Bodies Politic Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 John
Wood Sweet "At once detailed and sweeping, social and political,
archival and synthetic. . . . This book is the best application yet to
early American history of postcolonial theory."--American Historical
Review "An ambitious and persuasive account of the ways the political
inclusion of some groups and not others connected the colonial era
through the Revolution to the early American republic."--Journal of
American History "Sweet offers scholars a capacious history of race in
the North and a primer for thinking about the relationship between
'cultures' and identities. . . . Bodies Politic is deeply researched
and richly detailed."--William and Mary Quarterly "This superb study
explores the origins of that ironic definition of democracy as
'universal freedom and racial inequality.' . . . Sophisticated and
engaging. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice In this sweeping analysis
of colonialism and its legacies, John Wood Sweet explores how the
ongoing interaction of conquered Indians, English settlers, and enslaved
Africans in New England produced a closely interwoven, though radically
divided, society. The coming together of these diverse peoples
profoundly shaped the character of colonial New England, the meanings of
the Revolution in the North, and the making of American democracy writ
large. Critically engaged with current debates about the dynamics of
culture, racial identity, and postcolonial politics, this innovative and
intellectually capacious work is grounded in a remarkable array of
evidence. What emerges from this analysis of colonial and early national
censuses, newspapers, diaries, letters, court records, printed works,
and visual images are the dramatic confrontations and subtle
negotiations by which Indians, Africans, and Anglo-Americans defined
their respective places in early New England. Citizenship, as Sweet
reveals, was defined in meeting houses as well as in courthouses, in
bedrooms as well as on battlefields, in land disputes as well as on
streets. Bodies Politic reveals how the legacy of colonialism shaped
the emergence of the nineteenth-century North and continues, even to
this day, to shape all our lives. John Wood Sweet is Associate
Professor of History at the University of North Carolina and coeditor
(with Robert Appelbaum) of Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and
the Making of the North Atlantic World, also available from the
University of Pennsylvania Press. 2007 504 pages 6 x 9 24 illus. ISBN
978-0-8122-1978-4 Paper $24.95s £16.50 World Rights American History,
African-American/African Studies Short copy: "Sweet offers scholars a
capacious history of race in the North and a primer for thinking about
the relationship between 'cultures' and identities. . . . Bodies
Politic is deeply researched and richly detailed."--William and Mary
Quarterly
