Probing the Unorthodox and Reappraising Nonconformity: Recent Historiographical Perspectives on Early America and the Antebellum Period

Abstract

Over the past several decades, critical developments in the study of early America and the antebellum era have reshaped the ways we think about this period of American history. Scholars have examined the interaction between early American national and individual identities; they have expanded the geographical as well as chronological limits of early America; they have shown how the dynamics of the Atlantic world were embedded in the very patterns of early American society, territory, and repr...