More importantly, our misappropriation of “puritan” has allowed scholars to ignore and the public to misunderstand religion.

Depending on one’s relationship to the monetary regime, coining could either appear a heinous offense that threatened the ruling order by undermining public trust in its currency, or a creative solution to the shortage of specie across much of the Atlantic world.

Indeed, early American salt makers exploited productive precedents established by generations of people who had engaged with salt resources for thousands of years. This deeper history of salt shaped space, relations, and power dynamics during the eighteenth century in ways both explicit and obscure.

In the crested buttes and slot canyons of the Internet that comprise the academic blogosphere, pseudonymity has been controversial.

Clothing studies are too often overlooked by historians and even material culture scholars. Kate Haulman makes an overdue and important […]

Why are early Americanists so obsessed with region—with geography, in short—rather than with chronology?

Mather, like most other Christians of the time, also believed that racial equality before God did not demand equality on Earth–and, in particular, that it was wholly compatible with the institution of slavery.

“As a result of their proximity to legal proceedings, many tavern keepers worked as common lawyers in addition to running their hostels.”

When they arrived in Virginia, Africans joined a society that was divided between master and white servant, a society with such contempt for white servants that masters were not punished for beating them to death.

Teaching in historical clothing helps to tell the story of how wider societal transitions affected the lives of ordinary people.

“Jefferson repeatedly relied on the common symbol of homespun, much as he wore the best clothes he could find while in France, but when he dressed even further down as president he knew that his slippers would be understood differently by different people.”

The reasons for keeping funeral broadsides may have been genealogical: the lyrical remembrance of ancestors perhaps struck a balance between the heraldic crests found in living rooms across America and the magnetic poetry on the fridge.

Last spring, the campus I have called home for the last twenty years suffered an unprecedented act of violence.

Increase Mather’s primary target was “Mixt or Promiscuous Dancing” of men and women together.

Like the agents and reagents of a chemical demonstration, Winthrop’s specimens illustrated a fundamental transformation as they were unpacked from their crates: not a transformation in their material state, per se, but rather an alteration of the New World environment and the political economy of colonial New England according to Winthrop’s careful designs.

Is there anything more ludicrous than the present day barbeque contests in which contestants are prohibited from supplying meat that might be more sapid than those of their fellows?

Why does any piece of the past survive?

Indians and English people shared a measure of common ground in their understanding of animals.

…the discourse of safety pioneered by the insurance industry brought about important transformations in urban design, architecture, and public health.

Ultimately, what seems to distinguish sacred violence from other acts of aggression is not its form but its intensity.

Although Puritans designed their service in direct opposition to the Catholic mass, its practitioners’ version of the Lord’s Supper had more in common with the mass than they wanted to admit.

“The thing is a fake from beginning to end,” Corning replied.

Reading a 1959 article about a 1639 miscarriage in 2011 reveals how little the discourse about women’s bodies evolves over three hundred and twenty years.

It seemed to me that the conditions of cancer and captivity shared physical, emotional, and spiritual correspondences.

The English Puritans who founded Massachusetts in 1630 formed a society as committed to religion as any in history. But for them, marriage was a civil union, a contract, not a sacred rite.

He was a man stretched between worlds: one of cautious belief, another of passion and sentiment; one of rational learning, another of devotion and deep emotion.

Those Separatists who emigrated directly from England and those who had just left Leyden, Holland, would have been equals in their ability to recognize that whaling could be an immensely profitable business.

Rice revolutionized life in Carolina, making the colony the richest in British North America. South Carolina also became home to the American mainland’s most brutal slave regime.

There was only one source of value in coin, Locke was saying, and that was its silver content.

A strange and memorable thing. After outpourings of prayer, with the utmost fervor and fasting, there appeared an Angel, whose face shone like the noonday sun. His features were those of a man, and beardless; his head encircled by a splendid tiara; on his shoulders were wings; his garments were white and shining; his robe reached to his ankles; and about his loins was a belt not unlike the girdles of the peoples of the East.

Isn’t barbecue one of the few foods prepared and enjoyed by all Americans regardless of color?

Newell’s harrowing evidence effectively demonstrates the ruthlessness by which English settlers engineered expropriation of Indian bodies, forcing them into servitude and slavery.

