Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (1986), Provides a Classic Account of the Damage

Chapter 1

Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (1986), provides a classic account of the damage caused by European pathogens.

Brain Fagan, Chaco Canyon (2005), presents current archaeological understandings on the Chaco Canyon site.

Mark Kurlansky, Cod (1997), explores the far-reaching historical impact of a transatlantic fish trade that preceded European colonization.

Kent G. Lightfoot and Otis Parrish, Californian Indians and Their Environment (2009), synthesizes recent scholarship on the diverse social and ecological world of ancient California.

Charles C. Mann, 1491 (2006), opens a wide-angle lens on America before Columbus.

Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures (2008), explores the cultural significance of chocolate and tobacco in the Columbian Exchange.

Michael Oberg, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand (2008), reinterprets the course and significance of the abortive English colony at Roanoke.

Timothy Pauketat, Cahokia (2009), relates the remarkable archaeological rediscovery of an ancient city along the Mississippi River.

Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution (2011), draws powerful parallels between Europe and North America in the periods prior to their contact.

Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence (1984), considers the significance of early European colonization in North America in terms of the politics and world views of indigenous peoples.

Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country (2010), explores the importance of captivity to the history of Indian politics before the arrival of the Europeans.

Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold (2004), offers a new narrative of the establishment of New Spain.

John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (1992), highlights the active role of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade and in the larger reshaping of the Americas beginning in the fifteenth century.

Frederick Hadleigh West (ed.), American Beginnings (1996), explores the prehistoric world of Beringia.

Chapter 2

Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire (2004), highlights the role of domestic animals in the colonization of the Chesapeake and New England.

Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs (1996), puts gender relations at the heart of the emergence of Virginia’s tri-racial society.

William Cronon, Changes in the Land (1983), explores the environmental impact of European land uses in colonial New England.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed (1989), traces four distinct colonial settlements in English North America to four different regions and cultures in England.

Allison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (1999), studies the records of men and women who left London in 1635 for England’s new overseas possessions.

Lisa Gordis, Opening Scripture (2003), explores the complex ways in which New England Puritans interpreted the Bible.

Ramon Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away (1991), shows the centrality of disputes about marriage, gender, and sexuality to the history of Spanish-Indian relations in New Mexico.

David D. Hall, A Reforming People (2011), highlights the political reforms enacted by New England’s colonial leaders.

Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue (1997), illuminates the intense political conflicts over speech in seventeenth-century New England.

Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (1987), grounds the history of New England witchcraft accusations in the social history of gender relations.

Andrew Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (1995), covers the dramatic uprising against Spanish authority in New Mexico.

Jill Lepore, The Name of War (1998), stresses the role of language and writing in the cultural history of King Philip’s War.

Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), remains an influential interpretation of early Virginia society and the origins of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Mark A. Peterson, The Price of Redemption (1998), explores the relationship between commercial growth and religious values in Puritan New England.

Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (2001), considers what the establishment of European colonies looked like from the perspective of Native Americans.

Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (2004), presents the early history of New Amsterdam.

Chapter 3

Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (1998), puts the rise of slavery in North America in hemispheric context.

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (1998), presents an extensive and highly influential account of colonial slavery.

T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “MyneOwne Ground” (1980), studies the lives and prospects of Africans and their descendants in eastern Virginia, before the entrenchment of chattel slavery in the Chesapeake.

David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage (2006), synthesizes decades of scholarship on New World slavery, especially on the evolution of Western attitudes about race and freedom.

Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks (1998), emphasizes the retention of particular African religious traditions, languages, and ethnic identities among slaves in North America.

Douglas Grant, The Fortunate Slave (1968), reconstructs the life of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo.

Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery (2004), surveys the history of African Americans in colonial New York City.

Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black (1968), uncovers deep patterns of anti-African prejudice in English thought prior to the entrenchment of North American slavery.

Peter Kolchin, American Slavery (1993), provides a comprehensive survey of colonial and antebellum slavery in the lands that became the United States.

Jill Lepore, New York Burning (2006), explores the alleged slave conspiracy that rocked New York in 1741.

Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), explains the decline of indentured servitude and the entrenchment of slavery in the Chesapeake after Bacon’s Rebellion.

Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint (1998), compares slavery in the Chesapeake and the

Carolina Lowcountry—the two largest slave systems in colonial North America.

William D. Piersen, Black Yankees (1988), examines the history of slaves and free blacks in colonial New England.

Mark Michael Smith (ed.), Stono (2005), presents documents and essays on the Stono Rebellion of 1739.

