Liberty's Prisoners examines how changing attitudes about work, freedom, property, and family shaped the creation of the penitentiary system in the United States. The first penitentiary was founded in Philadelphia in 1790, a period of great optimism and turmoil in the Revolution's wake. Those who were previously dependents with no legal standing—women, enslaved people, and indentured servants—increasingly claimed their own right to life, liberty, and happiness. A diverse cast of women and men, including immigrants, African Americans, and the Irish and Anglo-American poor, struggled to make a living. Vagrancy laws were used to crack down on those who visibly challenged longstanding social hierarchies while criminal convictions carried severe sentences for even the most trivial property crimes. The penitentiary was designed to reestablish order, both behind its walls and in society at large, but the promise of reformative incarceration failed from its earliest years. Within this system, women served a vital function, and Liberty's Prisoners is the first book to bring to life the e xperience of African American, immigrant, and poor white women imprisoned in early America. Always a minority of prisoners, women provided domestic labor within the institution and served as model inmates, more likely to submit to the authority of guards, inspectors, and reformers. White men, the primary targets of reformative incarceration, challenged authorities at every turn while African American men were increasingly segregated and denied access to reform. Liberty's Prisoners chronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment for the most egregious of offenders, quickly became a repository for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation's promise of liberty.

Punishment, Prisons, and Patriarchy tells the story of how first-generation Americans coupled their legacy of liberty with a penal philosophy that promoted patriarchy, especially for marginal Americans. American patriots fought a revolution in the name of liberty. Their victory celebrations barely ended before leaders expressed fears that immigrants, African Americans, women, and the lower classes were prone to vice, disorder, and crime. This spurred a generation of penal reformers to promote successfully the most systematic institution ever devised for stripping people of liberty: the penitentiary. Today, Americans laud liberty but few citizens contest the legitimacy of federal, state, and local government authority to incarcerate 2 million people and subject another 4.7 million probationers and parolees to scrutiny, surveillance, and supervision. How did classical liberalism aid in the development of such expansive penal practices in the wake of the War of Independence?

Here, in two volumes, is a collection of over 650 letters (two-thirds of them never before printed) from the pen of Benjamin Rush. A signer of the Declaration of Independence and the 18th century's most distinguished American physician, Rush was also a politician, pamphleteer, social reformer, chemistry professor, psychiatrist, college founder, church founder, and "enthusiastic lifelong student of everything under the sun."--Jacket.

Volume 1 of 2. Full of flavor and zest, this collection of over 650 letters, two-thirds of them never printed before, is a companion piece to Rush's Autobiography. Written between 1761 and 1813, the letters trace Rush's career, from student in Scotland and England to signer of the Declaration of Independence and Philadelphia's leading physician. He writes to John Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, WItherspoon, and a host of others. Two fascinating series of letters chronicle the failures of the hospital service in the Revolutionary War and teh Philadelphia yellow-fever epidemic of 1793. Rush the private individual is revealed in the letters to his wife. Published for the American Philosophical Society. Lyman Butterfield is associate editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Originally published in 1951. 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.

Debates over the proper relationship between church and state in America tend to focus either on the founding period or the twentieth century. Left undiscussed is the long period between the ratification of the Constitution and the 1947 Supreme Court ruling in Everson v. Board of Education, which mandated that the Establishment Clause applied to state and local governments. Steven Green illuminates this neglected period, arguing that during the 19th century there was a "second disestablishment." By the early 1800s, formal political disestablishment was the rule at the national level, and almost universal among the states. Yet the United States remained a Christian nation, and Protestant beliefs and values dominated American culture and institutions. Evangelical Protestantism rose to cultural dominance through moral reform societies and behavioral laws that were undergirded by a maxim that Christianity formed part of the law. Simultaneously, law became secularized, religious pluralism increased, and the Protestant-oriented public education system was transformed. This latter impulse set the stage for the constitutional disestablishment of the twentieth century. The Second Disestablishment examines competing ideologies: of evangelical Protestants who sought to create a "Christian nation," and of those who advocated broader notions of separation of church and state. Green shows that the second disestablishment is the missing link between the Establishment Clause and the modern Supreme Court's church-state decisions.

No Single vision for the future of America existed after the Revolution. In light of social and economic changes, America's scope shifted from community-mindedness-the very heart of the republican ideal-to economic individualism. In Moral Visions and Material Ambittions, A. Kristen Foster describes how eager young entrepreneurs in Philadelphia manipulated America's moral vision of a classical republic to facilitate their own material ambitions, fostered by the free market economy that arose between 1776 and 1836. As market developments changed economic relationships in the city, men and women used the Revolutions's republican language to help explain what was happening to them, and in the process they helped redefine class structure in Philadelphia. This study explores the ways Philadelphians used the Revolution and its powerful language of liberty and equality to impose meaning on their lives, as an expanding market irreversibly changed social and econimic relationships in their city and, eventually, throughout the rest of the country. Book jacket.