Early American History and Culture
Some of the Press's most acclaimed books have been in the field of American colonial history and culture. This achievement is due in part to the Press's role as publisher for the Institute of Early American History and Culture (IEAHC), which sponsors scholarly editions of significant primary sources and scholarly critiques based on such sources. Since 1947, books produced for the IEAHC have won publishing's most prestigious awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.
Primary Historical SourcesThomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, one of America's first permanent literary and intellectual landmarks, was published privately in Paris in 1785. In 1787 Jefferson authorized an enlarged and corrected English version by the London bookseller John Stockdale. The IEAHC edition, edited and with an introduction and notes by William Peden (1955), was the first to be issued separately in sixty years and is based on Jefferson's annotated copy of the Stockdale edition.
In 1959 the Press and the IEAHC made available for the first time the complete correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John and Abigail Adams. The Adams-Jefferson Letters, edited by Lester J. Cappon, constitutes one of the most important ex change of ideas in American colonial history. Abigail Adams's letters to Jefferson not only complement the correspondence between the two men but also reveal her exceptional wit and the important role she played in reconciling the estranged statesmen.
Studies in American Colonial History
The collaboration between the University of North Carolina Press
and the IEAHC has also produced studies of early American history and
culture that have influenced the direction of historical scholarship.
In The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (1969) Gordon Wood traces the evolution of American political thought from the Declaration of Independence to the ratification of the Constitution, showing how classical notions of Republican government were transformed into a distinctively American paradigm. Winner of Columbia University's Bancroft Prize in 1970, The Creation of the American Republic made the concept of "Republicanism" an important new area for historical investigation.
In The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (1982), Rhys Isaac describes and analyzes the dramatic religious and political confrontations between the planter elite and the proponents of evangelical Christianity in late eighteenth-century Virginia. Using the observational techniques of the cultural anthropologist, Isaac vividly reconstructs and painstakingly dissects a society experiencing profound social change. For its groundbreaking methodology and provocative insights, this book won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in history.
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