Order and Civility in the Early Modern Chesapeake - by Debra Meyers & Melanie Perreault (Hardcover)

About the Book

Order and Civility in the Early Modern Chesapeake captures a variety of experiences in the early modern Chesapeake, illustrating the race, class, ethnic, and gender diversity that created a unique New World experience. Students and scholars will find this book essential to und...

Book Synopsis

Order and Civility in the Early Modern Chesapeake captures a variety of experiences in the early modern Chesapeake, illustrating the race, class, ethnic, and gender diversity that created a unique New World experience. Students and scholars will find this book essential to understanding the colonial Chesapeake.

Review Quotes

These articles provide ample room for reflection on how a tug-of-war between resistance to and assertion of social control led to order and civility in the Chesapeake.

This collection from established and emerging scholars offers fresh and sophisticated essays on the beliefs, legal systems, and labor systems of the early Chesapeake. This innovative organization makes the book a fruitful one, not only for scholars, but also for students who can use the essays to compare sources, arguments, and methods.

This is a fine and provocative collection of essays from a band of largely junior scholars, newly minted Ph.Ds. and the like. All the essays in some way revisit the 'origins debate, ' and the nature and extent of 'unfreedom' in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia and the Chesapeake, with the additional concentration on class and gender. These young scholars have not only produced some new interpretations of old arguments, they shift our attention from the antebellum period and black enslavement, which has dominated much of the scholarship for the last four decades, to the colonial period and unfree, non-black labor, particularly indentured and convict labor. We are reminded of the harsh realities of life for those unable to assert and maintain their legal freedom, such as wives separated from husbands, convict women, or those accused of witchcraft. These essays make abundantly clear that race was far from the primary determining factor in an age when 'freedom' was far from universal and exploitation of the powerless was widespread.

About the Author

Debra Meyers is professor of history and women's and gender studies and director of public history at Northern Kentucky University.

Melanie Perreault is professor of history and associate provost at Salisbury University.