Contents

• Introduction: In Search of a Metaphor / Greg Dening
• Histories of Self / Greg Dening
• "The Cast of His Countenance": Reading Andrew Montour / James H. Merrell
• Communal Definitions of Gendered Identity in Seventeenth- Century English America / Mary Beth Norton
• Making History: The Force of Public Opinion and the Last Years of Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts / T. H. Breen
• "The Unhappy Stephen Arnold": An Episode of Murder and Penitence in the Early Republic / Alan Taylor
• The Suicide of a Notary: Language, Personal Identity, and Conquest in Colonial New York / Donna Merwick
• Texts of Self / Greg Dening
• The Revolution in Selves: Black and White Inner Aliens / Mechal Sobel
• Stories and Constructions of Identity: Folk Tellings and Diary Inscriptions in Revolutionary Virginia / Rhys Isaac
• Hannah Barnard’s Cupboard: Female Property and Identity in Eighteenth-Century New England / Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
• Colonial Self-Fashioning: Paradoxes and Pathologies in the Construction of Genteel Identity in Eighteenth-Century America / Kenneth A. Lockridge
• Reflections on Defining Self / Greg Dening
• The Self Shaped and Misshaped: The Protestant Temperament Reconsidered / Philip Greven
• "I Have Suffer’d Much Today": The Defining Force of Pain in Early America / Elaine Forman Crane
• "Although I am dead, I am not entirely dead. I have left a second of myself": Constructing Self and Persons on the Middle Ground of Early America / Richard White
• An Inner Diaspora: Black Sailors Making Selves / W. Jeffrey Bolster