Atlantic Families: Lives And Letters In The Later Eighteenth Century Hardcover

Sarah M. S. Pearsall

The Atlantic represented a world of opportunity in the eighteenth century, but it represented division also, separating families across its coasts. Whether due to economic shifts, changing political landscapes, imperial ambitions, or even simply personal tragedy, many families found themselves fractured and disoriented by the growth and later fissure of a larger Atlantic world. Such dislocation posed considerable challenges to all individuals who viewed orderly family relations as both a general and a personal ideal. The more fortunate individuals who thus found themselves divided by the Atlantic were able to use family letters, with attendant emphases on familiarity, sensibility, and credit, in order to remain connected in times and places of considerable disconnection. Portraying the family as a unified, affectionate, and happy entity in such letters provided a means of surmounting concerns about societies fractured by physical distance, global wars, and increasing social stratification. It could also provide social and economic leverage to individual men and women in certain circumstances. Sarah Pearsall explores the lives and letters of these families, revealing the sometimes shocking stories of those divided by sea. Ranging across the Anglophone Atlantic, including mainland American colonies and states, Britain, and the British Caribbean, Pearsall argues that it was this expanding Atlantic world-much more than the American Revolution-that reshaped contemporary ideals about families, as much as families themselves reshaped the transatlantic world.

9780199532995

English

Oxford University Press

25 Oct 2011

310

Sarah M. S. Pearsall is a member of the Department of History, Oxford Brookes University. She was previously a Lecturer in Modern History at St. Andrews University, and has held long-term fellowships at the Newberry Library and Cambridge University. She received her PhD from Harvard University. Her articles have appeared in numerous books and journals, including The William and Mary Quarterly.

A study that reads well and is full of insightful vignettes * Hermann Wellenreuther, Sehepunkte * an important contribution to both Atlantic and family history. * Mary K. Geiter, History * Ultimately, Pearsall asserts that historians must again turn their attention to the history of the family, since the eighteenth century was not an era of independent and modern selfhood; instead, it was a complex and unnerving world of commerce, wars, and forced separations deeply grounded in family values. Letters forged connections between individuals, between family members, and between wider communities. * Vivian Bruce Conger, American Historical Review * Brings together heavy-hitting argumentation and delightfully entertaining soap opera. * Lauren Winner, Books & Culture * Pearsall is master and commander of [the letters] as she analyzes the complex life experiences, personal relationships, and linguistic strategies of their writers. * Susan Whyman, Reviews in History * Valuable...[the book] demonstrates the historical and intellectual value of attending to the individual and contingent, revealed through the material traces of personal correspondence and the surprising capacity of letters to undercut stereotypes, to reinflect grand historical narratives of national or economic progress, 'and to reveal something new' about the Atlantic worlds of the eighteenth century. * Alison Searle, William and Mary Quarterly * Engaging and thoroughly captivating...An excellent read [and] a very significant contribution to family and gender history. * Women's History Prize Committee * An insightful and well-conceived monograph, written with verve and based on exhaustive archival research as well as a thorough grounding in historical and literary analysis of the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world. * Natalie Zacek, English Historical Review * lively and extensively researched. * Natalie Zacek, English Historical Review * Atlantic Families is a contirubtion to the best new kind of transnational history, connective rather than comparative, using persoanl histories to illuminate larger social phenomena. * Maya Jasanoff, London Review of Books *