A cross of thorns

Sample

William E. Unrau

In White Man's Wicked Water William Unrau tells the compelling story of how an alcohol-sodden society introduced drink to the Indians. That same society then instituted futile policies to control the flow of alcohol to tribes who, as one superintendent put it, "have not the moral force to resist temptation." Unrau dispels that racial-deficiency theory and debunks the belief that prohibition was carried out by well-intended reformers. Scholars have often viewed the sale of alcohol to Native Americans as a ploy by Euro-Americans to trick them into unfair land and trade deals. But Unrau makes it clear that alcoholic consumption by Native Americans was the inevitable consequence of cultural confluence, not of conscious white subversion. Indian inebriation in the nineteenth century, he shows, essentially mimicked the habits of white Americans who - spurred on by prevailing attitudes and federal law - were aspiring to integrate the natives into the cultural mainstream.

Sample

Edmund S. Morgan

The men who came together to found the independent United States either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did. George Washington, hero of the Revolution, was the master of several hundred slaves. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, owned more than 200 men, women, and children while eloquently defending the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In this classic work, originally published in 1976, through a meticulous history of Virginia from its earliest settlement through the seventeenth century boom in tobacco, the gradual replacement of servitude with slavery, and the rise of republican ideology, historian Morgan reveals the deep and interlocking relationship between these seemingly contradictory ideas.--From publisher description.

Sample

Cornelia Hughes Dayton

Women before the Bar is the first study to investigate changing patterns of women's participation in early American courts across a broad range of legal actions - including proceedings related to debt, divorce, illicit sex, rape, and slander. Weaving the stories of individual women together with systematic analysis of gendered litigation patterns, Cornelia Dayton argues that women's relation to the courtroom scene in early New England shifted from one of integration in the mid-seventeenth century to one of marginality by the eve of the Revolution.

Sample

A.T. Van Deursen

This is an account of the ordinary working people of Holland in the seventeenth-century, the so-called 'golden age'. Professor van Deursen is the most outstanding and gifted scholar at present working on this period of Dutch history. His history 'from below' is based on a mass of contemporary documentary evidence and the text is enlivened by contemporary illustrations. Ranging over a broad spectrum of everyday conditions, sex, marriage, leisure, religion and popular culture, this is the most comprehensive study yet published of the plain lives of a 'golden age'.