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
Elizabeth Ellis Associate Professor of History, Princeton University
Roquinaldo Ferreira Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Emma Hart Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History, University of Pennsylvania, and The Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies
Staff Editorial Contact: Robert Lockhart, Senior Editor rlockhar@upenn.edu
Contested Currents presents a new perspective on the history of New England by following its many rivers—tracing how the changes Native Americans and European colonists made to rivers drove the dramatic environmental and social transformation of the region.
How Climate Knowledge Made the Nineteenth-Century US South
Elaine LaFay
Price: $49.95
ISBN: 9781512830279
Pub Date: November 2026
Format: Hardcover
336 Pages
How could a place be at once a life-giving paradise and sinister threat to health? In Debility and Power, Elaine LaFay answers this question by exploring the powerful and surprising role of debility in the nineteenth-century US South and by showing how imperial actors weaponized weakness and fragility to control both land and people.
The Engine of Free Expression shows that, over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, copyright became a powerful tool and product of the growth of local, state, and national governments, establishing precedents that are with us in the present.
In Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850, Mark J. Miller argues that transatlantic Protestant discourses of abjection engaged with, and furthered the development of, concepts of race and sexuality in the creation of public subjects and public spheres.
Speculation Nation chronicles the “mania” for land speculation that swept the new United States, as the nation’s elite founders rushed to profit off Native American dispossession. It reveals how the American Revolution produced a republican “empire of liberty” with financial speculation at its core.
Before Disability is a literary, legal, and cultural history of disability, race, and citizenship between the Revolution and the Civil War. It shows how disability helped to shape US citizenship as it developed as well as how the formation of US citizenship, in turn, fundamentally shaped disability.
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.
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.