Under the specter of witches’ meetings said to be aimed at destroying the village ministry, an unprecedented and momentous claim, the New England tradition of legal caution towards witchcraft accusations completely evaporated.

Godbeer likens examining seventeenth-century witch trials through the surviving transcripts to watching “narrow-beamed spotlights that play upon an otherwise darkened landscape” . . .

“Did Moncacht-apé really make this transcontinental journey nearly a century before Lewis and Clark?

Recent scholarship reminds us how eighteenth-century letters were produced and consumed very differently than we might imagine, certainly in the Native communities of New England.

When read closely, the 1670 deed challenges our tendency to see deeds as merely evidence of Indians’ capitulation to colonial rule.

The book’s contribution is not that it places Native Americans at center stage … but that it highlights inter-Indian diplomacy and other forms of interaction between Native peoples.

Did fugitive slaves find haven on naval ships? And […] could I trace the lives of some of the colored mariners I had identified from other sources?

To plan for the observation of the events central to the history of seventeenth-century New England, a partnership of organizations and individuals was formed as New England Beginnings in 2015.

Material culture interfered with the seemingly inexorable rise of racialism in Louisiana, creating its own chronology, and highlighting the uneven development and fractured character of the process of racialization in North America.

Sinéad Morrissey pays homage to revolution and to pattern-breaking, considered through a jigsaw puzzle mapping North America.

“When Puritans saw specters of witches and Indians assembled in military companies, heard trumpets mustering them to meetings, or cried out that invisible attackers were tearing them to pieces, they were articulating the beliefs of their ancestors in England as well as their own New England assumptions.”

Manegold crafts a narrative not stuffed with jargon but filled with lively prose that not only links the reader to past events but illustrates their connection to modern-day issues.

A “Topping People” could well be considered the definitive insider’s take on the eighteenth-century Virginia elite.

By 1776, backcountry Indian-hating had become a patriotic virtue as quintessentially American as independence, self-sacrifice, and egalitarianism.

Resistant to quantification or even to classification, emotions are a slippery topic for any scholar at any time, and particularly so for historians.

Capitalism and the state were not (and are not) separate and autonomous operations, and “free trade” was sometimes combined with military aggression.

In the early years both Native Americans and Europeans were proud, suspicious, and ill-informed.

It is this messy interplay between the words of the minister and the experience of the hearer that produces the lived truth or application of the sermon.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

I first came across Thomas Harriot’s strange and wonderful account, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), in the large, sepia-toned Dover edition—”The Complete 1590 Theodor de Bry Edition”—on the shelves of the university bookstore.

The Website provides a taste of the abundant repository of sources available at the various Bethlehem archives.

John Dixon’s welcome study of Cadwallader Colden is the most comprehensive of the few biographies we have of this important North Briton colonial.

The labor theory of settlement contains some conflicts with the standard liberal account.

… when you visit Digital Paxton—which you can do from your desktop or your smartphone—you’ll automatically enter the introductory path.

If newspaper producers had aspirations to grandeur in their self-presentation, readers took a somewhat dimmer view.

“Convinced of their superior might, the British decided they could do as they pleased. After all, with the French gone, they were now the only game in town. It was time for the Indians to bend to their rules.”

My primary goal was to understand how impressment worked, not to settle once and for all the question of “how bad was it?”

“[I]f justice—holding the guilty accountable—is actually a social priority, is it not possible that knowledge of a defendant’s past might further that end?”

In his new, excellent book on Puritanism, Baird Tipson emphasizes that this life of faith accrued assurance of salvation over the long haul. Conversion was not a moment; it was more like momentum.

Wigginton reveals the many different kinds of American women—including women of color, lower-status women, and dissenting or exiled women—who participated in the public dialogues that helped to constitute an American sense of national identity.

Women poets were under-recognized experts and artists in the forms associated with their homes and neighborhoods, the realms where they held power and influence.

Dutch tolerance is best understood as an elastic system whose properties must be inferred from the historical record of the homeland as well as that of each colony.

Anne was oppressed and it is difficult for me to write her. I don’t want to oppress her further and […]

If a decade ago some folks were wondering why we had stopped taking religion seriously as a legitimate academic topic, today many are taking religion seriously enough to be willing to tip one of the sacred cows of Enlightenment modernity itself: that cow being, of course, secularism’s sense of its total victory.

