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During the many years that they were separated by the perils of the American Revolution, John and Abigail Adams exchanged hundreds of letters. Writing to each other of public events and private feelings, loyalty and love, revolution and parenting, they wove a tapestry of correspondence that has become a cherished part of American history and literature. With Abigail and John Adams, this book mines those familiar letters to a new purpose: teasing out the ways in which they reflected—and helped transform—a language of sensibility, inherited from Britain but, amid the revolutionary fervor, becoming Americanized. Sensibility—a heightened moral consciousness of feeling, rooted in the theories of such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Adam Smith, and including a “moral sense” akin to the physical senses—threads throughout these letters. As the book makes clear, sensibility was the fertile, humanizing ground on which the Adamses not only founded their marriage, but also the “abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity” they and their contemporaries hoped to plant at the heart of the new nation. Bringing together their correspondence with a wealth of fascinating detail about life and thought, courtship and sex, gender and parenting, and class and politics in the revolutionary generation and beyond, the book draws a portrait of a marriage endangered by separation, yet surviving by the same ideas and idealism that drove the revolution itself.

Since the dawn of the republic, faith in social equality, religious freedom, and the right to engage in civic activism have constituted the national creed of the United States. This book traces the evolution of these ideals, exploring the impact of philanthropy and volunteerism on America from 1700 to 1865. What results is a vital reevaluation of public life during the pivotal decades leading up to the Civil War. The market revolution, participatory democracy, and voluntary associations have all been closely linked since the birth of the United States. This book explores the relationships among these three institutions, showing how charities and reform associations forged partnerships with government, provided important safety valves for popular discontent, and sparked much-needed economic development. The book also demonstrates how the idea of philanthropy became crucially wedded to social activism during the Jacksonian era. It explores how acts of volunteerism and charity became involved with the abolitionist movement, educational patronage, the struggle against racism, and female social justice campaigns. What resulted, it contends, were heated political battles over the extent to which women and African Americans would occupy the public stage.

This book analyzes an extraordinary change that occurred during the American Revolution. Early in the conflict, colonial legal systems grew weak or collapsed. But by the end of the war, Americans managed to rebuild working legal structures like courts and legislatures that enjoyed popular support. The book examines one province in detail, New York, to understand the fundamental process of transforming a popular uprising into a new legal order. Movements around the world have confronted that challenge as they try to develop new legal structures during periods of great upheaval. New Yorkers faced this same difficulty during the American Revolution, and they overcame it a surprising way: property redistribution. By seizing property from British sympathizers and selling it to supporters of independence, New Yorkers managed to build the legal institutions of a revolutionary state. Moreover, New Yorkers were not alone as every state enforced some form of redistribution during and after the war. By examining this process in New York, the book explores the critical change from revolutionary disorder to legal order. The book also highlights a central paradox of the revolutionary era. An aggressive, partisan legal regime, rather than undermining the new state, actually stabilized it and generated support for the authority it wielded. In this way, property redistribution proved crucial to the foundation of American independence.

When Americans think of investment and finance, they think of Wall Street—though this was not always the case. During the dawn of the Republic, Philadelphia was the center of American finance. The first stock exchange in the nation was founded there in 1790, and around it the bustling thoroughfare known as Chestnut Street was home to the nation's most powerful financial institutions. This book recounts the history of Chestnut Street and its forgotten role in the birth of American finance. Philadelphia, known for its cultivation of liberty and freedom, blossomed into a financial epicenter during the nation's colonial period. The continent's most prodigious minds and talented financiers flocked to Philly in droves, and by the eve of the Revolution, the Quaker City was the most financially sophisticated region in North America. This book reveals how the city played a leading role in the financing of the American Revolution and emerged from that titanic struggle with not just the wealth it forged in the crucible of war, but an invaluable amount of human capital as well. This capital helped make Philadelphia home to the Bank of the United States, the U.S. Mint, an active securities exchange, and several banks and insurance companies—all clustered in or around Chestnut Street. But as the decades passed, financial institutions were lured to New York, and by the late 1820s only the powerful Second Bank of the United States upheld Philadelphia's financial stature. But when Andrew Jackson vetoed its charter, he sealed the fate of Chestnut Street forever.

