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  • From the Editor
  • Elaine Forman Crane

If last fall's issue of Early American Studies was narrowly focused on the evolution of the Hudson Valley, this issue is decidedly broader and more eclectic. The only shared feature in this issue—although of no real importance—is the word "defiance," which appears in the title of two of the essays. Yet if such diversity of subject matter teases the intellect, it also has made the sequence of articles somewhat problematical. How should they be arranged, I wondered, to make order out of a disparate collection of interesting essays, the subjects of which had little or nothing in common? Article content and geography provided a good answer: the articles progress from the local to the regional to the trans-Atlantic to the global.

As a result of the format, the "local" begins in Newport, Rhode Island, where Christina Hodge and Diana Gallagher have taken an archaeological approach to the study of this seaport town. Excavated objects form the basis of their work, and analysis of such items has revealed vital information about the daily life of middle-class households in the eighteenth century.

The local gives way to the regional in the next several essays. Stephanie Schnorbus takes another look at the New-England Primer and concludes that although successive editions show some change over time, the Calvinist themes are not drastically transformed by the Lockean model, as some would have it. Indeed, the primers (and particularly their illustrations) offer a blend of Calvinist and Lockean representations. Similarly, as T. J. Tomlin notes in his essay, the astrological content of early American almanacs is not a rejection of mainstream Protestantism, as some historians have proposed, but rather a complement to it.

The next three articles are regionally aligned with the middle colonies or states in the eighteenth century. Andrew Newman's study of Edgar Huntly explores how the novel is connected to local history through actual people and events, and Jessica Roney explains why the Philadelphia Defense Association was unusual for its time and place: it was a private, voluntary, nongovernmental organization with no legal basis. Simon Finger's research is also based in the Philadelphia area—or at least in the regional waterways surrounding Philadelphia. His article clearly demonstrates the importance of a less well-known group of men: the Delaware River pilots who tied Philadelphia to the Atlantic world.

The final two articles in this long issue also tie early America to other continents. Rachel Cleves examines the parallels between British and Ameri [End Page v] can anti-Jacobinism. She shows how a fear of violence stimulated the movement on both sides of the Atlantic. And in an essay that links early America to countries beyond Western Europe and connects the past to the present, Robert Battistini reveals how the Americans who were captured off Algiers shaped a view of Muslims as "the Other." Though this is an early American story, it resonates in our own time as well.

Spring 2010 [End Page vi]

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