Product Description: Anyone could swear like a sailor! Within the larger culture, sailors had pride of place in swearing. But how they swore and the reasons for their bad language were not strictly wedded to maritime things. Instead, sailor swearing, indeed all swearing in this period, was connected to larger developments...read more

Product Description: Anyone could swear like a sailor! Within the larger culture, sailors had pride of place in swearing. But how they swore and the reasons for their bad language were not strictly wedded to maritime things. Instead, sailor swearing, indeed all swearing in this period, was connected to larger developments...read more

Product Description: On July 2, 1812, Captain David Porter raised a banner on the USS Essex proclaiming "A free trade and sailors rights," thus creating a political slogan that explained the War of 1812. Free trade demanded the protection of American commerce, while sailors' rights insisted that the British end the impressment of seamen from American ships...read more

Product Description: The American Revolution is one of the most studied time periods in U.S. history and a substantial part of the history curriculum in schools. The new three-volume Encyclopedia of Revolutionary America is the definitive reference to everything students need to know about this pivotal moment in American history...read more

Product Description: These nine essays explore new directions and ways to explore the elusive "Jack Tar" - the common sailor in the early modern world. We see him as a pirate, learn something of the ships to sailed, and share his experience in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. ...

Through careful research and colorful accounts, historian Paul A. Gilje discovers what liberty meant to an important group of common men in American society, those who lived and worked on the waterfront and aboard ships. In the process he reveals that the idealized vision of liberty associated with the Founding Fathers had a much more immediate and complex meaning than previously thought.In Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution, life aboard warships, merchantmen, and whalers, as well as the interactions of mariners and others on shore, is recreated in absorbing detail. Describing the important contributions of sailors to the resistance movement against Great Britain and their experiences during the Revolutionary War, Gilje demonstrates that, while sailors recognized the ideals of the Revolution, their idea of liberty was far more individual in nature—often expressed through hard drinking and womanizing or joining a ship of their choice.Gilje continues the story into the post-Revolutionary world highlighted by the Quasi War with France, the confrontation with the Barbary Pirates, and the War of 1812.

Product Description: Making of the American Republic seeks to provoke readers to think about the implications of the American Revolution in a new way, offering a larger interpretive theme other than the rise of democracy. This interpretive book places the events, the people, and the ideas of the period within the context of how the American Revolution gave birth to a dynamic capitalist economic system...read more

Essays look at the rise of capitalism in the United States.

Product Description: "... a sweeping, analytical synethsis of collective violence from the colonial experience to the present." —American Studies"Gilje has written ‘the book’ on rioting throughout American history." —The Historian"... a thorough, illuminating, and at times harrowing account of man’s inhumanity to man...read more

Product Description: Given the fundamental changes that transformed American society in the years between Benjamin Franklin's apprenticeship in a printer's shop and mid-19th-century efforts to organize labouring men and women, no social group offers a more interesting spectacle than skilled tradesmen or artisans...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The seven essays in this collection, originally presented at a New-York Historical Society Conference, examine ways in which the epic political events associated with the founding of the United States affected the lives of New Yorkers.

A savvy New Yorker offers traveling advice and tips on the hottest destinations in the Big Apple, from hip clubs and new restaurants to the little-known secret happenings that only a local would know. Original. 20,000 first printing.

The Road to Mobocracy is the first major study of public disorder in New York City from the Revolutionary period through the Jacksonian era. During that time, the mob lost its traditional, institutional role as corporate safety valve and social corrective, tolerated by public officials. It became autonomous, a violent menace to individual and public good expressing the discordant urges and fears of a pluralistic society. Indeed, it tested the premises of democratic government.Paul Gilje relates the practices of New York mobs to their American and European roots and uses both historical and anthropological methods to show how those mobs adapted to local conditions. He questions many of the traditional assumptions about the nature of the mob and scrutinizes explanations of its transformation: among them, the loss of a single-interest society, industrialization and changes in the workforce, increased immigration, and the rise of sub-classes in American society. Gilje's findings can be extended to other cities.The lucid narrative incorporates meticulous and exhaustive archival research that unearths hundreds of New York City disturbances -- about the Revolution, bawdy-houses, theaters, dogs and hogs, politics, elections, ethnic conflict, labor actions, religion. Illustrations recreate the turbulent atmosphere of the city; maps, graphs, and tables define the spacial and statistical dimensions of its ferment. The book is a major contribution to our understanding of social change in the early Republic as well as to the history of early New York, urban studies, and rioting.