Early American Places:

Early American Places Featured Title

Cultivating Regionalism

Higher Education and the Making of the American Midwest

By Kenneth Wheeler

From The Northern Illinois University Press

In this ambitious book, Kenneth Wheeler revises our understanding of the nineteenth-century American Midwest by reconsidering an institution that was pivotal in its making -- the small college. During the antebellum decades, Americans built a remarkable number of colleges in the Midwest that would help cultivate their regional identity. Through higher education, the val...

Early American Places Featured Title

Empire at the Periphery

British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621-1713

By Christian J. Koot

From The NYU Press

Throughout history the British Atlantic has often been depicted as a series of well-ordered colonial ports that functioned as nodes of Atlantic shipping, where orderliness reflected the effectiveness of the regulatory apparatus constructed to contain Atlantic commerce. More >>

Early American Places Featured Title

Creolization and Contraband

Curacao in the Early Modern Atlantic World

By Linda M. Rupert

From The University of Georgia Press

"This exploration of localized sociocultural mixing and extensive, illicit commerce on a Dutch Caribbean island makes for a fascinating study of colonial agency."
Philip Morgan, author of Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry More >>

Early American Places Featured Title

Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean

Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit

By Kristen Block

From The University of Georgia Press

"By taking religion seriously and looking across colonial empires, Block has produced a study that will be must reading for everyone interested in the early modern Atlantic."
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, New York University

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Early American Places Featured Title

Colonization and Its Discontents

Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania

By Beverly C. Tomek

From The NYU Press

Pennsylvania contained the largest concentration of early America's abolitionist leaders and organizations, making it a necessary and illustrative stage from which to understand how national conversations about the place of free blacks in early America originated and evolved, and, importantly, the role that colonization - supporting the emigration of free and emancipated blacks... More >>

News

EAP at AHA
Friday, December 14th, 2012
Editors from all four presses participating in the Early American Places series will be at the American Historical Association meeting in New Orleans. If you’ll be at AHA and have a first book project in early American history that focuses on any of the following areas, please contact an EAP editor:

the southeastern colonies, the plantation economies of the Caribbean, and the Spanish borderlands (University of Georgia Press)
the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic colonies, and French and British Canada (New York University Press)
the old Northwest (Northern Illinois University Press)
the American far West (University of Nebraska Press)

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Interview with Robert Paulett about his new book, An Empire of Small Places
Tuesday, August 21st, 2012
Britain’s colonial empire in southeastern North America relied on the cultivation and maintenance of economic and political ties with the numerous powerful Indian confederacies of the region. Those ties in turn relied on British traders adapting to Indian ideas of landscape and power. In An Empire of Small Places, Robert Paulett examines this interaction over the course of the eighteenth century, drawing attention to the ways that conceptions of space competed, overlapped, and changed. He encourages us to understand the early American South as a landscape made by interactions among American Indians, European Americans, and enslaved African American laborers. This is the fourth video featuring EAP authors. In each video, the authors are asked three questions: 1) Why did you focus your research on this particular place/area/region? 2) Please tell us a little more about your book. 3) Is your study specific to your area or is it applicable to other places/area/regions? More >>

Participating Institutions

institutions

Early American Places is a collaborative series on the early history of North America supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The participating institutions are:

- University of Georgia Press
- Northern Illinois University Press
- NYU Press
- University of Nebraska Press
- Andrew W. Mellon Foundation