At the heart of Commerce by a Frozen Sea is the beaver hat, which by the seventeenth century had become an essential […]

After reading Van Engen’s iconoclastic work, it is difficult to remember why New England Calvinists are so often caricatured as cold and unfeeling.

For many readers, the most eye-opening revelation of this book will be Osborn’s evolving position on slavery.

Lawmakers believed that men who fathered children had fulfilled a patriotic duty, which they continued to pursue by providing for their families.

Alcoholic beverages for most people were food, prepared in the same kitchens by the same people who cooked the spoon bread, stirred the porridge, and roasted the meat.

Neither natural magic nor the occult sciences such as alchemy and astrology (excepting only judicial astrology) were seen as incompatible with Reformed religion in the seventeenth century.

After the provisions trade with Cape Breton had been reduced to a trickle following its prohibition by the New York General Assembly, the French enemy was supplied by way of the neutral Dutch and Danish islands in the West Indies.

For Vowell, everything is always happening and always all at once. Her explicitly ethical and transhistorical interpretive method accounts for her unapologetically anachronistic style.

There is much more to know about the enigmatic George Whitefield, as new books by Kidd and Parr amply demonstrate.

“In animadverting upon the acts of our ancestors, it is not to censure them as sinners above all others . . . ”

Ask the Author invites a group of distinguished scholars of Revolutionary America to participate in a forum on the continuing importance of The Stamp Act Crisis.

Jodi Schorb extends and revises the historiography of literacy, punishment, and incarceration during the long eighteenth century in British North America and the early United States.

In this erudite, thoughtful, and at times sparkling study, Simon Newman—author of noteworthy earlier books on festive culture in the […]

Swashbucklers, rogues, and scoundrels—the legacy of early modern sea rovers in popular culture has made piracy basically synonymous with villainy. […]

The continental versus Atlantic debate is more about historiography than history.

What role did trade play in connecting South Carolina to the greater Southeast? How were these economic exchanges understood and depicted? What type of information did trade offer the English? How were those far-reaching networks regulated?

The cast of characters in Robert Love’s Warnings is astonishing. William Collier, a British veteran of the Seven Years’ War, journeyed to Boston from as far as South Carolina and East Florida in hopes of obtaining passage back to England.

Notetaking and Sermon Culture in Puritan New England

In memory of the unnamed woman branded Y, sent in 1719 from Barbados to Kittery, Massachusetts, Province of Maine.

While many aspects of early American life were bound by geography, many others transcended it.

If Mather’s portrait inspires reverence, another object associated with him helps bring him down a bit from his lofty position: his childhood highchair

You don’t show up in a predominantly Muslim country during Ramadan and just start asking questions.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Entering the world of big money meant encountering the challenges of empire.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“When he first met them, Hesselius found Indians repulsive.”

In truth, I run with the Atlanticist crowd for a selfish reason: because Atlantic history allows me to be in two places at once. And by “be,” I mean “be,” as in “exist or live,” or better yet, “belong.”

My search for Mehetabel’s diary had entailed a good six months of concentrated—and at times seemingly futile—effort. When I finally held it in my hands, however, every moment of that search seemed worthwhile.

“In effect, the cemetery becomes a history laboratory where students can chart and graph gravestone styles and inscriptions according to the specific increments in time in which they first appear, reach the height of popularity, and finally fade out.”

Linnaeus, sitting at home in Uppsala while his students traveled all over the world collecting natural objects for him, could be quite peevish and demanding.

The anti-Indian sublime was as much about lambasting particular non-Indians as dividing whites from Indians.

The growth of the English-Indian slave trade after 1659 laid the groundwork for a series of deadly epidemics at the end of the seventeenth century.

Why was it, then, that such reverential colonists came to desecrate the king?

The devotional culture of early New England did not predict or facilitate a straight line from sin to salvation.

Norumbega Harmony is a choral ensemble organized at Wellesley College in 1976. Since the beginning we have sung weekly in […]

Colonial newspapers generally located maps with goods that in turn were associated with literacy and refinement, in particular with interior decoration and visual culture.

Between the lines, buried deep in the least likely passages, among small tidbits of oral lore, they can be heard but only faintly.

I am now intrigued, as a textbook coauthor, by how readily many of my peers still dismiss the enterprise of textbook writing.

