Riot and Revelry in Early America

History

Newman, Simon P.

Pencak, William

Dennis, Matthew

Americas

Penn State University Press

Riot and revelry have been mainstays of English and European history writing for more than a generation, but they have had a more checkered influence on American scholarship. Despite considerable attention from "new left" historians during the 1970s and early 1980s, and more recently from cultural and "public sphere" historians in the mid-1990s, the idea of America as a colony and nation deeply infused with a culture of public performance has not been widely demonstrated the way it has been in Britain, France, and Italy. In this important volume, leading American historians demonstrate that early America was in fact an integral part of a broader transatlantic tradition of popular disturbance and celebration. The first half of the collection focuses on "rough music" and "skimmington"—forms of protest whereby communities publicly regulated the moral order. The second half considers the use of parades and public celebrations to create national unity and overcome divisions in the young republic. Contributors include Roger D. Abrahams, Susan Branson, Thomas J. Humphrey, Susan E. Klepp, Brendan McConville, William D. Piersen, Steven J. Stewart, and Len Travers. Together the essays in this volume offer the best introduction to the full range of protest and celebration in America from the Revolution to the Civil War.

Simon P. Newman vividly evokes the celebrations of America's first national holidays in the years between the ratification of the Constitution and the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson. He demonstrates how, by taking part in the festive culture of the streets, ordinary American men and women were able to play a significant role in forging the political culture of the young nation. The creation of many of the patriotic holidays we still celebrate coincided with the emergence of the first two-party system. With the political songs they sang, the liberty poles they raised, and the partisan badges they wore, Americans of many walks of life helped shape a new national politics destined to replace the regional practices of the colonial era.

Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Early American Studies)

University of Pennsylvania Press

Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Early American Studies)

Offering a new view into the lives and experiences of plebeian men and women, and a provocative exploration of the history of the body itself, Embodied History approaches the bodies of the poor in early national Philadelphia as texts to be read and interpreted. Through a close examination of accounts of the bodies that appeared in runaway advertisements and in seafaring, almshouse, prison, hospital, and burial records, Simon P. Newman uses physical details to paint an entirely different portrait of the material circumstances of the poor, examining the ways they became categorized in the emerging social hierarchy, and how they sought to resist such categorization. 
The Philadelphians examined in Embodied History were members of the lower sort, a social category that emerged in the early modern period from the belief in a society composed of natural orders and ranks. The population of the urban poor grew rapidly after the American Revolution, and middling and elite citizens were frightened by these poor bodies, from the tattooed professional sailor, to the African American runaway with a highly personalized hairstyle and distinctive mannerisms and gestures, to the vigorous and lively Irish prostitute who refused to be cowed by the condemnation of others, to the hardworking laboring family whose weakened and diseased children played and sang in the alleys. In a new republic premised on liberty and equality, the rapidly increasing ranks of unruly bodies threatened to overwhelm traditional notions of deference, hierarchy, and order.
Affluent Philadelphians responded by employing runaway advertisements, the almshouse, the prison, and to a lesser degree the hospital to incarcerate, control, and correct poor bodies and transform them into well-dressed, hardworking, deferential members of society. Embodied History is a compelling and accessible exploration of how poverty was etched and how power and discipline were enacted upon the bodies of the poor, as well as how the poor attempted to transcend such discipline through assertions of bodily agency and liberty.

The small and remote island of Barbados seems an unlikely location for the epochal change in labor that overwhelmed it and much of British America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, by 1650 it had become the greatest wealth-producing area in the English-speaking world, the center of an exchange of people and goods between the British Isles, the Gold Coast of West Africa, and the New World. By the early seventeenth century, more than half a million enslaved men, women, and children had been transported to the island. In A New World of Labor, Simon P. Newman argues that this exchange stimulated an entirely new system of bound labor.
Free and bound labor were defined and experienced by Britons and Africans across the British Atlantic world in quite different ways. Connecting social developments in seventeenth-century Britain with the British experience of slavery on the West African coast, Newman demonstrates that the brutal white servant regime, rather than the West African institution of slavery, provided the most significant foundation for the violent system of racialized black slavery that developed in Barbados. Class as much as race informed the creation of plantation slavery in Barbados and throughout British America. Enslaved Africans in Barbados were deployed in radically new ways in order to cultivate, process, and manufacture sugar on single, integrated plantations. This Barbadian system informed the development of racial slavery on Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, as well as in South Carolina and then the Deep South of mainland British North America. Drawing on British and West African precedents, and then radically reshaping them, Barbados planters invented a new world of labor.

