Introduction: What Is This Book?
PART I. CONTINENTAL POSSESSIONS
1. Continental Possessions—Three Deepening Trends
—Andrés Reséndez
2. Whither the Rest of the Continent?
—Elizabeth A. Fenn
3. Continental Drifts
—James F. Brooks
4. Continental Crossings
—Alan Taylor
PART II. PURSUING HAPPINESS
5. Liberal America/Christian America: Another Conflict or Consensus?
—Stewart Davenport
6. The View from the Farmhouse: Rural Lives in the Early Republic
—Christopher Clark
7. The Limits of Homo Economicus: An Appraisal of Early American Entrepreneurship
—Barbara M. Tucker and Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr.
8. Economic Landscapes Yet to be Discovered: The Early American Republic and Historians' Unsubtle Adoption of Political Economy
—James L. Huston
PART III. INTERACTIVE LANDSCAPES
9. Environmental Stewardship and Decline in Old New England
—Brian Donohue
10. Re-Greening the South and Southernizing the Rest
—Mart A. Stewart
11. Mudslides Make Good History
—Conevery Bolton Valencius
12. Down, Down, Down, No More: Environmental History Moves Beyond Declension
—Ted Steinberg
PART IV. COMMODIFICATION OF PEOPLE
13. The Vexed Story of Human Commodification Told by Benjamin Franklin and Venture Smith
—David Waldstreicher
14. Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations
—Amy Dru Stanley
15. Commodified Freedom: Interrogating the Limits of Anti-Slavery Ideology
in the Early Republic
—Stephanie Smallwood
16. The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question
—Walter Johnson
PART V. PUBLIC, PRIVATE, AND SPIRIT WORLDS
17. Sex and Sexuality: The Public, the Private, and the Spirit Worlds
—Patricia Cline Cohen
18. Space in the Early American City
—Bernard Herman
19. A History of all Religions
—Leigh E. Schmidt
20. Questions, Suspicions, Speculations
—David S. Shields
Afterword: The Quest for Universal Understanding
Index