MechalSobel, The World They Made Together (1987), demonstrates the striking similarities and convergences of black and white experience, world view, and culture in eighteenth-century Virginia.

Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery (2007), provides a powerful and detailed history of the Middle Passage.

Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (1997), follows the history of the massive forced migration of Africans to the Americas as it unfolded on four continents and across the ocean.

Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial America (2005), summarizes the basic trends and patterns in American slavery prior to the Revolution.

Peter Wood, Black Majority (1974), charts the formation of colonial South Carolina’s distinctive slave system.

Chapter 4

Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America (1986), sketches broad patterns in eighteenth-century immigration to the American colonies.

Marilyn C. Baseler, Asylum for Mankind (1998), surveys the role of refugees in the settlement and growth of the British colonies.

Kathleen Brown, Foul Bodies (2009), explores changing standards, ideals, and practices of personal hygiene in early America.

Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America (1992), follows the spreading cultural ideal of gentility among colonists, expressed in such things as homes, gardens, educational attainments, and personal conduct.

Jon Butler, Becoming America (2000), surveys the changes in material, spiritual, and political life that helped form a new American identity in the century before the American Revolution.

David Conroy, In Public Houses (1992), illuminates the growing popularity and importance of taverns in the eighteenth century.

James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten (revised ed. 1996), demonstrates how archaeological discoveries illuminate the study of the material life of early America.

Jack Greene, Pursuits of Happiness (1988), remains an influential interpretation of the period.

Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul (1998), studies the changing world views reflected in crime narratives of the colonial era.

David Hancock, Oceans of Wine (2009), traces the networks of consumption and culture that formed around the commerce in Madeira wine.

Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (2000), emphasizes the importance of land to the expectations and experiences of the British immigrants who came to North America.

Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family (1988), underscores the novel and influential family values of the Friends in the Middle Colonies.

Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism (2003), defines the core features of evangelical religious expression and belief in eighteenth-century Britain and its American colonies.

Mary P. Ryan, Mysteries of Sex (2006), includes a survey of changes in gender roles in colonial farm families.

David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (1997), examines coffeehouses and other urban institutions where ideas and information circulated among colonial elites.

Chapter 5

Fred Anderson, The Crucible of War (2000), provides a comprehensive narrative of the French and Indian War.

Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman (2007), demonstrates the importance of women to white-Indian diplomacy in the Texas borderlands, a region where natives were politically dominant.

T. H. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution (2004), illuminates the growth of Britain’s Empire of Goods in the North American context.

Colin Calloway, The Scratch of the Pen (2006), treats 1763 as a pivotal year in the history of North America.

Michael Coe, The Line of Forts (2006), surveys archaeological findings on the sites where British forts stood in western New England during the mid-1700s.

Konstantin Dierks, In My Power (2009), probes the development of correspondence and communications infrastructure in the eighteenth century.

Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven (2004), maps the fate and significance of Pontiac’s Rebellion.

John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme (2005), details the saga of the Acadian expulsion and diaspora.

PekkaHämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (2008), charts the growth of an overlooked political power in the American Plains and Southwest.

Paul Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire (2011), explores European perceptions of the western parts of North America.

James Merrell, Into the American Woods (1999), studies the administrators, entrepreneurs, and converts who negotiated the fragile peace between natives and settlers in the Pennsylvania frontier.

Jane Merritt, At the Crossroads (2003), connects deteriorating white-Indian relations in the Middle Colonies to new ideas about race.

Peter Moogk, La Nouvelle France (2000), explores the cultural identity of French colonists in Canada.

Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (2001), narrates the European colonization of North America from a native perspective and presents the French and Indian War as a turning point in that story.

Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors (2009), shows how fear of Indian attack united a diverse society of immigrants to the British colonies in the 1750s.

Timothy J. Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire (2000), places the Albany Plan of Union in the context of imperial politics and disputes some of the received wisdom regarding its provenance.

Richard White, The Middle Ground (1991), highlights the role of culture in the diplomatic politics of the Great Lakes region in order to rethink the history of white-Indian relations in North America before 1815.

Chapter 6

Colin Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995), considers the revolutionary crisis from a native perspective.

Caroline Cox, A Proper Sense of Honor (2007), highlights the role of social conflict within George Washington’s army.

Douglas Egerton, Death or Liberty (2009), reconstructs the experiences and dilemmas of African Americans during the Revolution.

Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana (2001), considers the impact of a smallpox outbreak on the struggle for independence.

David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom (2005), shows how two key ideas of the revolutionary cause were represented visually.

