The Farmer S Friend Or The History Of Mr Charles Worthy

Harriet E. Wilson's Our nig (1859) is a startling tale of the mistreatment of a young African American mulatto woman, Frado, living in New England at a time when slavery, though abolished in the North, still existed in the South. Frado, a Northern free black', yet treated as badly as many Southern slaves of the time, is unforgettably portrayed as experiencing and resisting vicious mistreatment. To achieve this disturbing portrait, Harriet Wilson's book combines several different literary genres - realist novel, autobiography, abolitionist slave narrative and sentimental fiction. R.J. Ellis explores the relationship of Our nig to these genres and, additionally, to laboring class writing (Harriet Wilson was an indentured farm servant). He identifies the way Our nig stands as a double first: the first separately-published novel written in English by an African American female it is also one of the first by a member of the laboring class about the laboring class.

Allan Kulikoff's provocative new book traces the rural origins and growth of capitalism in America, challenging earlier scholarship and charting a new course for future studies in history and economics. Kulikoff argues that long before the explosive growth of cities and big factories, capitalism in the countryside changed our society- the ties between men and women, the relations between different social classes, the rhetoric of the yeomanry, slave migration, and frontier settlement. He challenges the received wisdom that associates the birth of capitalism wholly with New York, Philadelphia, and Boston and show how studying the critical market forces at play in farm and village illuminates the defining role of the yeomen class in the origins of capitalism.

During the first half-century of American independence, a fundamental change in the meaning and morality of ambition emerged. Beyond the Farm blends biography, social history, and cultural history to describe and explain that change.

The rebuilding of New England during what architectural historians have labeled the Federal period serves as the basis for most Americans visual or mental image of rural New England. This reconstruction became very controversial as a result of the differing definitions of republican virtue, taste, beauty, and economy held by the architects, rural reformers, and those engaged in rebuilding their homes and communities during this time. What could have promoted the attacks, primarily in the agricultural press, on the new two-story-with-ell rural homes? The answer lies in the attitudes and perceptions of cultural aesthetics and the notion of republican virtue. Nora Pat Small sharpens our understanding of the important changes that occurred in the New England landscape during the Federal period, effectively connecting her study of post-Revolutionary reform ideology and political discourse to architectural evidence; the buildings and landscapes express cultural values, aesthetic choice, and personal identity. The Author: Nora Pat Small is an associate professor of history at Eastern Illinois University. She has published articles in William & Mary Quarterly and has contributed chapters to volumes III and VII of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. "