witchcraft accusations. Collectively, these numerous scholarly monographs and journal articles have...