At the age of twenty-four, the Rhode Island Quaker Jemima Wilkinson (1752-1819) recovered from a bout of fever with the pronouncement that she had been directed by a vision to preach to a "dying and sinful world." Announcing that Jemima had died and that her body now housed a new spirit, the Publick Universal Friend, this remarkably charismatic―and notably scandal-plagued―woman gathered several hundred followers and settled to the west of Seneca Lake. Although the religious community she founded on a framework of abstinence and friendship did not long survive her, Wilkinson remains a figure of fascination and mystery to this day. Herbert A. Wisbey Jr.'s 1964 biography is the authoritative account of her life, times, and ideals.

Pioneer Prophetess: Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend

Biographies & Memoirs

Wisbey, Herbert A.

Community & Culture

Fall Creek Books

"The Dutch colony of New Netherland in the seventeenth century enjoyed a greater diversity of religious beliefs than any of the English colonies in America at the time, except possibly Rhode Island. George L. Procter-Smith has investigated the background and reasons for this religious diversity and toleration despite the legal establishment of the Dutch Reformed Church. All colonies have to be understood in terms of their mother country; but, Procter-Smith insists, the European background is especially important in the study of New Netherland. He devotes about half the book to the religious situation in the Netherlands and the de facto toleration that existed despite the state church.
"The Dutch colony in America was founded for trade, not for religious reasons which were so prominent in the neighboring English colonies. As the Dutch directors of the West India Company, the colony's proprietor, tried to recruit settlers, they realized that intolerance and religious persecution would keep many prospective settlers away. Consequently, they paid lip service to the Dutch Reformed establishment but in practice allowed dissenters to practice their religion in private. Procter-Smith has written a clear, persuasive account of religion and politics, as shaped by the Dutch trading interests, in both Europe and New Netherland."―Review for Religious: A Journal of Catholic Spirituality

Religion and Trade in New Netherland: Dutch Origins and American Development

Procter-Smith, George L.

Religion & Spirituality

Integrating sophisticated demographic techniques with clearly written narrative, this pioneering book (first published in 1976) explores the complex social and economic life of a major colonial city. New York City was a vital part of the middle colonies and may hold the key to the origins of political democracy in America. Family histories, public records of births, marriages, and assessments, and records of business transactions and poll lists are among the rich sources Thomas J. Archdeacon uses to determine the impact of the English conquest on the city of New York. Among his concerns are the changing relationships between the Dutch and the English, the distribution of wealth and the role of commerce in the city, and the part played by ethnic and religious heritage in provincial politics.

New York City, 1664-1710: Conquest and Change

History

Archdeacon, Thomas J.

Americas

The winner of the first New York State Historical Association Manuscript Award, this book is a fascinating attempt to show how criminal behavior fits into the society in which it occurs. Through a computer-assisted analysis of some 5,300 eighteenth-century court cases, Douglas Greenberg explores larger problems of social change and development in what was considered the most fractious of all Britain's North American colonies: New York.Greenberg describes the court system in New York and considers such issues at the demography of criminal prosecution and judgment, the character and social position of accused criminals, the social forces that led people into criminal behavior, crime rates, and the effectiveness of the court system. He concludes by placing his findings in a comparative framework and relating them to the coming of the American Revolution. "Crime and law enforcement were central experiences for early Americans," he writes, "and the ways in which they dealt with these problems have much to tell us about their view of the world in which they lived."

Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691–1776

Greenberg, Douglas S.

Through an examination of religious life in a typical northern rural locale―Cortland County, New York―from 1790 to 1860, Curtis D. Johnson adds to our understanding of the Second Great Awakening, an intellectual and religious watershed in American history. Offering both quantitative and qualitative analyses of churches' memberships, ideologies, and activities, he maintains that scholars have misunderstood the historical significance of evangelicalism. 
Johnson contends that these churches did not constitute society, nor were they microcosms of it; rather, they evolved from embattled congregations of the saved―"islands of holiness"―to ideologically conservative, organizationally unified, integrated parts of society. He uncovers the many diversities of Protestantism in the form of splits between evangelicals and non-evangelicals, formalists and anti-formalists, Arminians and Calvinists, Old School traditionalists and Oberlin perfectionists, church members and religious society members.
At the heart of the revivalistic impulse, he argues, was ideological conflict―primarily between Calvinists and Arminians―with gender politics and internal church dynamics also contributing to the evangelical tumult. With a special interest in the Awakening's impact on congregational life, Johnson focuses on rural community experience to challenge the findings of historians who have concentrated exclusively on urban religious expression. He concludes that the importance of the various factions of evangelicalism lies in their common exhortation to republicanism and reform: these congregations, he says, influenced social change out of proportion to their numbers because activism was a central tenet of their religion.
Islands of Holiness is a gem of local history. A meticulously researched book, it makes a valuable contribution to an enduring aspect of the social history of American religious expression.

Islands of Holiness: Rural Religion in Upstate New York, 1790–1860 (Longman Linguistics Library)

Johnson, Curtis D.

Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution: The Holland Land Purchase

"Clearly written, thoroughly researched, and cleverly argued, Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution makes a major contribution to a very significant topic: the reconstitution of the agrarian persuasion of nineteenth-century America and the careful location of that persuasion in the social context of rural communities."―Alan Taylor, UC Davis, author of The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution 
"By reconstructing the activities of the Holland Land Company, settlers, and the emerging entrepreneurial elite on New York’s frontier, Brooks demonstrates that the market revolution was spurred primarily by capitalists, while small producers fiercely resisted efforts by landlords to establish market agriculture."―Journal of Economic History
Land development in western New York contributed to some of the most dramatic and convulsive changes in nineteenth-century America. In Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution, Charles E. Brooks explains how the Holland Land Purchase―in which the Holland Land Company purchased 3.3 million acres of land in western New York State― contributed to the development of a frontier region. Powerful cultural and religious changes flowing from evangelical Protestantism, together with settlement and the intensification of market relations, put western New York in the vanguard of capitalist transformation in rural areas. Brooks also describes the ecological impact of frontier settlement and the evolution of private land development based on the decision either to clear land for farming or to harvest forest products for potash, lumber, maple sugar, fuel wood, and scrub pasture.

Business & Money

Brooks, Charles E.

Economics

Chapters of Erie is a classic account of ruthless business practices in nineteenth-century America―in particular, Jay Gould and James Fisk's successful effort to gain control of the Erie Railroad in 1868 and subsequent attempt to corner the American gold market, which resulted in the "Black Friday" panic of September 24, 1869. Seizing upon the opportunity provided by the scandals to expose the links between financial malpractice on Wall Street and political favoritism and corruption, Henry Adams and his older brother Charles Francis Adams, Jr., traveled to New York and Washington to interview the participants (including Fisk), observe the Congressional hearings on the gold conspiracy, and reconstruct in forensic detail the machinations that had shaken the nation's economy. 
First appearing in a series of articles in the Westminster Review and the North American Review in 1870 and 1871, the results of the Adams brothers' investigative journalism were published as a book in 1886. Reissued by Cornell University Press in 1956 with a preface by Robert H. Elias, Chapters of Erie remains a well-documented, perceptive, and sometimes sardonic examination of the relationship between business and politics in America―and a warning about the dangers posed by unregulated corporations "to override and trample on law, custom, decency, and every restraint known to society, without scruple."

Chapters of Erie

ADAMS, HENRY

Adams Jr., Charles Francis

When Charles Evans Hughes defeated William Randolph Hearst for the governorship of New York in 1906, the New York State Republican Party was split between the remnants of the rural, conservative Platt political machine in Albany and the forces loyal to the progressive, energetic President and former New York Governor, Teddy Roosevelt. Although Hughes owed his nomination largely to Roosevelt's desire to weaken conservative influences, the aloof and independent governor's moral idealism and legal experience led him to positions more liberal and unyielding than even Roosevelt could endorse.In this thorough study of Hughes's two terms as governor, Robert F. Wesser depicts the tensions of conservativism and liberalism, corruption and moral indignation, which rent the state government under his administration. Making use of unpublished manuscript collections, both personal and organizational, and other primary sources, Wesser evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Hughes as a political leader and reformer. He shows that despite opposition from his own party, Hughes's governorship produced important reform legislation in three areas: improvement of the machinery and processes of government; extension of the state's regulatory authority over businesses engaged in public services; and expansion of governmental police and welfare functions.These legislative achievements were supplemented by Hughes's relentless dedication to administrative efficiency, which helped shift the focus of New York politics from the legislature and party organization to the office of the governor. But not all Governor Hughes's efforts were successful, and Wesser carefully analyzes his failures as well as his triumphs-including the humiliating defeat at the hands of his own party's bosses in his quest to pass a direct primary voting bill-providing a complete portrait of a significant turning point in the history of New York and of the man who undermined some of the very foundations of the old political order. First published in 1967, Charles Evans Hughes remains an import work of scholarship on the history of New York and of the Progressive Era more broadly.

Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905–1910

Wesser, Robert F.

Historical

At the age of twenty-four, the Rhode Island Quaker Jemima Wilkinson (1752-1819) recovered from a bout of fever with the pronouncement that she had been directed by a vision to preach to a "dying and sinful world." Announcing that Jemima had died and that her body now housed a new spirit, the Publick Universal Friend, this remarkably charismatic-and notably scandal-plagued-woman gathered several hundred followers and settled to the west of Seneca Lake. Although the religious community she founded on a framework of abstinence and friendship did not long survive her, Wilkinson remains a figure of fascination and mystery to this day. Herbert A. Wisbey Jr.'s 1964 biography is the authoritative account of her life, times, and ideals.

First published in 1960, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York remains the only one-volume study of Indian-European relations in seventeenth-century New York. In the first half of this book, Allen W. Trelease describes the Dutch period that followed Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage and details New Netherland's dealings with the Algonquian peoples of the Hudson Valley and Long Island. The second half of the book, addressing the English period after 1664, emphasizes the colonists' relations with the Iroquois. Still widely cited and read, this pioneering work remains an authoritative study of its subject and a valuable contribution to the historiography of both seventeenth-century colonial New York and Indian-European relations in this formative period.

Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century

Trelease, Allen W.

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Books by Fall Creek Books

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Pioneer Prophetess: Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend

Religion and Trade in New Netherland: Dutch Origins and American Development

New York City, 1664-1710: Conquest and Change

Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691–1776

Islands of Holiness: Rural Religion in Upstate New York, 1790–1860 (Longman Linguistics Library)

Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution: The Holland Land Purchase

Chapters of Erie

Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905–1910

Pioneer Prophetess: Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend

Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century