This book explores the development of a provincial textile industry in colonial America. It is a social history of cloth-making that also employs the economic and political elements of Massachusetts Bay to tell their story.

Farms that were on poor soil and distant from markets declined, whereas other farms successfully adjusted production as rural and urban markets expanded and as Midwestern agricultural products flowed eastward after 1840. Rural and urban demand for manufactures in the East supported diverse industrial development and prosperous rural areas and burgeoning cities supplied increasing amounts of capital for investment.

Returning to a foundational moment in the history of the American family, Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature explores how various authors of the period represented the maternal role – an office that came to a new, social prominence at the end of the eighteenth century. By examining maternal figures in the works of diverse authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Sarah Piatt, this book exposes the contentious but fruitful negotiations that took place in the heart of the American sentimental era – negotiations about the cultural meanings of family, womanhood, and motherhood. This book, then, challenges critical constructions that figure American sentimentalism as a coherent, monolithic project, tied strictly to the forces of cultural conservatism. Furthermore, by exploring nineteenth-century challenges to conventional maternal ideology and by exposing gaps in the mythology of "ideal" motherhood, Negotiating Motherhood demonstrates that the icon of an American Madonna – a figure that still haunts America’s imagination – never had an uncontested reign. Transcending the boundaries of literary criticism, this work will be useful to feminist scholars and to those who are interested in the history of women’s culture, the American mythology of family life, or the cultural construction of motherhood.

Older than both ceramics and metallurgy, textile production is a technology which reveals much about prehistoric social and economic development. This book examines the archaeological evidence for textile production in Italy from the transition between the Bronze Age and Early Iron Ages until the Roman expansion (1000-400 BCE), and sheds light on both the process of technological development and the emergence of large urban centres with specialised crafts. Margarita Gleba begins with an overview of the prehistoric Appennine peninsula, which featured cultures such as the Villanovans and the Etruscans, and was connected through colonisation and trade with the other parts of the Mediterranean. She then focuses on the textiles themselves: their appearance in written and iconographic sources, the fibres and dyes employed, how they were produced and what they were used for: we learn, for instance, of the linen used in sails and rigging on Etruscan ships, and of the complex looms needed to produce twill. Featuring a comprehensive analysis of textiles remains and textile tools from the period, the book recovers information about funerary ritual, the sexual differentiation of labour (the spinners and weavers were usually women) and the important role the exchange of luxury textiles played in the emergence of an elite. Textile production played a part in ancient Italian society's change from an egalitarian to an aristocratic social structure, and in the emergence of complex urban communities.

A look at the historical development of the lethal disease and its relationship with humanity. A disease of soil, animals, and people, anthrax has threatened lives for at least two thousand years. Farmers have long recognized its lasting virulence, but in our time, anthrax has been associated with terrorism and warfare. What accounts for this frightening transformation? Death in a Small Package recounts how this ubiquitous agricultural disease came to be one of the deadliest and most feared biological weapons in the world. Bacillus anthracis is lethal. Animals killed by the disease are buried deep underground, where anthrax spores remain viable for decades or even centuries and, if accidentally disturbed, can cause new infections. But anthrax can be deliberately aerosolized and used to kill—as it was in the United States in 2001. Historian and veterinarian Susan D. Jones recounts the life story of anthrax through the biology of the bacillus; the political, economic, geographic, and scientific factors that affect anthrax prevalence; and the cultural beliefs about the disease that have shaped human responses to it. She explains how Bacillus anthracis became domesticated, discusses what researchers have learned from numerous outbreaks, and analyzes how the bacillus came to be weaponized and what this development means for the modern world. Jones compellingly narrates the biography of this frightfully hardy disease from the ancient world through the present day. “Death in a Small Package is interesting, well written, and accessible, presenting a worthwhile addition to the history of modern medicine and bacteriological science.” —Karen Brown, Isis

This volume examines the role of textiles within the expanding global economy in the Age of European Exploration. Major themes include: the opening of new markets and responses to competition in the cloth trade, evolving techniques and modes of production, and changes in the patterns of consumption of local and imported cloth in a comparative, cross-cultural context.