Bodies politic : negotiating race in the American North, 1730-1830

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

Bodies politic : negotiating race in the American North, 1730-1830

John Wood Sweet

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, c2003

Available at  / 3 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [411]-474) and index

Originally published by the John Hopkins University Press, 2003

Description and Table of Contents

Description

In this sweeping analysis of colonialism and its legacies, John Wood Sweet explores how the ongoing interaction of conquered Indians, English settlers, and enslaved Africans in New England produced a closely interwoven, though radically divided, society. The coming together of these diverse peoples profoundly shaped the character of colonial New England, the meanings of the Revolution in the North, and the making of American democracy writ large. Critically engaged with current debates about the dynamics of culture, racial identity, and postcolonial politics, this innovative and intellectually capacious work is grounded in a remarkable array of evidence. What emerges from this analysis of colonial and early national censuses, newspapers, diaries, letters, court records, printed works, and visual images are the dramatic confrontations and subtle negotiations by which Indians, Africans, and Anglo-Americans defined their respective places in early New England. Citizenship, as Sweet reveals, was defined in meeting houses as well as in courthouses, in bedrooms as well as on battlefields, in land disputes as well as on streets. Bodies Politic reveals how the legacy of colonialism shaped the emergence of the nineteenth-century North and continues, even to this day, to shape all our lives.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: After Origins PT. I. COMING TOGETHER 1. Common Ground 2. Negotiating Slavery 3. Strange Christians PT. II. LIVING TOGETHER 4. Strange Flesh 5. Men of Arms 6. Negotiating Freedom PT. III. MOVING APART 7. Conceiving Race 8. Manifest Destinies 9. Hard Scrabble Epilogue: Democracy in America Notes A Note on Sources Index

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