Books by Fellows

In Friends and Strangers, John Smolenski argues that Pennsylvania’s early history can best be understood through the lens of creolization—the process by which Old World habits, values, and practices were transformed in a New World setting. Unable simply to transplant English political and legal traditions across the Atlantic, Quaker leaders gradually forged a creole civic culture that secured Quaker authority in an increasingly diverse colony.

John Styles reveals that ownership of new fabrics and new fashions was not confined to the rich but extended far down the social scale to the small farmers, day laborers, and petty tradespeople who formed a majority of the population. The author focuses on the clothes ordinary people wore, the ways they acquired them, and the meanings they attached to them, shedding new light on all types of attire and the occasions on which they were worn.

Taking our understanding of political antislavery into largely unexplored terrain, Jonathan H. Earle counters conventional wisdom and standard historical interpretations that view the ascendance of free-soil ideas within the antislavery movement as an explicit retreat from the goals of emancipation or even as an essentially proslavery ideology.

The book demonstrates that a wider Pan-American perspective can upset the most cherished national narratives of the United States, for it maintains that the Puritan colonization of New England was as much a chivalric, crusading act of Reconquista (against the Devil) as was the Spanish conquest.

Drawing on archaeological studies, colonial documents from three empires, and Native oral histories, Joseph M. Hall, Jr., offers fresh insights into broad segments of southeastern colonial history, including the success of Florida’s Franciscan missionaries before 1640 and the impact of the Indian slave trade on French Louisiana after 1699.

Since the first English settlers landed at Jamestown with the legacy of centuries of European warfare in tow, the military has been an omnipresent part of America. In The American Military: A Concise History, Joseph T. Glatthaar explores this relationship from its origins in the thirteen colonies to today’s ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

Who was Acorn Whistler, and why did he have to die? A deeply researched analysis of a bloody eighteenth-century conflict and its tangled aftermath, The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler unearths competing accounts of the events surrounding the death of this Creek Indian.

A work of original scholarship and compelling sweep, Okfuskee is a community-centered Indian history with an explicitly comparativist agenda. Joshua Piker uses the history of Okfuskee, an eighteenth-century Creek town, to reframe standard narratives of both Native and American experiences.

With illustrations and maps, a witty and erudite account of the history of circumnavigation and how it has influenced the way we think about the Earth and ourselves. In the first complete account, Joyce Chaplin tells of the outrageous ambitions that inspired men and women to take on the whole planet.

Julie Park explores places of solitude and enclosure that gave eighteenth-century subjects closer access to their inner worlds: grottos, writing closets, landscape follies, and the camera obscura, that beguiling “dark room” inside which the outside world in all its motion and color is projected. 

This highly original book asks new questions about paintings and prints associated with the British West Indies between 1700 and 1840, when the trade in sugar and slaves was most active and profitable. In a wide-ranging study of scientific illustrations, scenes of daily life, caricatures, and landscape imagery, Kay Dian Kriz analyzes the visual culture of refinement that accompanied the brutal process by which African slaves transformed “rude” sugar cane into pure white crystals.

In this vividly written book, prize-winning author Karen Ordahl Kupperman refocuses our understanding of encounters between English venturers and Algonquians all along the East Coast of North America in the early years of contact and settlement. All parties in these dramas were uncertain―hopeful and fearful―about the opportunity and challenge presented by new realities.

The last phase of Mark Twain’s life is sadly familiar: Crippled by losses and tragedies, America’s greatest humorist sank into a deep and bitter depression. It is also wrong. This book recovers Twain’s final years as they really were—lived in the shadow of deception and prejudice, but also in the light of the author’s unflagging energy and enthusiasm.

An intensely personal story crossed with a political potboiler, Left in the Dust is a unique and passionate account of the city of Los Angeles’s creation, cover-up and inadequate attempts to repair a major environmental catastrophe.

In April 1871, a group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono O’odham Indians surrounded an Apache village at dawn and murdered nearly 150 men, women, and children in their sleep. In the past century the attack, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, contemporary newspaper reports, and the participants’ own accounts, prize-winning author Karl Jacoby brings this perplexing incident and tumultuous era to life to paint a sweeping panorama of the American Southwest, a world far more complex, diverse, and morally ambiguous than the traditional portrayals of the Old West.

Focusing on the most recent epoch in which belief in an animate environment still widely prevailed, Climate Change and Original Sin argues that an ecologically inflected moral system assumed that humanity bore responsibility for climate corruption and volatility.

The fertility of Afro-Caribbean women’s bodies was at the crux of visions of economic success elaborated by many British politicians, planters, and doctors during the age of abolition. Reformers hoped that a home-grown labor force would obviate the need for the Atlantic slave trade. By establishing the ubiquity of visions of fertility and subsequent economic growth during the age of abolition, The Politics of Reproduction sheds fresh light on the oft-debated question of whether abolitionism was understood by contemporaries as economically beneficial to the British Empire.

Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. 

In the steam-powered mechanical age of the 18th and 19th centuries, the work of late Georgian and early Victorian mathematicians depended on far more than the properties of number. British mathematicians came to rely on industrialized paper and pen manufacture, railways and mail, and the print industries of the book, disciplinary journal, magazine, and newspaper. Though not always physically present with one another, the characters central to this book—from George Green to William Rowan Hamilton—relied heavily on communication technologies as they developed their theories in consort with colleagues.

World War II prompted many Americans to join an ongoing debate about the meaning of “race.” Some argued that the United States was fighting against Hitler’s racial ideology. Others insisted that a “white” America was fighting a “grasping, cruel and insanely ambitious race,” as the Los Angeles Examiner referred to the Japanese. This debate was especially notable in Los Angeles, home to the nation’s largest Japanese American and Mexican American communities and to a large and growing African American population. Kevin Leonard follows this verbal “battle for Los Angeles” immediately before, during, and after the war.

In this book a leading historian reveals how Tudor kings and queens sought to enhance their authority by presenting themselves to best advantage. Kevin Sharpe offers the first full analysis of the verbal and visual representations of Tudor power, embracing disciplines as diverse as art history, literary studies, and the history of consumption and material culture.

Kevis Goodman traces connections between georgic verse and developments in other spheres that were placing unprecedented emphasis on mediation from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. She expands the subject of the Georgic to broader areas of literary and cultural study—including the history of the feelings, print culture, and early scientific technology. Goodman maintains that the verse form presents ways of perceiving history in terms of sensation, rather than burying history in nature, an approach more usually associated with Romanticism.

With this richly illustrated history of industrial design reform in nineteenth-century Britain, Lara Kriegel demonstrates that preoccupations with trade, labor, and manufacture lay at the heart of debates about cultural institutions during the Victorian era. Through aesthetic reform, Victorians sought to redress the inferiority of British crafts in comparison to those made on the continent and in the colonies.

In Worlds Beyond, Laura Forsberg reads major works of fiction by George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Lewis Carroll alongside minor genres like the doll narrative, fairy science tract, and thumb Bible.

Examines how discussions about self-government and the so-called woman question developed in published opinion from the 1830s through the 1890s. Ranging beyond the organized women’s rights movement, it places in conversation travel writers and domestic advice gurus, activists and educators, novelists and journalists, as well as countless others who explored contested aspects of democratic womanhood. 

A fascinating study of the ways in which the consumption of luxury goods transformed social practices, gender roles, royal policies, and the economy in seventeenth-century England. Linda Levy Peck charts the development of new ways of shopping; new aspirations and identities shaped by print, continental travel, and trade to Asia, Africa, the East and West Indies; new building, furnishing, and collecting; and the new relationship of technology, luxury and science.