Hesperus was founded as a baroque ensemble in Arlington, Va., in 1979, but quickly expanded its repertoire to include colonial […]

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“With the cities’ growing political awareness and new methods and ideas, Bridenbaugh celebrates them as the seedbeds of a nascent American identity, the Enlightenment in the New World, the American Revolution, and its concurrent social transformations.”

Because of the importance of the region for so many diverse polities, DuVal is able to make her case more strongly that the Arkansas Valley was itself the center of North America for its Indian and European actors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

By broadening her narrative to encompass the wider urban context in which the trials took place, Lepore brilliantly reveals what theatrical plays men like Horsmanden saw, what accounts of other slave conspiracies they read about in local newspapers (most especially the recent plots and rebellions in Antigua and South Carolina), and how they regarded other faiths.

Caron’s speculation and his reliance on outdated literature lead him to significant interpretive errors.

This Article is Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Huge crowds in The Hague, Leiden, Haarlem, and Amsterdam welcomed Piet Hein as a hero. His valor appealed to the imagination of many young men, especially orphans, who broke off their vocational training to sign up as sailors with the WIC.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Advocates of paper money did not deny its risks, but they also saw it as a resource that could expand the money supply and, in so doing, facilitate exchange and stimulate enterprise.

The Scenographia Americana corresponded closely with imperial optimism in 1768.

Kamil… goes against the grain in arguing that metaphysics, not skepticism, laid the basis for early modern “multiculturalism…”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The social center of Havana was in its harbor. Something interesting happened there almost every day.”

Historical inquiry may often be blocked by the prior agenda of the historian.

The most significant accomplishment of America’s Founding Food is the truly impressive collection of lively and illuminating primary-source accounts.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

The design of the communion spoon and the silver beaker reflected the political values that held together the first British Empire.

Anne Bradstreet was a deeply ambitious poet who was far from surprised by the publication of her first book.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

The book’s a genre send-up: a mystery, with traces of the gothic; a love story, with an overwrought romantic sensibility; a picaresque, somewhat overblown.

The Newberry Consort presents historically informed programs of early music, often drawn from the collections at the Newberry Library, through […]

“The New England Primer emerged from, in David E. Stannard’s phrase, ‘a world in which the presence of early death was everywhere.'”

Taking Native culture seriously requires that we abandon the attempt to put Native wine into European bottles.

Pestana argues convincingly that the policies pursued by each English settlement were based in a pragmatic appraisal of local circumstances and interests.

We know a fair amount about theories of trial procedure, but scarcely anything about the courtrooms in which lawyers and judges practiced.

“Boni did not seek to replace titles, but to induce librarians to supplement their collections with cabinets full of some of the world’s greatest and rarest works—and, of course, the patented machines necessary to read them.”

Sweet provides rich evidence of slaves running away and thus directing their resistance towards individual masters rather than the slave system itself, but he broadens this view by arguing that the general threat of slave revolt was partly directed at a complicit public that failed to recognize the rights of slaves.

“Professor Kars, too, tries to walk the path between cultural conflict and structural change, with limited success.”

“In the course of this densely packed narrative, readers will find fresh insights into topics ranging from the political relations among Indian confederacies to the biographies of the English men who sponsored this sinister business.”

“Taylor’s text ends not, as almost all colonial American histories do, with a chapter on the coming of the Revolution, but with one that examines the expansion of various European empires to the West Coast of North America and to the islands of the Pacific Ocean.”

At its best, the book finds a kind of poetry in the act of diving into the wreck of the archive, the dark grottoes of history where competing narratives jostle, where myth and “truth” hopelessly blur.

David and Ginger Hildebrand co-founded the Colonial Music Institute, which conducts and promotes research and offers information and resource materials […]

If John Adams recognized Winthrop as a Founding Father, and was joined in that judgment by a growing number of Americans in the nineteenth century, how and when did we manage to forget Winthrop?

To materiality Anderson therefore joins intertextuality: every page of his analysis is marked by an acute sense of how Bradford as reader and writer draws on and responds to an extensive archive of printed books and manuscripts.

Parent turns to Marxist theory to structure his answer to the question of the origins of the slave system with markedly mixed results.

Is it possible to write an intellectual history of early American theology that keeps readers awake, and indeed eager to turn each page?