Edward Gray and Jane Kamensky (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution (2013), presents a wide-ranging collection of recent scholarly perspectives on the experience of the war and the meaning of the struggle for independence.

Woody Holton, Forced Founders (1999), argues that material interests, and not just abstract ideas, underlay revolutionary sentiment in Virginia.

Edward Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (2005), explores the literary and political innovations of Paine’s writings.

Holly Mayer, Belonging to the Army (1999), reconstructs the world of female “camp followers” in the war.

Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause (1982), remains an influential comprehensive narrative of the American Revolution.

Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible (1979), locates revolutionary sentiment within the context of egalitarian sentiments and struggles in colonial seaports.

Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth (2006), rethinks the significance of the war from the perspective of African Americans, including those who joined the British side.

Andrew O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided (2000), explains why Britain’s Caribbean colonies did not join in the revolt against the empire.

Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution (2001), offers a detailed survey of the crisis and the war, emphasizing the experiences of women, the poor, the enslaved, and Indians.

William Warner, Protocols of Liberty (2014), analyzes the infrastructure and the shared ideas about communications that undergirded the movement for independence.

Alfred Young, Masquerade (2004), interprets the broader significance of the life and celebrity of Deborah Sampson, the cross-dressing soldier.

Chapter 7

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1991), explores the process by which nations (including the United States) were imagined into being.

Carol Berkin, A Brilliant Solution (2002), narrates the history of the framing and ratification of the Constitution.

Richard Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary (2003), presents a biographical look at the unsung founding father, Gouverneur Morris. See also William Howard Adams, Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life (2003).

Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power (1991), surveys the diffusion of information in early America.

Martin Bruckner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America (2006), charts the new ways of writing about space during the colonial and early national periods.

Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word (1986), examines the importance of novels and novel-reading to the founding of the new nation.

Robin Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (2006), stresses the interrelation between tax debates and the politics of slavery in the new republic.

Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence (1993), places Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence within the context of late-eighteenth-century ideas about speech and oral performance.

Pauline Maier, American Scripture (1997), demystifies the nation’s founding document and details the process by which it acquired its current status as sacred text.

Jack Rakove, Original Meanings (1996), provides a thorough study of the constitutional and legal thought of the framers.

Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art, (2009), explores the broader cultural context for the ratification debates.

Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media (2004), emphasizes the role of the Post Office in the creation of a new culture of information exchange and the history of state-sponsored communication.

David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes (1997), studies the practices and rituals that created national identity during and after the American Revolution.

Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic (1990), critically dissects the relationship between print and the public sphere in colonial politics and between personal authorship and political authority in the Constitution.

Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British (2011), considers the everyday difficulties faced by the Americans in pursuing cultural independence from Britain.

Larzer Ziff, Writing in the New Nation (1991), offers a literary take on the role of writing in the early republic.

Chapter 8

Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics (2002), describes the role of elite women in building an informal public sphere during the early years of Washington, D.C.

Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost (1999), follows the spread of market relations in Kentucky and the transformation of the trans-Appalachian West.

Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent (1989), provides some crucial background for understanding the significance of the 1811 New York grid.

Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror (2009), emphasizes the role of Federalist revulsion to the French Revolution in the development of American humanitarianism.

David B. Davis, Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations (1990), probes the relationship between the American Revolution and those in France and Haiti.

Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (2006), reinterprets the role of slavery in shaping tax politics during the early national era.

Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (1993), surveys the political history of the new republic.

Simon Finger, The Contagious City (2012), provides a medical history of the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic.

David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (1978), offers some historical perspective on changing attitudes toward old age.

Craig Thompson Friend (ed.), The BuzzelAboutKentuck(1996), collects recent scholarship on life in Kentucky during this era.

David Hamer, New Towns in the New World (1990), compares attitudes and images toward the urban frontier in North America, Australia, and New Zealand in the nineteenth century.

Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist (2008), presents the dramatic story of Andrew Dexter’s Exchange Coffee House in Boston, which brings together the history of city growth, banking, party politics, land speculation, and the Embargo.

Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause (2003), reconsiders the Louisiana Purchase within the context of Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about land, slavery, and freedom.

Sarah Luria, Capital Speculations (2005), interprets the ideas and ideologies behind the planning of Washington, D.C.

Clare Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble (2006), reconstructs the tolerant and boisterous sexual culture of Philadelphia in the early national era.

Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom (1988), documents the history of Philadelphia’s free black community.

Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth (2006), argues that the 1790s presented a real opportunity to eliminate slavery throughout the United States.

Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories (2009), follows the themes of fever and race relations in Philadelphia’s literature.