| What would an account of early America
look like if it were based on examining rural insurrections or Native
American
politics instead of urban republican literature? Offering a new
interpretation
of eighteenth-century America, The
Backcountry and the City focuses
on the agrarian majority as distinct from the elite urban
minority.
Ed White explores the backcountry-city
divide as well as the dynamics of indigenous peoples, bringing together
two distinct bodies of scholarship: one stressing the political culture
of the Revolutionary era, the other taking an ethnohistorical view of
white–Native
American contact. White concentrates his study in Pennsylvania, a state
in which the majority of the population was rural, and in Philadelphia,
a city that was a center of publishing and politics and the national
capital
for a decade. Against this backdrop, White reads classic political
texts
such as Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American
Farmer, Franklin’s
Autobiography, and Paine’s “Agrarian
Justice,” alongside missionary and
captivity narratives, farmers’ petitions, and Native American
treaties.
Using historical and ethnographic sources to enrich familiar texts,
White
demonstrates the importance of rural areas in the study of U.S. nation
formation and finds unexpected continuities between the early colonial
period and the federal ascendancy of the 1790s. .
|
The Backcountry
and the City
Colonization and Conflict
in Early America
by Ed White
University of Minnesota
Press, 2005.
Order
a copy
|
