In A Town In-Between, Judith Ridner reveals the influential, turbulent past of a modest, quiet American community. Today Carlisle, Pennsylvania, nestled in the Susquehanna Valley, is far from the nation's political and financial centers. In the eighteenth century, however, Carlisle and its residents stood not only at a geographical crossroads but also at the fulcrum of early American controversies. Located between East Coast settlement and the western frontier, Carlisle quickly became a mid-Atlantic hub, serving as a migration gateway to the southern and western interiors, a commercial way station in the colonial fur trade, a military staging and supply ground during the Seven Years' War, American Revolution, and Whiskey Rebellion, and home to one of the first colleges in the United States, Dickinson. A Town In-Between reconsiders the role early American towns and townspeople played in the development of the country's interior. Focusing on the lives of the ambitious group of Scots-Irish colonists who built Carlisle, Judith Ridner reasserts that the early American west was won by traders, merchants, artisans, and laborers—many of them Irish immigrants—and not just farmers. Founded by proprietor Thomas Penn, the rapidly growing town was the site of repeated uprisings, jailbreaks, and one of the most publicized Anti-Federalist riots during constitutional ratification. These conflicts had dramatic consequences for many Scots-Irish Presbyterian residents who found themselves a people in-between, mediating among the competing ethnoreligious, cultural, class, and political interests that separated them from their fellow Quaker and Anglican colonists of the Delaware Valley and their myriad Native American trading partners of the Ohio country. In this thoroughly researched and highly readable study, Ridner argues that interior towns were not so much spearheads of a progressive and westward-moving Euro-American civilization, but volatile places situated in the middle of a culturally diverse, economically dynamic, and politically evolving early America.

Cape Town is a place between two oceans, between first and third worlds, between east and west. The majority of its citizens: a people between black and white, native and settler, African and European. How can we understand a city that is most assuredly in Africa, though not””seemingly””of it? By exploring this city’s tween-ness, we can begin to understand the soul of this town””haunted by its past, unsure of its future. A short book just over 100 pages, it allows readers to quickly identify the unique pulse of the city, its throbbing historical, social, cultural and political beat that underlies the transactions between all Capetonians. This is not a substitute for a traditional guidebook, but a perfect companion to one, filling in the intimate details that other books leave out.

Doris Peery has been writing this book for sixty years. Now she has collected all her writings into these intriguing stories and poems reflecting a lifetime of experiences. Her poetry and prose together make for inspirational reading as well as humorous takes on life. * Who is the better sister to be: the cute one or the beautiful one? * What if your husband tells you not to get religion? * What special place does a neighborhood store have in a community? * Would you put a Victory Bell in your church? Doris Peery was born and raised in Emporia, Kansas. After graduating from Ottawa University in Ottawa, Kansas, she taught in elementary schools in Kansas and Virginia. She and Ken, her husband of 55 years, have two sons, five grandchildren and two great grandsons. The Peerys live in Topeka, Kansas.

This volume collects papers by distinguished European scholars, on the changing perception of the city in the period of transition from the Roman World to the Early Middle Ages. Central themes are the persistence of classical ideals of urban life, within a rapidly-changing world, and the emergence of a new ideal of the city that was specifically Christian.

Early Urbanizations in the Levant examines the first cycle of urbanization, collapse and reurbanization in the 4th-2nd millennium BCE Levant. The core of the study is a detailed analysis of settlement fluctuations and material culture development in the Hula Valley, at the crossroads between modern Israel, Syria and Lebanon. Focusing on field data and a close reading of the material text, the book emphasizes the variety exhibited in patterns of cultural and social change when small, densely settled regions are carefully scrutinized. Using the concepts of time-space edges and shifting loci of power, the study suggests new scenarios to explain changes in the regional archaeological record, and considers the implications these have for existing reconstructions of social evolution in the larger region. The Levant is shown to be composed of a fluid mosaic of polities that moved along multiple, if often parallel, paths towards and away from complexity. This book should be of interest to anyone studying the archaeology of early state formation in the Near East, particularly in areas of secondary urbanization - Palestine, Syria and Anatolia. With its detailed consideration of settlement patterns and ceramic production, it is also indispensable for the study of the early history of the two major sites in the area, Tel Dan and Tel Hazor, being the first attempt to integrate the results of excavations at these sites with the information obtained in archaeological surveys of the valley which sustained them.