A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (The Early Modern Americas)

Africa

Simon P. Newman vividly evokes the celebrations of America's first national holidays in the years between the ratification of the Constitution and the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson. He demonstrates how, by taking part in the festive culture of the streets, ordinary American men and women were able to play a significant role in forging the political culture of the young nation. The creation of many of the patriotic holidays we still celebrate coincided with the emergence of the first two-party system. With the political songs they sang, the liberty poles they raised, and the partisan badges they wore, Americans of many walks of life helped shape a new national politics destined to replace the regional practices of the colonial era.

Winner of the 2004 American Studies Network Book Prize. Offering a new view into the lives and experiences of plebeian men and women, and a provocative exploration of the history of the body itself, Embodied History approaches the bodies of the poor in early national Philadelphia as texts to be read and interpreted. Through a close examination of accounts of the bodies that appeared in runaway advertisements and in seafaring, almshouse, prison, hospital, and burial records, Simon P. Newman uses physical details to paint an entirely different portrait of the material circumstances of the poor, examining the ways they became categorized in the emerging social hierarchy, and how they sought to resist such categorization. The Philadelphians examined in Embodied History were members of the lower sort, a social category that emerged in the early modern period from the belief in a society composed of natural orders and ranks. The population of the urban poor grew rapidly after the American Revolution, and middling and elite citizens were frightened by these poor bodies, from the tattooed professional sailor, to the African American runaway with a highly personalized hairstyle and distinctive mannerisms and gestures, to the vigorous and lively Irish prostitute who refused to be cowed by the condemnation of others, to the hardworking laboring family whose weakened and diseased children played and sang in the alleys. In a new republic premised on liberty and equality, the rapidly increasing ranks of unruly bodies threatened to overwhelm traditional notions of deference, hierarchy, and order.Affluent Philadelphians responded by employing runaway advertisements, the almshouse, the prison, and to a lesser degree the hospital to incarcerate, control, and correct poor bodies and transform them into well-dressed, hardworking, deferential members of society. Embodied History is a compelling and accessible exploration of how poverty was etched and how power and discipline were enacted upon the bodies of the poor, as well as how the poor attempted to transcend such discipline through assertions of bodily agency and liberty.

Awarded the 2013 Book Prize by the British Association for American Studies
 The small and remote island of Barbados seems an unlikely location for the epochal change in labor that overwhelmed it and much of British America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, by 1650 it had become the greatest wealth-producing area in the English-speaking world, the center of an exchange of people and goods between the British Isles, the Gold Coast of West Africa, and the New World. By the early seventeenth century, more than half a million enslaved men, women, and children had been transported to the island. In A New World of Labor, Simon P. Newman argues that this exchange stimulated an entirely new system of bound labor.
Free and bound labor were defined and experienced by Britons and Africans across the British Atlantic world in quite different ways. Connecting social developments in seventeenth-century Britain with the British experience of slavery on the West African coast, Newman demonstrates that the brutal white servant regime, rather than the West African institution of slavery, provided the most significant foundation for the violent system of racialized black slavery that developed in Barbados. Class as much as race informed the creation of plantation slavery in Barbados and throughout British America. Enslaved Africans in Barbados were deployed in radically new ways in order to cultivate, process, and manufacture sugar on single, integrated plantations. This Barbadian system informed the development of racial slavery on Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, as well as in South Carolina and then the Deep South of mainland British North America. Drawing on British and West African precedents, and then radically reshaping them, Barbados planters invented a new world of labor.

Freedom Seekers reveals the hidden stories of Britain’s enslaved people and their liberation.\nThis book brings the history of slavery in England to light, revealing the powerful untold stories of resistance by enslaved workers from Africa, South Asia, and First-Nations America forced to work in London as sailors and dockworkers, wet-nurses and washerwomen. Featuring a series of original case studies on those enslaved people who escaped captivity, this volume provides a rich source of information about slavery in eighteenth-century mainland Britain and the “freedom seekers” therein. Using maps, photographs, newspaper advertisements, and more, the book details escape routes, the networks of slaveholders, and the community of people of color across the London region.\nFreedom Seekers demonstrates that not only were enslaved people present in Restoration London but that white Londoners were intimately involved in the construction of the system of racial slavery, a process traditionally regarded as happening in the colonies rather than the British Isles. Freedom Seekers is an utterly unmissable and important book that seeks to delve into Britain’s colonial past.

Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (Institute of Historical Research)

University of London Press

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Books by Newman, Simon P.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Newman, Simon P.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Riot and Revelry in Early America

Riot and Revelry in Early America

Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Early American Studies)

Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Early American Studies)

A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (The Early Modern Americas)

Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Early American Studies)

Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Early American Studies)

A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (The Early Modern Americas)

Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (Institute of Historical Research)