Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History

Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities looks at aspects of the formation and development of English or, after 1707, British-American cultural spaces during the colonial and Revolutionary eras. It focuses on the special character of those new and rapidly changing spaces as dependent and derivative entities on the far periphery of the established core culture in England. Stressing the extent to which each of them was the product of a distinctive physical space and set of socio-economic and political circumstances affected emerging social priorities and operated to produce cultures that bth diverged sharply from that of Britain and need to be understood and analyzed in their own terms.