Anne Murray Powell was born to a middle-class English family in 1755. She was neither famous nor unusually talented but her story embodies the values of her time, place, and class. Having emigrated to Boston at sixteen, in 1775 she married and returned to England during her husband's training as a lawyer. They eventually settled in British North America, residing chiefly in York (Toronto). Anne, as well as being the mother of nine children, was a leading figure in York's social circles a member of a generation that matured during a period of dramatic social change. Katherine McKenna's biography, based on an extensive collection of letters and papers, shows how the three distinct environments in which she and her family lived England, New England, and Upper Canada were shaped by important aspects of late eighteenth-century and early Victorian society.

This volume is the most comprehensive bibliography of purely biographical material written by Americans. It covers every possible field of life but, by design, excludes autobiographies, diaries, and journals.

Detroit’s industrial health has long been crucial to the American economy. Today’s troubles notwithstanding, Detroit has experienced multiple periods of prosperity, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the city was the center of the thriving fur trade. Its proximity to the West as well as its access to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River positioned this new metropolis at the intersection of the fur-rich frontier and the Atlantic trade routes. In Frontier Seaport, Catherine Cangany details this seldom-discussed chapter of Detroit’s history. She argues that by the time of the American Revolution, Detroit functioned much like a coastal town as a result of the prosperous fur trade, serving as a critical link in a commercial chain that stretched all the way to Russia and China—thus opening Detroit’s shores for eastern merchants and other transplants. This influx of newcomers brought its own transatlantic networks and fed residents’ desires for popular culture and manufactured merchandise. Detroit began to be both a frontier town and seaport city—a mixed identity, Cangany argues, that hindered it from becoming a thoroughly “American” metropolis.