Calloway introduces the reader to the most up-to-date findings and interpretations in archaeology, but orients his own analysis around the theme of movement.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“When the legislature was occupied with other matters, the inattention permitted a kind of anarchy. Nowhere is the fluidity more apparent than in the naming of streets.”

“Why do coffee and business seem to go together so naturally?”

“Taverns were far more numerous than any other type of architectural space besides dwellings.”

“[S]eventeenth-century Protestants believed that the spirit of a dead person might appear in order to draw attention to “an injustice that might not be detected by other means’.”

“Public and private money spent amusing the millions with past-based reality television represents money not spent on other kinds of public-history experiments.”

Common-place asks Victoria Freeman, author of Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America (South Royalton, Vt., forthcoming November 2002), what kinds of responsibility do descendants of dispossessors have to history and to native peoples today?

Crucible of War has nearly as much to teach about form and style as it does about the Seven Years’ War.

of course, Crucible of War is both imperfect in form, and incomplete–with respect to the scholarship it seeks to synthesize, no less than to the immensity of the event it tries to capture.

I quickly realized that much more so than my other public-history projects, Colonial House had to weave historical accuracy with modern-day reality.

“Who was Mercy Lewis, and why did she hate George Burroughs?”

“The result is that often promised but rarely achieved object: an interdisciplinary project with contributions from scholars of history, art history, the history of science, and literature.”

“In the period of initial contacts with Europeans, Native Americans lacked any exposure at all to Variola; when it arrived in a given locality, virtually the entire population was likely to be infected . . . “

“All of these books provide extended meditations on the ambiguities of power. Empire itself is an endlessly variant term, always imprecisely invoked and vaguely understood.”

“[S]erving in a patrol may have reaffirmed Southern notions of community, kinship, masculinity, and honor.”

“I could not overlook the biggest anachronism of all–that of character.”

Crucible of War begins with hints toward the possibility of a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent (to steal a phrase from Kant), but ends firmly within the paradigm of American history.

In the 1970s a number of excellent books, using the same kinds of sources and responding to the same social movements in contemporary American society, began to open up the study of slave life in the British West Indies. The new literature on slave life in the thirteen mainland British colonies and in the antebellum South was even larger and livelier. Did I really have anything fresh to contribute?

As rendered by Morgan, English-style freedom was naive, arrogant, and ethnocentric, qualities that readers in the post-Vietnam United States might have recognized with shame.

Or How the Puritans Boogied Down, Down, Down Derry Down

    What’s a synthesis? Everyone knows the smart aleck answer: history without original research. This conviction fuels the disparaging […]

From the model of scholarship and teaching he provided, I learned that the greatest of historians–such as himself–do not tolerate intellectual arrogance whether in others or in themselves.

Heroic in its synthesizing, perhaps, but not in its style, this book conceives of people lifelessly and in the aggregate.

For all their decadent, Italianate, Miltonic overtones, the serial-killer books by Thomas Harris resurrect the gritty frontier narratives of the Wild West and Indian fighting that are the literary precursors to later American gothic and horror fiction.

Editors’ note: as many readers may be aware, Professor Bellesiles’s research methods and scholarly standards have become the subject of considerable debate since Common-place first published this essay in September 2000, the same month that Arming America appeared in print. In October 2002, Bellesiles resigned his faculty position at Emory University. Both the report of the independent investigative committee whose findings led to his resignation, and Bellesiles’s response are available online.

Death of a Notary offers a particularly good example of the possibilities of microhistory, although Merwick never refers to her study in those terms. Merwick’s careful reconstruction of Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam’s life illustrates the rewards of microhistory’s emphasis on rigorous interpretation of small details and small subjects.

Franklin figures prominently in Jon Butler’s Becoming America, a wide-ranging and spirited book that describes the emergence of the first modern culture in a way that will satisfy many readers and provoke others.

This issue Common-place holds a round table discussion of Fred Anderson’s new history of the Seven Years’ War, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. This forum expands on an earlier round table discussion of Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War featuring the authors and moderator Pauline Maier, hosted by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.

Massachusetts, after all, had not executed anyone for rape in twenty-seven years . . . Yet now . . . the community took a daughter’s accusation against her father so seriously that it sent a man to the gallows. What circumstances, we wondered, led to this extraordinary outcome?

Since the ability to impregnate a woman was a crucial component of manhood in seventeenth-century America, T could be at best only a partial man by colonial standards.

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