The majority of studies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century communities have examined either towns, the focus of social organization in New England, or counties, the equivalent for the Chesapeake. However, the parish, not the county, was the unit of government that dealt with the problems which affected seventeenth- and eighteenth- century Virginians. Because the parish served as a focus for the day to day activities of the majority of colonial Virginians, it seems logical to examine a parish community in order to learn about their lives. However, most of the Chesapeake historians have focused their studies on a county or several counties.;The following study focuses on the development of Charles Parish, York County, Virginia from 1630 to 1740 in order to contribute new information to what is already known about life in the early Chesapeake. A detailed approach based on biographical data about residents of Charles provides data about the impact of high mortality rates and immigration on the development of the parish community and its neighborhoods, the role that family members and neighbors played in associations, the different social levels within Charles and its neighborhoods, the ways in which local leaders exercised their power, and the impact of nearby Williamsburg and Yorktown on a rural area such as Charles Parish. The inclusion of all the free residents--women, free blacks, and small white planters, not just the successful white male planters--of Charles in a data base makes it possible to study the role of each group in the parish community. A variety of sources including the most complete birth and death registers extant for a seventeenth-century Virginia parish, colonial records, and court proceedings from York County furnish the necessary data to study the development of neighborhoods in Charles and the parish's connections to the other parishes in York County and the nearby counties.

This dissertation examines the personnel actively trading with native Americans in the greater South Carolina area from 1670-1755. It concentrates on the mostly white and mostly male traders licensed to trade directly in the Indian towns by the colonies of South Carolina and Georgia.;Traders were active agents in formulating South Carolina's Indian trade and diplomacy. Some made a fortune in the trade while countless others died in the pursuit of that dream. Traders also took with them goods, germs, genes, a greed for deerskins, and attitudes that changed the old ways of life in Indian country.;Traders have traditionally been condemned for their selfish pursuit of a personal fortune without caring for native attitudes or for their colonies' welfare. This is an oversimplification. This work uncovered many instances where traders acted as diplomats and official interpreters for their colonies.;A major result of the dissertation is a classification of the persons involved in the Indian trade, using evidence culled from the official records such as South Carolina's Commons House of Assembly journals, also wills, and inventories of estates. It also uncovers the organization of those who took goods into the native American villages as well as the social and economic networks in which they functioned. The dissertation concludes that success and influence belonged to those who were respected in both cultures, especially when they safeguarded their interests through marrying Indian women.

As a social history of the town and people of Carlisle, Pennsylvania from 1750 to 1810, this dissertation traces the evolution of communal identity in the early American backcountry. By focusing on the growth and development of one urban community, this work details not only how and why one group of backcountry inhabitants took pride in their town's outward accomplishments and material prosperity, but also explains how Carlisle's evolutionary growth prompted the town's people to see themselves as key players in an economic and social universe that stretched far beyond the geographic boundaries of their localized realm.;Using state and county records, personal correspondence, business account books, and material evidence to delineate expanding networks of association on the local and regional levels, this study demonstrates that it was the combined expectations and aspirations generated by personal interactions and economic exchanges that governed how the men and women of Carlisle defined themselves and their roles within the rapidly changing worlds of colonial, revolutionary, and early national America.;In Carlisle, as in the rest of the American backcountry, communal identity was ultimately determined by the convergence of several competing, but nonetheless complementary, developmental forces. Carlisle's sense of itself was profoundly shaped by the independent and highly localized social, economic, and personal associations forged among the town's men and women in the private sphere of backcountry homes and in the public realm of frontier marketplaces. Carlisle's identity was also derived, however, from the town's gradual social, economic, and cultural integration into the metropolitan realms of the eastern port cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore.

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