Frontier Seaport begins by asking: when, how, to what degree, and with what consequences did “frontier” and “Atlantic” coexist in early Detroit? In six chapters, it argues that colonial Detroit's status as a successful fur-trading center, accessible via the Great Lakes, hastened the town's economic and cultural incorporation into the broader Atlantic world. Early chapters foreground Detroit's Atlantic connections, showing how they were strengthened by the settlement's positioning on the frontier. In turn, by 1780, almost 80 years after its founding by the French, British Detroit participated fully in the types of reciprocal, transoceanic commerce that characterized other North Atlantic settlements. Although economic and cultural inclusion came quickly, political incorporation took a slower and fickler course. The town's close proximity to Native groups, its physical separation from indifferent imperial powers, and repeated political upheavals made Detroiters resistant to complete assimilation into the broader Atlantic world. These are the subjects of later chapters, which foreground Detroit's frontier connections and localisms, establishing that they were created, strengthened, and ultimately eroded by its Atlantic associations. By the time of Michigan's U.S. statehood in 1837, Detroit's residual distinctiveness had waned, rendering the town reminiscent of any other American metropolis. In short, Frontier Seaport demonstrates that between 1701 and 1837, Detroit was a complicated geographic space as much tied to “empire” as to “frontier,” and as committed to attaining its own economic, political, and cultural prowess as it was to functioning in more traditionally colonial ways.

In the decades after the American Revolution, inhabitants of the United States began to shape a new national identity. Telling the story of this messy yet formative process, this book argues that ordinary men and women gave meaning to American nationhood and national belonging by first learning to imagine themselves as members of a shared public. The book shows that the creation of this American public — which only gradually developed nationalistic qualities — took place as men and women engaged with oratory and print media not only as readers and listeners but also as writers and speakers. It paints vibrant portraits of the arenas where this engagement played out, from the schools that instructed children in elocution to the debating societies, newspapers, and presses through which different groups jostled to define themselves — sometimes against each other. Demonstrating the previously unrecognized extent to which non-elites participated in the formation of our ideas about politics, manners, and gender and race relations, this book provides an unparalleled genealogy of early American identity.

The Province of Affliction explores the surprising roles that illness played in shaping the foundations of New England society and government from the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century. Considered healthier than residents in many other regions of early America, and yet still riddled with disease, New Englanders grappled steadily with what could be expected of the sick and what allowances could be made to them and their providers. The book integrates the history of disease into the narrative of early American cultural and political development, illuminating the fragility of autonomy, individualism, and advancement in this period. Each sickness in early New England created its own web of interdependent social relations that could both enable survival and set off a long bureaucratic struggle to determine responsibility for the misfortune. From families and households to townships, colonies, and states, illness both defined and strained the institutions of the day, bringing people together in the face of calamity, yet also driving them apart when the cost of persevering grew overwhelming. In the process, domestic turmoil circulated through the social and political world to permeate the very bedrock of early American civic life.

When we talk about the economy, “the market” is often just an abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma Hart argues that Britain’s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market’s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy. Hart’s book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America—places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans recreated or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. Since those earlier conventions tended to rely more heavily on regulations than their colonial offspring, what emerged in early America was a less fettered brand of capitalism. By the nineteenth century, this had evolved into a market economy that would not look too foreign to contemporary Americans. To tell this complex transnational story of how our markets came to be, Hart looks back farther than most historians of US capitalism, rooting these markets in the norms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. Perhaps most important, this is not a story of specific commodity markets over time, but rather is a history of the trading spaces themselves: the physical sites in which the grubby work of commerce occurred and where the market itself was born.

This book argues that repeated waves of frustrated urban development in the colonial Chesapeake region were critical to framing the political and economic structures of the region’s plantation society. Although the early Chesapeake never boasted major cities, intense debates over the spaces, processes, and consequences of urbanization between imperial officials, English merchants, and colonial factions persisted over two centuries. This was because, rather than being simply the product of deterministic geographic, social, and economic forces, towns and cities were institutional and legal forms of colonial space that were consciously crafted by colonists and officials in the struggle to define the nature of early modern empire. Exploring these contests reveals long-overlooked ways in which important questions about the imperial constitution and mercantilism were negotiated by ordinary people through the quotidian production of such spaces. The book demonstrates that the development of the rural tobacco plantation system, defined by the exploitation of enslaved labor on large estates by a well-connected imperial oligarchy, was a result of this process; it was not inevitable, but was honed in response to repeated efforts to reshape and redefine the economic, institutional, and political spaces of the Chesapeake. The book argues that these struggles were a crucial catalyst in the formation of a distinctive planter vision of civic order and imperial political economy that continued to shape southern planters’ agrarian republicanism after the American Revolution.