Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the mid-Atlantic region from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Series Editors:
Kathleen M. Brown
David Boies Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Roquinaldo Ferreira
Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Emma Hart
Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania and The Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies
Daniel K. Richter
Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History, University of Pennsylvania
Staff Editorial Contact:
Robert Lockhart, Senior Editor rlockhar@upenn.edu
Focusing on the lived experiences of British colonists, Indigenous people, and enslaved Africans, The Invention of Rum shows how people engaged in making and consuming this commodity created a new means of profit that transformed the Atlantic world.
Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation
Kirsten Fischer
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 9781512828764
Pub Date: September 2025
Format: Paperback
320 Pages
In this first biography of Elihu Palmer, Kirsten Fischer depicts a once notorious freethinker who countered Christianity with the idea of an interconnected universe infused with a divine life force. Denounced as "heretical," Palmer's speeches and writings shaped the contest over freedom of religion and of speech in the new United States.
Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean
Casey Schmitt
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 9781512828146
Pub Date: September 2025
Format: Hardcover
296 Pages
The Predatory Sea explores the deeply entangled histories of captivity and colonialism in the greater Caribbean between 1570 and 1670. Casey Schmitt explicates the captive economy that shaped English and French colonization, inter-imperial competition, and the lived experiences of captives and their captors during this violent century.
Abolitionism in Colonial and Revolutionary America
Nicholas P. Wood
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 9781512828320
Pub Date: November 2025
Format: Hardcover
384 Pages
Let the Oppressed Go Free recovers the sophistication and influence of antislavery theology and abolitionist activism in eighteenth-century America. Far from inevitable, the abolition of slavery in the North resulted from tenacious activism by Quakers, African Americans, and antislavery evangelicals during the American Revolution.
The War for the American Interior and the Infrastructural Routes of Revolution
Alec Zuercher Reichardt
Price: $55.00
ISBN: 9781512828283
Pub Date: August 2025
Format: Hardcover
368 Pages
Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis maps the Seven Years’ War for the American Interior and reconstructs the inter-imperial roots of the American Revolution. The construction of a British infrastructure state propelled Britain to wartime victory. Yet, in its aftermath, it was also the empire’s undoing, laying the roads to revolution.
Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States
Whitney Martinko
Price: $34.95
ISBN: 9781512828795
Pub Date: November 2025
Format: Paperback
312 Pages
In Historic Real Estate, Whitney Martinko shows how early Americans debated whether, and how, to preserve historic structures as permanent features of the new nation's landscape. She argues that early advocates of preservation affirmed a capitalist system of land development by promising to make it moral.
Empire and Enslavement in Colonial Illinois and Missouri
John Craig Hammond
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 9781512828429
Pub Date: November 2025
Format: Hardcover
288 Pages
Beginning with French colonizers creating systems of Indigenous and African slavery in the 1720s and concluding with the Missouri Crisis of 1819, The Centrality of Slavery examines how empires, settlers, and enslaved people created, maintained, and challenged systems of slavery in the Middle Mississippi Valley.
How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States
Michelle Craig McDonald
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 9781512827552
Pub Date: May 2025
Format: Hardcover
280 Pages
When and why coffee became part of North American daily life is at the center of Coffee Nation. Using a wide range of archival, quantitative, and material evidence, Michelle Craig McDonald presents a sweeping history that explores how coffee shaped the lives of enslaved laborers and farmers, merchants and retailers, consumers and advertisers.
The Great Power of Small Nations tackles questions of Native power past and present and provides a fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations—including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas—who helped shape the modern Gulf South.
Empires of Indigenous Law in the Early American South
Bradley J. Dixon
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 9781512826425
Pub Date: December 2024
Format: Hardcover
320 Pages
A sweeping history of the Native Southerners who challenged European empires from the inside, Republic of Indians tells the story of Indigenous leaders who wrote their principles into Spanish and English law and how they gave meaning to the modern idea of tribal sovereignty.
