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
Liberty’s Prisoners chronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment, quickly became a holding tank for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation’s promise of liberty. Reissued with a new preface that connects these early penitentiaries to our present debates over mass incarceration.
Featuring a new preface that discusses the complicated legacy of the nation’s founding at its 250th anniversary for the Indigenous peoples of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lenape Country is a sweeping narrative history of Lenape Indian encounters with European settlers in the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom
Sarah L. H. Gronningsater
Price: $34.95
ISBN: 9781512829709
Pub Date: March 2026
Format: Paperback
416 Pages
The Rising Generation chronicles the history of emancipation in the United States through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a remarkable generation of black northerners. It focuses on the efforts of the “children of gradual abolition,” who, as grown-ups, shaped national and state campaigns for legal equality and the end of slavery.
Undoing Slavery excavates medical and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Facing many challenges to their goal of restoring embodied self-sovereignty to the enslaved, abolitionists learned that legal rights alone, while necessary, were not sufficient either to protect or heal the bodies of African-descended people from the consequences of slavery and racism.
Britain's Occupation of Philadelphia During the American Revolution
Aaron Sullivan
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 9781512829693
Pub Date: March 2026
Format: Paperback
304 Pages
Focusing on the British occupation of Philadelphia from 1777 to 1778, The Disaffected highlights the perspectives of those wearied by and withdrawn from the War for Independence and reveals the consequences of a Revolutionary ideology that assumed the nation's people to be a united and homogenous front.
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.
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.
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.
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.
