Edward Countryman

Consolidating Power in Revolutionary America: The Case of New York, 1775-1783

Consolidating Power in Revolutionary America: The Case of New York, 1775-1783 Between October 2, 1777 and February 7, 1778 the newly founded state assembly of New York took votes on the state supreme court, on prohibiting the sale of scarce grain to customers out of the state, and on an extraconstitutional convention that had seized power in the face of a military crisis in the late autumn of 1777 and that held it until the legislature could reassemble.I There is no reason, on the face of it, to expect any relationship among these divisions; none of them was a party issue and none of them was identified with the governor, George Clinton. Yet these votes-there were five in all-formed a single Guttman scale.2 In other words, voting patterns showed that the votes turned on a single basic issue: the existence and powers of the extralegal convention and other bodies like it. The problem with the court was the refusal of its judges, named to their posts by an earlier extralegal convention, to carry out their duties until reappointed constitutionally. The debate over the embargo bill asked whether the assembly should merely continue a prohibition already imposed by the convention or whether it should impose a new one, without mentioning the convention at all. The issue, in short, was legitimacy: should New Yorks constitutional republican institutions recognize the power that revolutionary bodies had exercised in the state since the collapse of the colonial government ? And if they did, would that betoken an abandonment of their own claim to be the sole legitimate political power in the state ? Conventional wisdom says that such a problem should not have existed in revolutionary America. Ever since its French counterpart provided a first basis for comparison, students of the American Revolution have remarked on the ease and smoothness with which that event

The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America

The Beginnings of Anglo-American and the Setting of the First Cousins War * The Protestant Background of Anglo-American Expansion and the Cousins Wars The Early Cousins Wars * Anglo-Americas First Civil Wars: The British Setting, 16301763 * America, 17631775: The Inheritance of Revolutionary Conflict * The British Empire and Civil War in the Western Hemisphere, 17751783 * The Making of a Revolution: Patriots, Loyalists, and Neutrals * Support for the American Revolution Within the British Isles * Trauma and Triumph: Saratoga and the Revitalization of the British Empire The Final Cousins War * Sectionalism, Slavery, and Religion: The Continuity of the Second and Third Cousins Wars * The Final Cousins Fight: Causes and Origins of the American Civil War * The U.S. Civil War: Loyalties, Alignments, and Partisanships, 18611865 * The U.S. Civil War and the Framework of Anglo-America The Triumph of Anglo-AmericaWar, Population, and English Language Hegemony * The Cousins Wars and the Shaping of Anglo-American Politics * Demographic Imperialism: The Second Architecture of Anglo-American Hegemony * The English Language: Words as Weaponry? * Afterword

Toward a New Mississippi history

Political Culture in the Nineteenth‐Century South: Mississippi, 1830–1900. BRADLEY G. BOND. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1995. 342 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

Americans: A Collision of Histories

35.00. ISBN 0–807–1976–8. Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770–1860. CHRISTOPHER MORRIS. New York: Oxford University Press. 1995. 258 pp., notes, illustrations, appendices, index.

Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue and the Formation of American Republics.

35.00. ISBN 0–19–508366–0. Worse than Slavery:”; Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. DAVID M. OSHINSKY. New York: Free Press. 1996. 306 pp., notes, illustrations, index.

Alan Taylor. American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804.

25.00. Mississippi: An American Journey. ANTHONY WALTON. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1996. 279 pp., illustrations.

West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776. By Claudio Saunt. (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2014). Pp. 288.

24.00.

26.95.)

Part 1 Slavery and freedom, loss and gain: a collision of histories Braudels American mosaic colonial revolts, American revolution the revolution and the republic. Part 2 What, then, were these Americans?: mountains, valleys, and plains capital cities with iron interlaced citizens, subjects, and slaves - the republican mosaic. Part 3 A house burst asunder: the crisis of triumphant democracy engaged in a great civil war in one, many. Coda: the vexed, unanswered question.

Trade, Land, and Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America. By Daniel K. Richter. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. viii, 315.

On the way toward declaring independence, Americans saw themselves as a separate people in the process of birth. In 1774, the First Continental Congress drew up a highly specific code of behaviour banning cock-fighting, horse-racing , and theatre. Public executions took the place of drama, and strict regulations were placed on funerals . Withington argues that Congress banned these activities because they were viewed as posing a threat to the values needed in order to make resistance to Britain successful. The book is a brilliant example of cultural history, using activities like gambling and theatre to illuminate the popular attitudes and government policy that contributed to the move toward Independence.