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A groundbreaking study situating the Mississippi River valley at the heart of the early American republic's political economy Shortly after the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, twenty-two-year-old Andrew Jackson pledged his allegiance to the king of Spain. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, imperial control of the North American continent remained an open question. Spain controlled the Mississippi River, closing it to American trade in 1784, and western men on the make like Jackson had to navigate the overlapping economic and political forces at work with ruthless pragmatism. In Empire of Commerce, Susan Gaunt Stearns takes readers back to a time when there was nothing inevitable about the United States'untrammeled westward expansion. Her work demonstrates the centrality of trade on and along the Mississippi River to the complex development of the political and economic structures that shaped the nascent American republic. Stearns's perspective-shifting book reconfigures our understanding of key postrevolutionary moments—the writing of the Constitution, the outbreak of the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Louisiana Purchase—and demonstrates how the transatlantic cotton trade finally set the stage for transforming an imagined west into something real.

Frances Kolb Turnbell's study of Spanish colonial Louisiana is the first comprehensive history of the colony. It emphasizes the Lower Mississippi valley's status as a borderland contested by empires and the region's diverse inhabitants in the era of volatility that followed the Seven Years'War. As Turnbell demonstrates, the Spanish era was characterized by tremendous transition as the colony emerged from the neglect of the French period and became slowly but increasingly centered on plantation agriculture. The transformations of this critical period grew out of the struggles between Spain and Louisiana's colonists, enslaved people, and Indians over issues related to space and mobility. Many borderland peoples, networks, and alliances sought to preserve Louisiana as a flexible and fluid zone as the colonial government attempted to control and contain the region's inhabitants for its own purposes through policy and efforts to secure loyalty and its own advantageous alliances.Turnbell first examines the period from 1763 through the American Revolution, when the Mississippi River was a boundary between empires. The river's designation as an imperial border ran counter to the topography of North America and counter to the practices of the valley's inhabitants, who employed its waterways to trade, communicate, migrate, and survive. Turnbell pays special attention to the Revolt of 1768, the burgeoning trade along the Mississippi prior to the American Revolution that involved British and American merchants, Spanish preparation for war, and the crucial involvement of the borderland's diverse inhabitants as the war played out on the Lower Mississippi.Turnbell then explains how the activity of borderland peoples evolved after the Revolutionary War when the Lower Mississippi was no longer an imperial boundary. She considers the instability and fluidity of postwar years in Louisiana, American trade and migration, Louisiana's experience of the Age of Revolutions—from pro-French sentiments to plans for rebellion among the enslaved—and ultimately, Spain's political demise in the Mississippi River valley.

Libel and Lampoon shows how English satire and the law mutually shaped each other during the long eighteenth century. Following the lapse of prepublication licensing in 1695, the authorities quickly turned to the courts and newly repurposed libel laws in an attempt to regulate the press. In response, satirists and their booksellers devised a range of evasions. Writers increasingly capitalized on forms of verbal ambiguity, including irony, allegory, circumlocution, and indirection, while shifty printers and booksellers turned to a host of publication ruses that complicated the mechanics of both detection and prosecution. In effect, the elegant insults, comical periphrases, and booksellers'tricks that came to typify eighteenth-century satire were a way of writing and publishing born of legal necessity. Early on, these emergent satiric practices stymied the authorities and the courts. But they also led to new legislation and innovative courtroom procedures that targeted satire's most routine evasions. Especially important were a series of rulings that increased the legal liabilities of printers and booksellers and that expanded and refined doctrines for the courtroom interpretation of verbal ambiguity, irony, and allegory. By the mid-eighteenth century, satirists and their booksellers faced a range of newfound legal pressures. Rather than disappearing, however, personal and political satire began to migrate to dramatic mimicry and caricature-acoustic and visual forms that relied less on verbal ambiguity and were therefore not subject to either the provisions of preperformance dramatic licensing or the courtroom interpretive procedures that had earlier enabled the prosecution of printed satire.

