Today, New York stands as the capital of American culture, business, and cosmopolitanism. Its size, influence, and multicultural composition mark it as a corner-stone of our country. The rich and varied history of early New York would seem to present a fertile topic for investigation to those interested colonial America. Yet, there has never been a modern history of old New York--until this lively and detailed account by Michael Kammen. Gracefully written and comprehensive in scope, Colonial New York includes all of the political, social, economic, cultural, and religious aspects of New York's formative centuries. Social and ethnic diversity have always been characteristic of New York, and this was never so evident as in its early years. This period provides the contemporary reader with a backward glance at what the United States would become in the twentieth-century. Colonial New York stood as a precursor of American society and culture as a whole: a broad model of the American experience we witness today. Kammen's history is enlivened by a look at some of the larger-than-life personalities who had tremendous impact on the many social and political adjustments necessary to the colony's continued growth. Here we meet Peter Stuyvesant, director of New Netherland and an executive of the West India Company--a man facing the innumerable difficulties of governing a large, sprawling colony divided by Dutch, English, and Indian settlements. Ultimately, history would view him as a failure, but his strong, Calvinist approach left such an indelible stamp on the burgeoning colony that readers will be tempted to do a little revisionist thinking about his tenure. Looking at a later governor, Lord Cornbury, gives us the very opposite example of a man despised by his contemporaries as the most venal of all the colonial governors (he was an occasional public cross-dresser, wearing the clothes of his distant cousin, Queen Anne), but who forcefully guided the colony through a transition to Anglican rule. The book culminates in chapters that investigate New York's strategic role in the bloody French and Indian War, and the key part it played in the economic protests and political conflict that finally led to American independence. The intricate and tangled web of alliances, loyalties, and shifting political ground that underlies much of colonial New York's past has clearly daunted many historians from taking on the task of writing an understandable account. Michael Kammen has accepted this challenge and gives us much more than a mere chronicle. Rather, he paints a compelling portrait of colonial life as it truly was. Although this important book is thorough and informed by primary sources, Colonial New York's clear and vivid prose offers a delightful narrative that will entertain both general readers and serious scholars alike. It pays special attention to localities and contains numerous illustrations that are attentive to the decorative arts and the material culture of early New York. Surprising and enlightening, Colonial New York is a delight to read and provides new perspectives on our nation's beginnings.

Hugh Gaine was a Colonial New York printer who in the second year of the American Revolution first allied his press to the American cause, then deserted to publish his newspaper for the British. This first book-length biography of Gaine contributes substantially to our knowl­edge of journalism in the Colonial period and provides fascinating insights into life in Revolutionary times. Gaine was more than a turncoat Amer­ican, Lorenz shows. From his reading of the files of Gaine's newspaper, from un­published material, and from a wide va­riety of printed sources, Lorenz has pieced together this study of economic and political conservatism, religious be­lief, and social class feelings which made Gaine a prototypal Loyalist to the British cause, though a citizen, or at least a resi­dent, of the United States, to the end of his days, in 1807.

Freedom of speech was restricted during the Revolutionary War. In the great struggle for independence, those who remained loyal to the British crown were persecuted with loss of employment, eviction from their homes, heavy taxation, confiscation of property and imprisonment. Loyalist Americans from all walks of life were branded as traitors and enemies of the people. By the end of the war, 80,000 had fled their homeland to face a dismal exile from which few would return, outcasts of a new republic based on democratic values of liberty, equality and justice.

Volume 1 of A History of the Book in America, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, encompasses the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is organized around three major themes: the persisting colonial relationship between European settlements and the Old World; the gradual emergence of a pluralistic book trade that differentiated printers from booksellers; and the transition from a 'culture of the Word', organized around an understanding of print as a vehicle of the sacred, to the culture of republicanism, epitomized by Benjamin Franklin, and culminating in the uses of print during the Revolutionary era. The volume will also describe nascent forms of literary and learned culture (including the circulation of manuscripts), literacy and censorship, orality, and the efforts by Europeans to introduce written literary to Native Americans and African Americans.

"Explores Benjamin Franklin's network of partnerships and business relationships with printers. His network altered practices in both European and American colonial printing trades by providing capital and political influence to set up working partnerships with James Parker, Francis Childs, Benjamin Mecom, Benjamin Franklin Bache, David Hall, Anthony Armbruster, and others"--Provided by publisher.

From one of our most acclaimed and original colonial historians, a groundbreaking book tracing the critical "long year" of 1774 and the revolutionary change that took place from the Boston Tea Party and the First Continental Congress to the Battles of Lexington and Concord. A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR In this masterly work of history, the culmination of more than four decades of research and thought, Mary Beth Norton looks at the sixteen months leading up to the clashes at Lexington and Concord in mid-April 1775. This was the critical, and often overlooked, period when colonists traditionally loyal to King George III began their discordant “discussions” that led them to their acceptance of the inevitability of war against the British Empire. Drawing extensively on pamphlets, newspapers, and personal correspondence, Norton reconstructs colonial political discourse as it took place throughout 1774. Late in the year, conservatives mounted a vigorous campaign criticizing the First Continental Congress. But by then it was too late. In early 1775, colonial governors informed officials in London that they were unable to thwart the increasing power of local committees and their allied provincial congresses. Although the Declaration of Independence would not be formally adopted until July 1776, Americans had in effect “declared independence ” even before the outbreak of war in April 1775 by obeying the decrees of the provincial governments they had elected rather than colonial officials appointed by the king. Norton captures the tension and drama of this pivotal year and foundational moment in American history and brings it to life as no other historian has done before.

A new edition of the germinal study of Loyalism in the American Revolution Building on the work of his 1989 book The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays, accomplished historian Robert M. Calhoon returns to the subject of internal strife in the American Revolution with Tory Insurgents. This volume collects revised, updated versions of eighteen groundbreaking articles, essays, and chapters published since 1965, and also features one essay original to this volume. In a model of scholarly collaboration, coauthors Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and Robert Scott Davis are joined in select pieces by Donald C. Lord, Janice Potter, and Robert M. Weir. Among the topics broached by this noted group of historians are the diverse political ideals represented in the Loyalist stance; the coherence of the Loyalist press; the loyalism of garrison towns, the Floridas, and the Western frontier; Carolina loyalism as viewed by Irish-born patriots Aedanus and Thomas Burke; and the postwar reintegration of Loyalists and the disaffected. Included as well is a chapter and epilogue from Calhoon's seminal—but long out-of-print—1973 study The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760-1781. This updated collection will serve as an unrivaled point of entrance into Loyalist research for scholars and students of the American Revolution.