Helena Wall shows what life was like in colonial America, a culture where individuals and family were subordinated to the demands of the community. Using local town, church, and especially court records from every colony, she examines the division of authority between family and community throughout colonial America. Although this close relationship and its consequences for private life bred many tensions and conflicts, the premises and conditions of that interdependent association persisted even into the nineteenth century. Wall sketches the subsequent changes and outlines the new arrangements of family and community life as the colonies moved toward the formation of a new nation.
"At its core was a suspicion of emotional attachments between men and women. Boys were taken under their father's wing from a young age and taught the virtues of reason, responsibility, and maturity. Intimate bonds with mothers were discouraged, as were individual expression, pride, and play. The mature man who moderated his passions and contributed to his family and community was admired, in sharp contrast to the young, adventurous, and aggressive hero who would emerge after the American Revolution and embody our modern image of masculinity."--BOOK JACKET.
This book provides a lively account of one of the most important and overlooked themes in American education. Beginning in the colonial period and working to the present, Gaither describes in rich detail how the home has been used as the base for education of all kinds. The last five chapters focus especially on the modern homeschooling movement and offer the most comprehensive and authoritative account of it ever written. Readers will learn how and why homeschooling emerged when it did, where it has been, and where it may be going. The second edition has been thoroughly revised to incorporate the most recent scholarship on the topic and to provide comprehensive coverage of recent trends.
This is a lively account of one of the most important and overlooked themes in American education. Beginning in the colonial period and working to the present, Gaither describes in rich detail how the home has been used as the base for education of all kinds. The last five chapters focus especially on the modern homeschooling movement and offer the most comprehensive and authoritative account of it ever written. Readers will learn how and why homeschooling emerged when it did, where it has been, and where it may be going. Please visit Gaither's blog here: http://gaither.wordpress.com/homeschool-an-american-history/
A generous portrait of an artist at the height of her powers of perception. In these poems, sketches and song lyrics, crafted over a lifetime, we come to share in the adventure of stepping out of what Grenfell Fairhead calls the "house of orthodoxy." What binds these pieces together is her exuberance, and the sense that we are always at the beginning. Again and again, one feels a sense of things just beyond the range of the senses, waiting for us to catch up with them. In each landscape she describes, one feels her sensibility in sympathy with it, finding a place in it. As she remembers and argues with herself, mourns and celebrates, we find ourselves accompanying her on this voyage of discovery with our own full attention.
When the beautiful Magdalena Chavez and her troubled, passionate son move into the small town of Las Madres, New Mexico, it doesn't take long for the discerning among the townspeople to discover that they are "other." Magdalena is a teller of stories that delight many, but also challenge the assumptions of one and all. Soon the reader is seduced into an enchanted world in which the boundary between reality and fantasy is always on the point of collapsing. The main characters must maintain a difficult balance between opposing polarities-sacred and profane, forbidden desire and ruthless power-a balance that seems to come instinctively to the simple but knowing inhabitants of Las Madres. Fairhead is utterly at home in this environment, evoking it with a mixture of precision and lyrical intensity. Whether she is describing the tumult of a bullfight, the stillness of a work of art or the vast, cinematic splendour of the New Mexico landscape, her voice is always pitch perfect. As the title suggests, it is a world of great beauty, but that same title also warns us that we cannot speak of beauty without also speaking of death. The Duende, that dark wind that blows through the world and touches the back of the neck whenever death is possible, is never far away.
What role did sexual assault play in the conquest of America? How did American attitudes toward female sexuality evolve, and how was sexuality regulated in the early Republic? Sex and sexuality have always been the subject of much attention, both scholarly and popular. Yet, accounts of the early years of the United States tend to overlook the importance of their influence on the shaping of American culture. Sex and Sexuality in Early America addresses this neglected topic with original research covering a wide spectrum, from sexual behavior to sexual perceptions and imagery. Focusing on the period between the initial contact of Europeans and Native Americans up to 1800, the essays encompass all of colonial North America, including the Caribbean and Spanish territories. Challenging previous assumptions, these essays address such topics as rape as a tool of conquest; perceptions and responses to Native American sexuality; fornication, bastardy, celibacy, and religion in colonial New England; gendered speech in captivity narratives; representations of masculinity in eighteenth- century seduction tales, the sexual cosmos of a southern planter, and sexual transgression and madness in early American fiction. The contributors include Stephanie Wood, Gordon Sayre, Steven Neuwirth, Else L. Hambleton, Erik R. Seeman, Richard Godbeer, Trevor Burnard, Natalie A. Zacek, Wayne Bodle, Heather Smyth, Rodney Hessinger, and Karen A. Weyler.
Settling the Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England (1620-1650) is the first institutional history of the Massachusetts Bay Company, cornerstone of early modern English colonisation in North America. Agnès Delahaye analyses settlement as a form of colonial innovation, to reveal the political significance of early New England sources, above and beyond religion. John Winthrop was not just a Puritan, but a settler governor who wrote the history of the expansion of his company as a record of successful and enduring policy. Delahaye argues that settlement, as the action and the experience of appropriating the land, is key to understanding the role played by Winthrop’s writings in American historiography, before independence and in our times.
