In Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives leading scholars offer interdisciplinary revisionist essays on the political, cultural and social history of early Maryland and Virginia, calling special attention to the importance of power relations, reproductive politics, and identity politics in the shaping of the area. Using primary documents, which are included with the essays, this collection suggests that the multicultural Chesapeake created significant cultural, intellectual, and social norms that shaped the diverse world of the American people. This anthology uses these perspectives to represent the multitude of experiences in the region, and in doing so captures the essence of race, class, and ethnic and gender diversity that made up life in early Chesapeake Maryland and Virginia. Students and scholars in American history, as well as anthropology, will find this book essential in understanding the political history of the colonial Chesapeake area.

Proof that the renaissance in colonial Chesapeake studies is flourishing, this collection is the first to integrate the immigrant experience of the seventeenth century with the native-born society that characterized the Chesapeake by the eighteenth century. Younger historians and senior scholars here focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people: why they came to the Chesapeake; how they adapted to their new world; who prospered and why; how property was accumulated and by whom. At the same time, the essays encompass broader issues of early American history, including the transatlantic dimension of colonization, the establishment of communities, both religious and secular, the significance of regionalism, the causes and effects of social and economic diversification, and the participation of Indians and blacks in the formation of societies. Colonial Chesapeake Society consolidates current advances in social history and provokes new questions.

As Britain’s dominant port for the slave trade in the eighteenth century, Liverpool is crucial to the study of slavery. And as the engine behind Liverpool’s rapid growth and prosperity, slavery left an indelible mark on the history of the city. This collection of essays, boasting an international roster of leading scholars in the field, sets Liverpool in the wider context of transatlantic slavery. The contributors tackle a range of issues, including African agency, slave merchants and their society, and the abolitionist movement, always with an emphasis on the human impact of slavery.

Slavery and Emancipation is a comprehensive collection of primary and secondary readings on the history of slaveholding in the American South combining recent historical research with period documents. The most comprehensive collection of primary and secondary readings on the history of slaveholding in America. Combines recent historical research with period documents to bring both immediacy and perspective to the origins, principles, realities, and aftermath of African-American slavery. Includes the colonial foundations of slavery, the master-slave relationship, the cultural world of the planters, the slave community, and slave resistance and rebellion. Each section contains one major article by a prominent historian, and three primary documents drawn from plantation records, travellers' accounts, slave narratives, autobiographies, statute law, diaries, letters, and investigative reports.

This book is a unique archaeological study of a British aristocratic family in eighteenth century Chesapeake.

What are the origins of slavery and race-based prejudice in the mainland American colonies? How did the Atlantic slave trade operate to supply African labor to colonial America? How did African-American culture form and evolve? How did the American Revolution affect men and women of African descent? Previous editions of this work depicted African-Americans in the American mainland colonies as their contemporaries saw them: as persons from one of the four continents who interacted economically, socially, and politically in a vast, complex Atlantic world. It showed how the society that resulted in colonial America reflected the mix of Atlantic cultures and that a group of these people eventually used European ideas to support creation of a favorable situation for those largely of European descent, omitting Africans, who constituted their primary labor force. In this fourth edition of African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution, acclaimed scholar Donald R. Wright offers new interpretations to provide a clear understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and the nature of the early African-American experience. This revised edition incorporates the latest data, a fresh Atlantic perspective, and an updated bibliographical essay to thoroughly explore African-Americans’ African origins, their experience crossing the Atlantic, and their existence in colonial America in a broadened, more nuanced way.

Explores the particular beliefs of Maryland's Catholic laborers, who were at odds with the traditional English Catholic gentry, in opposition to their crown, parliament, clergy and papacy, and sympathetic to the Protestant Antinomians seeking to challenge the established order of Maryland's church and state. The economic, intellectual, legal and social history of the Maryland Catholics during the English Civil War is compared to related developments in Europe, Latin America, and Africa.

Lorena Walsh offers an enlightening history of plantation management in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, ranging from the founding of Jamestown to the close of the Seven Years' War and the end of the "Golden Age" of colonial Chesapeake agriculture. She argues that, in the mid-17th century, planter elites deliberately chose to embrace slavery. Accounts of personal and family fortunes among the privileged minority and the less well documented accounts of the lives of the enslaved workers add a personal dimension to more concrete measures of planter success or failure.

Originally published as a collection in 2006, this volume discusses the development of the Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century, looking at issues such as how African societies reacted to the trade; the economic origins of black slavery in the British West Indies; and the growth of plantations responding to changes in European diet – particularly the rise of the sugar economy. The volume also has an introduction by the editor commenting on the contribution each essay makes.