This work establishes the precise location of the site of "shares" or "home lots" of five acres each belonging to Roger Williams and the other original settlers of the Providence, Rhode Island. Perhaps more importantly for genealogists it also consists of short biographical and genealogical essays of the owners of the lots, virtually all of them containing references to the settlers' origins in England

In 1840, twenty-three-year-old George Long Brown migrated from New Hampshire to north Florida, a region just emerging from the devastating effects of the Second Seminole War. This volume presents over seventy of Brown’s previously unpublished letters to illuminate day-to-day life in pre–Civil War Florida. Brown’s personal and business correspondence narrates his daily activities and his views on politics, labor practices, slavery, fundamentalist religion, and local gossip. Having founded a successful mercantile establishment in Newnansville, Brown traveled the region as far as Savannah and Charleston, purchasing goods from plantations and strengthening social and economic ties in two of the region’s most developed cities. In the decade leading up to the Civil War, Brown married into one of the largest slaveholding families in the area and became involved in the slave trade. He also bartered with locals and mingled with the judges, lawyers, and politicians of Alachua County. The Letters of George Long Brown provides an important eyewitness view of north Florida’s transformation from a subsistence and herding community to a market economy based on cotton, timber, and other crops, showing that these changes came about in part due to an increased reliance on slavery. Brown’s letters offer the first social and economic history of one of the most important yet little-known frontiers in the antebellum South. A volume in the series Contested Boundaries, edited by Gene Allen Smith

Owned by his father, Isaac Harold Anderson (1835–1906) was born a slave but went on to become a wealthy businessman, grocer, politician, publisher, and religious leader in the African American community in the state of Georgia. Elected to the state senate, Anderson replaced his white father there, and later shepherded his people as a founding member and leader of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church. He helped support the establishment of Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, where he subsequently served as vice president. Anderson was instrumental in helping freed people leave Georgia for the security of progressive safe havens with significantly large Black communities in northern Mississippi and Arkansas. Eventually under threat to his life, Anderson made his own exodus to Arkansas, and then later still, to Holly Springs, Mississippi, where a vibrant Black community thrived. Much of Anderson’s unique story has been lost to history—until now. In The Recovered Life of Isaac Anderson, author Alicia K. Jackson presents a biography of Anderson and in it a microhistory of Black religious life and politics after emancipation. A work of recovery, the volume captures the life of a shepherd to his journeying people, and of a college pioneer, a CME minister, a politician, and a former slave. Gathering together threads from salvaged details of his life, Jackson sheds light on the varied perspectives and strategies adopted by Black leaders dealing with a society that was antithetical to them and to their success.

What do you think of when you hear the phrase ‘nineteenth-century schooling'? The bullies of Tom Brown's Schooldays? The cane-wielding headmaster of Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby? Or Latin lessons, writing slates, learning-by-rote and the smell of ink? In this lively and engrossing book, Marion Aldis and Pam Inder separate the truth from the fiction by examining the diaries, letters and drawings of children and teachers from schools across the United Kingdom. The result is a vivid picture of what it was really like to be at school in the nineteenth century. Among the characters in this book are Ralphy, hopelessly unteachable but an avid collector of ‘curiosities’; Miss Paraman, sadistic teacher in a Dame School; Ann, who became a bluestocking in spite of chaotic home-schooling; Gerald, who spent too much time at Harrow School on cricket and socialising; the Quaker school where both girls and boys studied algebra, chemistry and shorthand; Sarah Jane, enrolled in a lace school at the age of six; and the National Schools where children were absent during the harvest.

Drawing on the federal census, wills, mortgage bills of sale, tax returns, and newspaper advertisements, this authoritative study describes the nature of African-American slaveholding, its complexity, and its rationales. It reveals how some African-American slave masters had earned their freedom and how some free Blacks purchased slaves for their own use. The book provides a fresh perspective on slavery in the antebellum South and underscores the importance of African Americans in the history of American slavery. The book also paints a picture of the complex social dynamics between free and enslaved Blacks, and between Black and white slaveowners. It illuminates the motivations behind African-American slaveholding--including attempts to create or maintain independence, to accumulate wealth, and to protect family members--and sheds light on the harsh realities of slavery for both Black masters and Black slaves. • BLACK SLAVEOWNERS--Shows how some African Americans became slave masters • MOTIVATIONS FOR SLAVEHOLDING--Highlights the motivations behind African-American slaveholding • SOCIAL DYNAMICS--Sheds light on the complex social dynamics between free and enslaved Blacks • ANEBELLUM SOUTH--Provides a perspective on slavery in the antebellum South

Annotation Searching for Their Places is a collection inspired by the Fifth Southern Conference on Women's History. The esays in this volume are particularly astute in assessing the ways in which southern women have claimed power, or "searched for their places, " and suggests how southern women, individually and collectively, have sought to empower themselves. The essays, written by outstanding historians in this field, represent some of the freshest and most exciting scholarship about women in the South. They convincingly illustrate how the national experience looks different when southern women become the focus. The essayists use extensive analyses of primary source materials to examine a variety of issues that have confronted women in the South from the days of English colonialization through the civil rights struggles of the post-World War II era. The collection is well balanced in its periodization, with four essays on the antebellum years, one on the Civil War, three on the immediate postbellum era, and four based in the twentieth century. Studying women of every color, background, and station across the region and across four centuries, Searching for Their Places will appeal to the general reader and anyone interested in women's studies

A historical study of a little-known episode of the American Revolution in which Charleston residents were held in a British-occupied region of Florida. In the months following the May 1780 capture of Charleston, South Carolina, by combined British and loyalist forces, British soldiers arrested sixty-three Americans and transported them to the borderland town of St. Augustine, East Florida—territory under British control since the French and Indian War. In Patriots in Exile, James Waring McCrady and C. L. Bragg chronicle the banishment of these southerners, the hardships endured by their families, and the plight of the enslaved men and women who accompanied them. McCrady and Bragg examine the events from various perspectives, including the British who governed occupied Charleston, the families left behind, the armies in the field, the Continental Congress, and finally the Jacksonboro Assembly of January and February 1782. Using primary sources and archival materials, the authors develop biographical sketches of each exile and illuminate important facets of the American Revolution’s southern theater. While they shared a common fate, the exiles were a diverse lot of tradesmen, artisans, prominent civilians, military officers, and others—among them three signers of the Declaration of Independence. Although they had clear socioeconomic differences, most were unrepentant patriots forced to navigate complex and dangerous circumstances.