New essays that illuminate and interpret William Bartram's journey through what would become the southeastern United States William Bartram, author of Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulees, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, was colonial America's first native born naturalist and artist, and the first author in the modern genre of writers who portrayed nature through personal experience as well as scientific observation. His book, first published in 1791, was based on his journeys through southern Indian nations and Britain's southern colonies in the years just prior to the American Revolution and provides descriptions of the natural and cultural environments of what would soon become the American South. Scholars and general readers alike have long appreciated Bartram's lush, vivid prose, his clarity of observation and evident wonder at the landscapes he traversed, and his engagement with the native nations whose lands he traveled through. The Attention of a Traveller: Essays on William Bartram's “Travels” and Legacy offers an interdisciplinary assessment of Bartram's influence and evolving legacy, opening new avenues of research concerning the flora, fauna, and people connected to Bartram and his writings. Featuring 13 essays divided into five sections, contributors to the volume weave together scholarly perspectives from geology, art history, literary criticism, geography, and philosophy, alongside the more traditional Bartram-affiliated disciplines of biology and history. The collection concludes with a comprehensive treatment of the book as a material historical artifact.

Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 examines how Creek communities and their leaders remained viable geopolitical actors in the trans-Appalachian West well after the American Revolution. The Creeks pursued aggressive and far-reaching diplomacy between 1763 and 1818 to assert their territorial and political sovereignty while thwarting American efforts to establish control over the region. The United States and the Creeks fought to secure recognition from the powers of Europe that would guarantee political and territorial sovereignty: the Creeks fought to maintain their connections to the Atlantic world and preserve their central role in the geopolitics of the trans-Appalachian West, while the American colonies sought first to establish themselves as an independent nation, then to expand borders to secure diplomatic and commercial rights. Creeks continued to forge useful ties with agents of European empires despite American attempts to circumscribe Creek contact with the outside world. The Creeks'solicitation of trade and diplomatic channels with British and Spanish colonists in the West Indies, Canada, and various Gulf Coast outposts served key functions for defenders of local autonomy. Native peoples fought to preserve the geopolitical order that dominated the colonial era, making the trans-Appalachian West a kaleidoscope of sovereign peoples where negotiation prevailed. As a result, the United States lacked the ability to impose its will on its Indigenous neighbors, much like the European empires that had preceded them. Hill provides a significant revisionist history of Creek diplomacy and power that fills gaps within the broader study of the Atlantic world and early American history to show how Indigenous power thwarted European empires in North America.

The present collection of essays grew out of a conference, held in Dresden in December 2001, exploring the relationship between the public sphere and legal culture. The conference was held in connection with the ongoing research undertaken by the Sonderforschungsbereich 537 ‘Institutionalisation and Historical Change'and, in particular, by the project ‘Circulation of Legal Norms and Values in British Culture from 1688 to 1900'.The conference papers include essays on the theory of the public sphere from a systematic and historical point of view by Gert Melville, by Peter Uwe Hohendahl and by Jürgen Schlaeger, all of whom try to re-evaluate and/or improve upon Jürgen Habermas'seminal contribution to the discussion of the emergence of modernism. Alastair Mann's contribution investigates the situation in Scotland, particularly censorship and the oath of allegiance; Annette Pankratz focuses on the king's body as a site of the public sphere; Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock looks into the widespread ‘culture of contention'at the beginning of the eighteenth century; and Eckhart Hellmuth considers the reform movement at the end of the century and the radical democrats'insistence on the right to discuss the constitution.Ian Bell, who took part in the conference, suggested the inclusion of part of the first chapter of his seminal study Literature and Crime in Augustan England (1991). Beth Swan, Anna-Christina Giovanopoulos, and Christoph Houswitschka respectively analyse the ideologies of justice, the interrelation between journalism and crime, and the juridical evaluation of the crime of incest and its representation in public. Greta Olson investigates keyholes as liminal spaces between the public and the private, Juliet Wightman focuses on theatre and the bear pit, Uwe Böker examines the court room and prison as public sites of discourse, and York-Gothart Mix discusses the German emigrant culture in North America.