Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit

Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit PDF Author: Lorena S. Walsh
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 080789592X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 736

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Book Description
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. Walsh focuses on the operation of more than thirty individual plantations and on the decisions that large planters made about how they would run their farms. She argues that, in the mid-seventeenth century, Chesapeake planter elites deliberately chose to embrace slavery. Prior to 1763 the primary reason for large planters' debt was their purchase of capital assets--especially slaves--early in their careers. In the later stages of their careers, chronic indebtedness was rare. Walsh's narrative incorporates stories about the planters themselves, including family dynamics and relationships with enslaved workers. Accounts of personal and family fortunes among the privileged minority and the less well documented accounts of the suffering, resistance, and occasional minor victories of the enslaved workers add a personal dimension to more concrete measures of planter success or failure.

Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit

Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit PDF Author: Lorena S. Walsh
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 080789592X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 736

Get Book

Book Description
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. Walsh focuses on the operation of more than thirty individual plantations and on the decisions that large planters made about how they would run their farms. She argues that, in the mid-seventeenth century, Chesapeake planter elites deliberately chose to embrace slavery. Prior to 1763 the primary reason for large planters' debt was their purchase of capital assets--especially slaves--early in their careers. In the later stages of their careers, chronic indebtedness was rare. Walsh's narrative incorporates stories about the planters themselves, including family dynamics and relationships with enslaved workers. Accounts of personal and family fortunes among the privileged minority and the less well documented accounts of the suffering, resistance, and occasional minor victories of the enslaved workers add a personal dimension to more concrete measures of planter success or failure.

The Overseers of Early American Slavery

The Overseers of Early American Slavery PDF Author: Laura R. Sandy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000048969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Enmeshed in the exploitative world of racial slavery, overseers were central figures in the management of early American plantation enterprises. All too frequently dismissed as brutal and incompetent, they defy easy categorisation. Some were rogues, yet others were highly skilled professionals, farmers, and artisans. Some were themselves enslaved. They and their wives, with whom they often formed supervisory partnerships, were caught between disdainful planters and defiant enslaved labourers, as they sought to advance their ambitions. Their history, revealed here in unprecedented detail, illuminates the complex power struggles and interplay of class and race in a volatile slave society.

The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer

The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer PDF Author: James L. Huston
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807159190
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
JAMES L. HUSTON is professor of history at Oklahoma State University and the author of The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War; Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765-1900; Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War ; and Stephen A. Douglas and the Dilemmas of Democratic Equality.

The Chesapeake House

The Chesapeake House PDF Author: Cary Carson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 080783811X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
For more than thirty years, the architectural research department at Colonial Williamsburg has engaged in comprehensive study of early buildings, landscapes, and social history in the Chesapeake region. Its painstaking work has transformed our understanding of building practices in the colonial and early national periods and thereby greatly enriched the experience of visiting historic sites. In this beautifully illustrated volume, a team of historians, curators, and conservators draw on their far-reaching knowledge of historic structures in Virginia and Maryland to illuminate the formation, development, and spread of one of the hallmark building traditions in American architecture. The essays describe how building design, hardware, wall coverings, furniture, and even paint colors telegraphed social signals about the status of builders and owners and choreographed social interactions among everyone who lived or worked in gentry houses, modest farmsteads, and slave quarters. The analyses of materials, finishes, and carpentry work will fascinate old-house buffs, preservationists, and historians alike. The lavish color photography is a delight to behold, and the detailed catalogues of architectural elements provide a reliable guide to the form, style, and chronology of the region's distinctive historic architecture.

African Founders

African Founders PDF Author: David Hackett Fischer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982145110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 960

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Book Description
In this sweeping, foundational work, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer draws on extensive research to show how enslaved Africans and their descendants enlarged American ideas of freedom in varying ways in different regions of the early United States. African Founders explores the little-known history of how enslaved people from different regions of Africa interacted with colonists of European origins to create new regional cultures in the colonial United States. The Africans brought with them linguistic skills, novel techniques of animal husbandry and farming, and generations-old ethical principles, among other attributes. This startling history reveals how much our country was shaped by these African influences in its early years, producing a new, distinctly American culture. Drawing on decades of research, some of it in western Africa, Fischer recreates the diverse regional life that shaped the early American republic. He shows that there were varieties of slavery in America and varieties of new American culture, from Puritan New England to Dutch New York, Quaker Pennsylvania, cavalier Virginia, coastal Carolina, and Louisiana and Texas. This landmark work of history will transform our understanding of America’s origins.

