Vital statistics copied from entries in a 1770 edition of the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer (volume stored off-site); includes inscriptions: "Matthew Singleton his Book, July 9th 1774"; with additional entries in the hand of Alice Singleton and others.

Contributions by Laura F. Edwards, Crystal Feimster, Glenda E. Gilmore, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Darlene Clark Hine, Mary Kelley, Markeeva Morgan, Anne Firor Scott, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Deborah Gray White Anne Firor Scott's The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 stirred a keen interest among historians in both the approach and message of her book. Using women's diaries, letters, and other personal documents, Scott brought to life southern women as wives and mothers, as members of their communities and churches, and as sometimes sassy but rarely passive agents. She brilliantly demonstrated that the familiar dichotomies of the personal versus the public, the private versus the civic, which had dominated traditional scholarship about men, could not be made to fit women's lives. In doing so, she helped to open up vast terrains of women's experiences for historical scholarship. This volume, based on papers presented at the University of Mississippi's annual Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History, brings together essays by scholars at the forefront of contemporary scholarship on American women's history. Each regards The Southern Lady as having shaped her historical perspective and inspired her choice of topics in important ways. These essays together demonstrate that the power of imagination and scholarly courage manifested in Scott's and other early American women historians' work has blossomed into a gracious plentitude.

In the half-century following the Revolutionary War, the logic of inequality underwent a profound transformation within the southern legal system. Drawing on extensive archival research in North and South Carolina, Laura F. Edwards illuminates those changes by revealing the importance of localized legal practice. Edwards shows that following the Revolution, the intensely local legal system favored maintaining the "peace," a concept intended to protect the social order and its patriarchal hierarchies. Ordinary people, rather than legal professionals and political leaders, were central to its workings. Those without rights--even slaves--had influence within the system because of their positions of subordination, not in spite of them. By the 1830s, however, state leaders had secured support for a more centralized system that excluded people who were not specifically granted individual rights, including women, African Americans, and the poor. Edwards concludes that the emphasis on rights affirmed and restructured existing patriarchal inequalities, giving them new life within state law with implications that affected all Americans. Placing slaves, free blacks, and white women at the center of the story, The People and Their Peace recasts traditional narratives of legal and political change and sheds light on key issues in U.S. history, including the persistence of inequality--particularly slavery--in the face of expanding democracy.