Rip Van Winkle S Neighbors

Explores the social and economic transformations of the mid-Hudson River Valley during the key expansionist period in American history.

A man who sleeps for twenty years in the Catskill Mountains wakes to a much-changed world.

Although Rip Van Winkle was a fictional character, his community in the mid-Hudson Valley of New York State was very real. Thomas S. Wermuth's book shows that the popular view of Hudson Valley farmers as self-sufficient, independent, and free of governmental authority is as fictional as the character of Rip Van Winkle himself. In fact these mid-Hudson farmers lived in villages where economic practices and behavior were regulated by civil authorities as well as neighborhood concerns, and where acquisitive practices that were believed to endanger the public good were forbidden. Based on extensive research into previously unused town records and commercial accounts, this book challenges the belief that the early valley was a capitalist society, arguing that the beliefs and practices associated with modern capitalism developed slowly and unevenly, and were not always welcomed by valley families.

Essays exploring rural New York during the American Revolution.

In this 1819 classic of colonial life, a henpecked villager goes rambling through the Catskills, meets mysterious strangers with a powerful liquor, and awakens 20 years later to a changed world.

Sure to enchant art lovers and Rackham devotees, this edition of all of Rackham's 51 full-page illustrations, plus Irving's complete story, will delight fantasy enthusiasts of all ages.

Featuring 30 of the greatest short stories from the most distinguished writers in the American short-story tradition, this new anthology begins with Washington Irving's tale "Rip Van Winkle" and ranges across more than one hundred years of storytelling, concluding with F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic, "Winter Dreams." Other selections include Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," Melville's "Bartleby, The Scrivener," Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "To Build a Fire," by Jack London, "The Middle Years" by Henry James, plus stories by Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, and others. Perfect for classroom use, this outstanding collection of short stories will also prove popular with fiction readers everywhere.