Ocean State Libraries

"In this book, Adrian Chastain Weimer uncovers the story of how, more than a hundred years before the American Revolution, colonists pledged their lives and livelihoods to the defense of local political institutions against arbitrary rule. When royal commissioners came to enforce the demands of the newly restored King Charles II, many New Englanders chafed against what they saw as arbitrary rule. Under immense metropolitan pressure, they mobilized...

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
Land ownership was not the sole reason for conflict between Indians and English, Jenny Pulsipher writes in Subjects unto the Same King, a book that cogently redefines the relationship between Indians and colonists in seventeenth-century New England. Rather, the story is much more complicated—and much more interesting. It is a tale of two divided cultures, but also

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In Town Born, Barry Levy shows that New England's distinctive and far more egalitarian order was due neither to the colonists' peasant traditionalism nor to the region's inhospitable environment. Instead, New England's labor system and relative equality were every bit a consequence of its innovative system of governance, which placed nearly all land under the control of several hundred self-governing town meetings. As Levy shows, these town meetings...

"Challenges many long-held assumptions about wartime experience during the American Revolution and demonstrates that communities conventionally depicted as hostile opponents were, in fact, in frequent contact. This book shows how personal concerns often triumphed over political ideology.

John James Audubon's The Birds of America stands as an unparalleled achievement in American art, a huge book that puts nature dramatically on the page. With that work, Audubon became one of the most adulated artists of his time, and America's first celebrity scientist. In this fresh approach to Audubon's art and science, Gregory Nobles shows us that Audubon's greatest creation was himself. A self-made man incessantly striving to secure his place in...

"The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise. The debate over women's rights began not in the decades prior to 1848 but during the American Revolution itself. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, Rosemarie Zagarri explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution...

This book is the first dedicated volume of academic analysis on the monumental work of Elena Ferrante, Italy's most well-known contemporary writer. The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins brings together the most exciting and innovative research on Ferrante's treatment of the intricacies of women's lives, relationships, struggles, and dilemmas to explore feminist theory in literature; questions of gender in twentieth-century Italy;...