Description
Book SynopsisOrder and Civility in the Early Modern Chesapeake captures a variety of experiences in the early modern Chesapeake, illustrating the race, class, ethnic, and gender diversity that created a unique New World experience. Students and scholars will find this book essential to understanding the colonial Chesapeake.
Trade ReviewThese articles provide ample room for reflection on how a tug-of-war between resistance to and assertion of social control led to order and civility in the Chesapeake. * Journal of American History *
This collection from established and emerging scholars offers fresh and sophisticated essays on the beliefs, legal systems, and labor systems of the early Chesapeake. This innovative organization makes the book a fruitful one, not only for scholars, but also for students who can use the essays to compare sources, arguments, and methods. -- Sarah Hand Meacham, Virginia Commonwealth University
This is a fine and provocative collection of essays from a band of largely junior scholars, newly minted Ph.Ds. and the like. All the essays in some way revisit the ‘origins debate,’ and the nature and extent of ‘unfreedom’ in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia and the Chesapeake, with the additional concentration on class and gender. These young scholars have not only produced some new interpretations of old arguments, they shift our attention from the antebellum period and black enslavement, which has dominated much of the scholarship for the last four decades, to the colonial period and unfree, non-black labor, particularly indentured and convict labor. We are reminded of the harsh realities of life for those unable to assert and maintain their legal freedom, such as wives separated from husbands, convict women, or those accused of witchcraft. These essays make abundantly clear that race was far from the primary determining factor in an age when ‘freedom’ was far from universal and exploitation of the powerless was widespread. -- Larry Hudson, University of Rochester
Table of ContentsTable of Contents Introduction Section One: Belief Systems Introduction Chapter One: Adam Jortner, Without Demons: Witchcraft, Gender, and Law in the Colonial Chesapeake Chapter Two: Monica Witkowski, “A Witch amongst All Them”: Chesapeake Witchcraft as a Case Study for Colonial North American Witchcraft Beliefs Chapter Three: Debra Meyers, “The people are not att all fond of the Litturgy or cerimonyes”: Theology in the Early Chesapeake Section Two: Legal Systems Introduction Chapter Four: Jeffrey Sawyer, English Law and the “Rights of Persons” in Early Maryland Chapter Five: Allison Madar, “An Innate Love of Cruelty”: Master Violence Against Female Servants in Eighteenth-Century Virginia Chapter Six: Karen Lubieniecki, Apart Before Death: Separated Women in Colonial Maryland Chapter Seven: Kristalyn Shefveland, Sic jurat transcendere montes ("Thus he swears to cross the mountains"): Alexander Spotswood, Colonial and Native diplomacy in the 1722 Albany Peace Section Three: Labor Systems Introduction Chapter Eight: Teresa Foster, “A shameful and unblessed thing” Convict Bondwomen in eighteenth-century Maryland Chapter Nine: Vaughn Scribner, ‘A Genteel and Sensible Servant’: The Commodification of African Slaves in Tidewater Virginia, 1700-1774 Chapter Ten: Jennie Jeppesen, “To serve longer according to law”: The chattel-like status of convict servants in Virginia
