At Kingdom's Edge

At Kingdom's Edge
Author: Jacob Selwood
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2022-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501764225

At Kingdom's Edge investigates how life in a conquered colony both revealed and shaped what it meant to be English outside of the British Isles. Considering the case of Jeronimy Clifford, who rose to become one of Suriname's richest planters, Jacob Selwood examines the mutual influence of race and subjecthood in the early modern world. Clifford was a child in Suriname when the Dutch, in 1667, wrested the South American colony from England soon after England seized control of New Netherland in North America. Across the arc of his life—from time in the tenuous English colony to prosperity as a slaveholding planter to a stint in debtors' prison in London—Clifford used all the tools at his disposal to elevate and secure his status. His English subjecthood, which he clung to as a wealthy planter in Dutch-controlled Suriname, was a ready means to exert political, legal, economic, and cultural authority. Clifford deployed it without hesitation, even when it failed to serve his interests. In 1695 Clifford left Suriname and, until his death, he tried to regain control over his abandoned plantation and its enslaved workers. His evocation of international treaties at times secured the support of the Crown. The English and Dutch governments' responses reveal competing definitions of belonging between and across empires, as well as the differing imperial political cultures with which claimants to rights and privileges had to contend. Clifford's case highlights the unresolved tensions about the meanings of colonial subjecthood, Anglo-Dutch relations, and the legacy of England's seventeenth-century empire.

The First English Detectives

The First English Detectives
Author: J. M. Beattie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2012-02-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199695164

This is the first comprehensive study of the Bow Street Runners, a group of men established in the middle of the eighteenth century by Henry Fielding to confront violent offenders on the streets and highways around London.

Identifying the English

Identifying the English
Author: Edward Higgs
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2011-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 144113560X

Personal identification is very much a live political issue in Britain and this book looks at why this is the case, and why, paradoxically, the theft of identity has become ever more common as the means of identification have multiplied. Identifying the English looks not only at how criminals have been identified - branding, fingerprinting, DNA - but also at the identification of the individual with seals and signatures, of the citizen by means of passports and ID cards, and of the corpse. Beginning his history in the medieval period, Edward Higgs reveals how it was not the Industrial Revolution that brought the most radical changes in identification techniques, as many have assumed, but rather the changing nature of the State and commerce, and their relationship with citizens and customers. In the twentieth century the very different historical techniques have converged on the holding of information on databases, and increasingly on biometrics, and the multiplication of these external databases outside the control of individuals has continued to undermine personal identity security.

The Records of the War Office and Related Departments, 1660-1964

The Records of the War Office and Related Departments, 1660-1964
Author: Michael Roper
Publisher: Public Record Office Publications
Total Pages: 404
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781873162453

This guide covers the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the establishment of the Ministry of Defence in 1964. It includes the records of the Board of Ordnance, military intelligence and military aviation.

Citizens in a Strange Land

Citizens in a Strange Land
Author: Hermann Wellenreuther
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2015-06-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271061006

In Citizens in a Strange Land, Hermann Wellenreuther examines the broadsides—printed single sheets—produced by the Pennsylvania German community. These broadsides covered topics ranging from local controversies and politics to devotional poems and hymns. Each one is a product of and reaction to a particular historical setting. To understand them fully, Wellenreuther systematically reconstructs Pennsylvania’s print culture, the material conditions of life, the problems German settlers faced, the demands their communities made on the individual settlers, the complications to be overcome, and the needs to be satisfied. He shows how these broadsides provided advice, projections, and comment on phases of life from cradle to grave.

Unnatural Rebellion

Unnatural Rebellion
Author: Ruma Chopra
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2011-05-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813931169

Thousands of British American mainland colonists rejected the War for American Independence. Shunning rebel violence as unnecessary, unlawful, and unnatural, they emphasized the natural ties of blood, kinship, language, and religion that united the colonies to Britain. They hoped that British military strength would crush the minority rebellion and free the colonies to renegotiate their return to the empire. Of course the loyalists were too American to be of one mind. This is a story of how a cross-section of colonists flocked to the British headquarters of New York City to support their ideal of reunion. Despised by the rebels as enemies or as British appendages, New York’s refugees hoped to partner with the British to restore peaceful government in the colonies. The British confounded their expectations by instituting martial law in the city and marginalizing loyalist leaders. Still, the loyal Americans did not surrender their vision but creatively adapted their rhetoric and accommodated military governance to protect their long-standing bond with the mother country. They never imagined that allegiance to Britain would mean a permanent exile from their homes.

The Cherokee Diaspora

The Cherokee Diaspora
Author: Gregory D. Smithers
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300169604

The Cherokee are one of the largest Native American tribes in the United States, with more than three hundred thousand people across the country claiming tribal membership and nearly one million people internationally professing to have at least one Cherokee Indian ancestor. In this revealing history of Cherokee migration and resettlement, Gregory Smithers uncovers the origins of the Cherokee diaspora and explores how communities and individuals have negotiated their Cherokee identities, even when geographically removed from the Cherokee Nation headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the author transports the reader back in time to tell the poignant story of the Cherokee people migrating throughout North America, including their forced exile along the infamous Trail of Tears (1838-39). Smithers tells a remarkable story of courage, cultural innovation, and resilience, exploring the importance of migration and removal, land and tradition, culture and language in defining what it has meant to be Cherokee for a widely scattered people.

Imaginary Friendship in the American Revolution

Imaginary Friendship in the American Revolution
Author: Colin Nicolson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351767429

Imaginary Friendship is the first in-depth study of the onset of the American Revolution through the prism of friendship, focusing on future US president John Adams and leading Loyalist Jonathan Sewall. The book is part biography, revealing how they shaped each other’s progress, and part political history, exploring their intriguing dangerous quest to clean up colonial politics. Literary history examines the personal dimension of discourse, resolving how Adams’s presumption of Sewall’s authorship of the Loyalist tracts Massachusettensis influenced his own magnum opus, Novanglus. The mystery is not why Adams presumed Sewall was his adversary in 1775 but why he was impelled to answer him.