John L. Brooke

Climate, Weather, Agriculture, and Food

Climate and weather are vital factors in food production, principally through their influence on the possibilities, limits, and risks of farming and pastoralism. Nevertheless, the historical links among climate, weather, agriculture, and food are often complex and contingent. This chapter reviews the growing body of research on these links, from the first domestication of plants and animals to the modern era, with emphasis on the contributions of climate history to explaining food shortages, famines, and related disasters in Little Ice Age Europe.

Innerworldly Individualism: Charismatic Community and Its Institutionalization.

Innerworldly Individualism looks to colonial history, in particular, seventeenth-century New England, to understand the sources of modern nation building. Seligman analyzes how cultural assumptions of collective identity and social authority emerged out of the religious beliefs of the first generation of settlers in New England. He goes on to examine how these assumptions crystallized three generations later into patterns of normative order, forming the foundation of an American consciousness. Seligman uses sociological research grounded in early American history as his laboratory, and does so in a highly original way. Seligman uses Max Webers paradigm of sociological inquiry to explore how a combination of ideational and structural factors helped to develop modern conceptions of authority and collective identity among New England communities. Seligman addresses a number of significant issues, including social change, the mutual interaction and development of process and structure, and the role of charisma in the forging of a social order. His book profoundly increases our understanding of the ideological and social processes prevalent in early American history as well as their contemporary influence on civil identity. Innerworldly Individualism uniquely intertwines sociological study with cultural history. It uses American history to develop and elucidate problems of broad theoretical significance. Seligmans argument is bolstered by a close examination of concrete detail. His book will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, political theorists, and historians of American culture.

The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844.

List of illustrations List of maps Preface Part I. A Prepared People: 1. Dreams of the primal Adam 2. The true spiritual seed 3. Something of our ancestors Part II. Hermetic Purity and Hermetic Danger: 4. A Urim spiritual 5. Alchymical experiments 6. I was born in Sharon Part III. The Mormon Dispensation: 7. Secret combinations and slippery treasures in the land of Zarahemla 8. The mysteries defined 9. Temples, wives, bogus-making and war 10. The keys to the kingdom 11. A tangle of strings and the kingdom of God 12. Let mysteries alone Appendix: the sectarian and hermetic circumstances of Mormon origins in Vermont and New York Abbreviations used in notes Notes Index.

The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713-1861.

List of illustrations and tables Preface Abbreviations used in the footnotes Prologue Part I. A Provincial World, 1713-1763: 1. Institutions: towns, countries and class 2. Economy: class, property, credit, and the Land Bank 3. Awakening: orthodoxy, dissent, and a new social architecture 4. Politics: from popular insurgency to Shirleys consensus Part II. The Revolution, 1763-1789: 5. The popular gentry and the revolutionary crisis 6. The Baptists and the constitution 7. Conventions, regulation, and antifederalism Part III. In the New Nation, 1789-1861: 8. Party spirit 9. Economic transformation 10. Insurgencies 11. Antislavery Epilogue Appendices Index.