Early American Places

The University of Georgia Press, New York University Press, and Northern Illinois University Press announce a collaborative book series supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Early American Places focuses on the history of North America from contact to the Mexican War, locating historical developments in the specific places where they occurred and were contested. Though these developments often involved far-flung parts of the world, they were experienced in particular communities—the local places where people lived, worked, and made sense of their changing worlds.

By restricting its focus to smaller geographic scales, but stressing that towns, colonies, and regions were part of much larger networks, Early American Places will combine up-to-date scholarly sophistication with an emphasis on local particularities and trajectories. Books in the series will be exclusively revised dissertations.

The collaborating presses’ responsibilities are divided geographically. Georgia will focus on the southeastern colonies, the plantation economies of the Caribbean, and the Spanish borderlands. NYU will cover the northeastern and middle Atlantic colonies, and French and British Canada. Northern Illinois will cover the Great Lakes, the Upper Mississippi Valley, and the Great Plains.

About the Collaboration

Our collective goal is to establish Early American Places as one of the most important homes for field-defining first books about early American history. Partner presses will acquire in their delineated geographic areas. Responsibility for signing books will reside with editors at the individual presses involved, who will be governed by their institutions’ guidelines and practices concerning peer review, editorial board approval, manuscript revisions, and contracts. Books in the series will be marketed through a joint effort by the three collaborating publishers and at the web site earlyamericanplaces.org.

Program Benefits

• Publication of first books by scholars
• Royalty advances for authors in the series
• Aggressive marketing and promotion through exhibits, direct mail, and advertising targeted to members of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the American Society for Ethnohistory, the Southern Historical Association, and the Western Historical Association

“This excellent initiative promises a series of strong books elaborating on one of the major themes in recent early American scholarship: the importance of place. The rationale for the collaboration in publication is sound, as is the plan for the management of the series as a whole. An imaginative and exciting approach to the well-known dilemmas of academic publishing.”
—Andrew Cayton, Distinguished Professor of History, Miami University

“The Early American Places series is an exciting development in scholarly publishing, one that will highlight the most important part of the study of history: the local and particular dimensions of global issues and trends. This is where the rubber meets the road, where ordinary people’s lives help to make, and are made by, the bustling wider world in which they live. Early American Places is an original series, and it will publish important scholarship.”
—Stephanie M. H. Camp, Rice University

Books in this series

Creolization and Contraband
Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World
Linda M. Rupert

On Slavery’s Border
Missouri's Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815–1865
Diane Mutti Burke

Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean
Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit
Kristen Block

Sounds American
National Identity and the Music Cultures of the Lower Mississippi River Valley, 1800–1860
Ann Ostendorf

The Year of the Lash
Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
Michele Reid-Vazquez

To inquire about
publishing in the series,
please contact the appropriate
acquisitions editor:

University of
Georgia Press
Derek Krissoff
dkrissoff@ugapress
.uga.edu

New York
University Press
Deborah Gershenowitz
deborah.gershenowitz
@nyu.edu

Northern Illinois
University Press
Sara Hoerdeman
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

earlyamericanplaces.org

 

Download the series flyer

Series Advisory Board

Vincent Brown
Harvard University

Stephanie M. H. Camp
Rice University

Andrew Cayton
Miami University

Cornelia Hughes Dayton
University of Connecticut

Nicole Eustace
New York University

Amy S. Greenberg
Pennsylvania State University

Ramón A. Gutiérrez
University of Chicago

Peter Charles Hoffer
University of Georgia

Karen Ordahl Kupperman
New York University

Joshua Piker
University of Oklahoma

Mark M. Smith
University of South Carolina

Rosemarie Zagarri
George Mason University