is book explores the growth of abolitionism among Quakers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey from 1688 to 1780, providing a case study of how groups change their moral attitudes. Dr. Soderlund details the long battle fought by reformers like gentle John Woolman and eccentric Benjamin Lay. The eighteenth-century Quaker humanitarians succeeded only after they diluted their goals to attract wider support, establishing a gradualistic, paternalistic, and segregationist model for the later antislavery movement. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Quaker Family in Colonial America is a book by J. William Frost.

The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748-1783 offers a detailed history of the withdrawal of the Society of Friends from mainstream America in the years between 1748 and the end of the American Revolution. Jack D. Marietta examines the causes, course, and consequences, both social and political, of the Quakers' retreat from prominent positions in civil government while at the same time developing a more distinctive and "purified" religious community. These changes amounted to a watershed in the greater history of the Society of Friends, a turning away from its engagement with the world on behalf of a Whig political philosophy and toward a role as critic and gadfly on the periphery of political society. Less conspicuously but perhaps more dramatically, the internal transformation of the Society through the strengthening of the members' commitment to a host of Quaker sectarian values—among them exogamy, "guarded" childrearing, sexual continence, honesty, simplicity, humility, and asceticism—was enforced by the reformers' stern determination that members would either conform to these mores or face expulsion from the Society. These changes resulted in the revitalization of the society and made possible the Quakers' campaign against slavery, thus distinguishing them as the first group of people in history to espouse abolition. Marietta draws on a wealth of data: over 10,000 disciplinary cases in the Society's records dating from 1682. The author's description and evaluation of the role, status, and treatment of women in the Society is sympathetic, and what emerges from his interpretation is a sensitive portrayal not only of withdrawal but of the substitution of a vision different from the one that inspired the Holy Experiment.

Troubled Experiment exposes the difference between glowing reputation and grim reality of crime in early Pennsylvania. The plight of lawmakers and magistrates, and the sufferings of victims, women, children, and minorities take their places in this tragedy. The authors conclude that through this lens, we see the troubled future of America.

The notion of a uniquely Quaker style in architecture, dress, and domestic interiors is a subject with which scholars have long grappled, since Quakers have traditionally held both an appreciation for high-quality workmanship and a distrust of ostentation. Early Quakers, or members of the Society of Friends, who held "plainness" or "simplicity" as a virtue, were also active consumers of fine material goods. Through an examination of some of the material possessions of Quaker families in America during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, the contributors to Quaker Aesthetics draw on the methods of art, social, religious, and public historians as well as folklorists to explore how Friends during this period reconciled their material lives with their belief in the value of simplicity. In early America, Quakers dominated the political and social landscape of the Delaware Valley, and, because this region held a position of political and economic strength, the Quakers were tightly connected to the transatlantic economy. Given this vantage, they had easy access to the latest trends in fashion and business. Detailing how Quakers have manufactured, bought, and used such goods as clothing, furniture, and buildings, the essays in Quaker Aesthetics reveal a much more complicated picture than that of a simple people with simple tastes. Instead, the authors show how, despite the high quality of their material lives, the Quakers in the past worked toward the spiritual simplicity they still cherish.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.