British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries PDF Author: Stephen Foster
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192513583
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Until relatively recently, the connection between British imperial history and the history of early America was taken for granted. In recent times, however, early American historiography has begun to suffer from a loss of coherent definition as competing manifestos demand various reorderings of the subject in order to combine time periods and geographical areas in ways that would have previously seemed anomalous. It has also become common place to announce that the history of America is best accounted for in America itself in a three-way melee between "settlers", the indigenous populations, and the forcibly transported African slaves and their creole descendants. The contributions to British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries acknowledge the value of the historiographic work done under this new dispensation in the last two decades and incorporate its insights. However, the volume advocates a pluralistic approach to the subject generally, and attempts to demonstrate that the metropolitan power was of more than secondary importance to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The central theme of this volume is the question "to what extent did it make a difference to those living in the colonies that made up British North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that they were part of an empire and that the empire in question was British?" The contributors, some of the leading scholars in their respective fields, strive to answer this question in various social, political, religious, and historical contexts.

The Indian World of George Washington

The Indian World of George Washington PDF Author: Colin G. Calloway
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190652179
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction. In this sweeping new biography, Colin Calloway uses the prism of George Washington's life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time--Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Little Turtle--and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America's founding. The Indian World of George Washington spans decades of Native American leaders' interactions with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands, to his military career against both the French and the British, to his presidency, when he dealt with Native Americans as a head of state would with a foreign power, using every means of diplomacy and persuasion to fulfill the new republic's destiny by appropriating their land. By the end of his life, Washington knew more than anyone else in America about the frontier and its significance to the future of his country. The Indian World of George Washington offers a fresh portrait of the most revered American and the Native Americans whose story has been only partially told. Calloway's biography invites us to look again at the history of America's beginnings and see the country in a whole new light.

American Planters and Irish Landlords in Comparative and Transnational Perspective

American Planters and Irish Landlords in Comparative and Transnational Perspective PDF Author: Cathal Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000358054
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This is the first study to systematically explore similarities, differences, and connections between the histories of American planters and Irish landlords. The book focuses primarily on the comparative and transnational investigation of an antebellum Mississippi planter named John A. Quitman (1799–1858) and a nineteenth-century Irish landlord named Robert Dillon, Lord Clonbrock (1807–93), examining their economic behaviors, ideologies, labor relations, and political histories. Locating Quitman and Clonbrock firmly within their wider local, national, and international contexts, American Planters and Irish Landlords in Comparative and Transnational Perspective argues that the two men were representative of specific but comparable manifestations of agrarian modernity, paternalism, and conservatism that became common among the landed elites who dominated economy, society, and politics in the antebellum American South and in nineteenth-century Ireland. It also demonstrates that American planters and Irish landlords were connected by myriad direct and indirect transnational links between their societies, including transatlantic intellectual cultures, mutual participation in global capitalism, and the mass migration of people from Ireland to the United States that occurred during the nineteenth century.

A Brave and Cunning Prince

A Brave and Cunning Prince PDF Author: James Horn
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541600037
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The extraordinary story of the Powhatan chief who waged a lifelong struggle to drive European settlers from his homeland In the mid-sixteenth century, Spanish explorers in the Chesapeake Bay kidnapped an Indian child and took him back to Spain and subsequently to Mexico. The boy converted to Catholicism and after nearly a decade was able to return to his land with a group of Jesuits to establish a mission. Shortly after arriving, he organized a war party that killed them. In the years that followed, Opechancanough (as the English called him), helped establish the most powerful chiefdom in the mid-Atlantic region. When English settlers founded Virginia in 1607, he fought tirelessly to drive them away, leading to a series of wars that spanned the next forty years—the first Anglo-Indian wars in America— and came close to destroying the colony. A Brave and Cunning Prince is the first book to chronicle the life of this remarkable chief, exploring his early experiences of European society and his long struggle to save his people from conquest.

The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery

The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery PDF Author: Daniel Rood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190655267
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
'The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery' explores how, in an age of industry and abolition, ambitious planters in the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil expanded slavery by collaborating with a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other 'plantation experts' to assist them in adapting the technologies of the Industrial Revolution to suit 'tropical' needs