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In Hock: Pazvning in America from Independence through the Great Depression. By Wendy Woloson. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. 233. Cloth, $35.00.)Reviewed by Jane KamenskyWe are all in hock now, Wendy Woloson points out in the final chapter of this deeply researched and lucidly written study of pawnbrokerage in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Having feasted for decades on credit-card debt - "pawning's mirror opposite" (182) - many Americans now find themselves in famine, pawning consumer goods bought dear with plastic for a little cash loaned at equally high interest rates. Long on the downswing, pawning is making a comeback: The number of pawnshops in the United States has nearly doubled since 1988. Surely the time is ripe for Woloson's probing history of the pawnshop seen from both sides of the counter and many other angles of vision as well. Using an enormous variety of evidence, including business records, personal documents, trade cards, satiric prints, sheet music, dime novels, penny papers, and much more, In Hock redeems pawnbrokerage from stereotypes that have haunted the trade since its inception. Woloson reveals instead a vibrant and complex facet of the emerging industrial economy in cities ranging from Boston to Birmingham to Leadville, Colorado. At its best, Woloson's study makes a worthy companion to Stephen Mihm's A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA, 2007), Seth Rockman's Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2010; reviewed earlier in this issue), and other recent books probing the murky interstices of early American capitalism.Woloson opens In Hock with a visit to her neighborhood pawnshop, the bright and cheerful McGarry's, a family business serving Philadelphians for two generations. "The place is neat and clean," she writes, "the atmosphere relaxed and friendly. The radio is tuned to NPR" (1). Pawnbrokers aren't who we think they are, in other words. Bankers, rescuers, and retailers by turns, they're a far cry from the seedy lowlifes of popular imagination. Primetime stereotypes don't get the pawners right, either, Woloson discovered. She herself pawned a gold necklace for $40.00 - another $6.00 due in five months if she wants to redeem it - all in the service of explaining to her reader the basic terms of the strange trade that is her subject.The reductive stereotypes Woloson wants so badly to dispel are the subject of her second chapter. The caricature of the pawnbroker as a rapacious and marginal figure and his customers as impoverished victims is an old one, arriving in British North America in the mid eighteenth century, before pawnbrokerage itself took root. Stories and images printed in London and reprinted in the colonies beginning in the 1 760s made pawnbrokers "anathema to the emerging capitalist system" (22). Cast as greedy, irrational foreigners (often Jews), pawnbrokers were merchants gone through the looking glass: They took goods and gave money with strings attached, doubly impeding their customers' pursuits of happiness. Woloson marshals mountains of evidence on this point, and her readings of these cultural texts are nuanced and persuasive. But starting the book with a lengthy explication of the stereotypes she wishes to dispel works against her agenda. She devotes nearly a quarter of In Hock to documenting what the pawnbroker was not.Far more revealing are the tour de force middle chapters of In Hock, which offer a painstaking social history of pawning from the perspectives of brokers, clients, and police. In America as in Europe, pawnbrokers followed immigrants to cities, where new kinds of lending arose to meet the needs of newly arrived populations. …

ions (and others as well) take on new precision as Richard and Irene Brown measure their costs and consequences in the strange case of Ephraim Wheeler. Their narrative is rich in historiographical connections as well as human ones; “abstract forces” abound here. But in the end it is the “actual people” in Ephraim Wheeler who constitute the book’s greatest strength. Jill Lepore has memorably described the authors of microhistories as “historians who love too much.”6 Ephraim Wheeler’s life denies his biographers that choice. Irene Brown and Richard Brown do not love their title character, nor do they expect their readers to do so. Writing in a voice that never loses moral clarity, they leave no doubt that Wheeler committed the crime for which the state killed him. “That he was no storybook hero ennobled by a galaxy of virtues,” they note, “is all too evident” (p. 187). “Ephraim Wheeler was a vicious man,” the Browns conclude, “but still a man” (p. 290). And if they can’t admire him, they do allow us—even force us—to know him. In this the authors resemble none of their historical actors so much as Samuel Shepard, the preacher who delivered Wheeler’s execution sermon. In an affecting and honest homily, Shepard accomplished the seemingly impossible: he moved his listeners “to weep over Ephraim Wheeler, the father who had raped his daughter” reborn as “the emblem of fallen man” (p. 249). Without histrionics, without scripture, without tears, the Browns do no less. Wheeler’s singular story, precisely as they say, was no grand melodrama but “a tragedy of the lowly, a tragedy of mediocrity” (p. 188). As such it becomes an exemplary tale, one that casts light on many others in the early American republic, and in our own day as well. Jane Kamensky teaches history at Brandeis University and is completing a microhistory of failure, The Exchange Artist: A Story of Paper, Bricks, and Ash in Early National America. 1. http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2004/7/26suarez.html. 2. See for example Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774 (1970); and Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (1976). 3. Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (1989). 4. See Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (2001); Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (1999); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (1998); and Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (1991). 505 KAMENSKY / The Power of Sympathy 5. Richard D. Brown, “Microhistory and the Post-Modern Challenge,” Journal of the Early Republic 23:1 (Spring 2003): 1–20, quotations at 9, 13, 18. 6. Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88:1 (June 2001): 129–144.

On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America BRIAN P. LUSKEY New York: New York University Press, 2010 Pp. 277, $48.00 (hbk), ISBN 978 0 8147 5228 9 Clerks are good t...

The American Revolution is a significant event in the history of the United States, yet has generated little interest among academic historians. This stems from two seemingly irreconcilable interpretations of the formation of the United States. Some view the Revolution as an intellectual event, while many social historians see it as a fundamentally popular and even populist revolt in which self-interested elites were challenged by ordinary people. This book explores what the American Revolution means at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Readers in the United States consider the histories of the war between Britain and her mainland North American colonies as origins stories. America's Revolution was Britain's American War, an episode in the entangled history of a vast and growing empire. It offers a continental perspective on the Revolution, focusing on contested North American frontiers. The book suggests a major shift in the core narrative of the Revolution, showing how the familiar tale of money and politics—taxation and representation—is joined and made more complex by stories focused on territorial sovereignty and native dispossession.

This book introduces the formative event in American history. In thirty-three individual chapters, by authorities on the Revolution, it provides in-depth analysis of the American Revolution's many sides, ranging from the military and diplomatic to the social and political; from the economic and financial, to the cultural and legal. The book's cast of characters ranges far, including ordinary farmers and artisans, men and women, free and enslaved African Americans, Indians, and British and American statesmen and military leaders. Its geographic scope is equally broad. The book offers an American Revolution whose geo-political and military impact ranged from the West Indies to the Mississippi Valley; from the British Isles to New England, and from Nova Scotia to Florida; simply put, an event that far transcended the boundaries of what was to become the United States. It offers a broad range of interpretive and methodological approaches.

What role did sexual assault play in the conquest of America? How did American attitudes toward female sexuality evolve, and how was sexuality regulated in the early Republic? Sex and sexuality have always been the subject of much attention, both scholarly and popular. Yet, accounts of the early years of the United States tend to overlook the importance of their influence on the shaping of American culture. Sex and Sexuality in Early America addresses this neglected topic with original research covering a wide spectrum, from sexual behavior to sexual perceptions and imagery. Focusing on the period between the initial contact of Europeans and Native Americans up to 1800, the essays encompass all of colonial North America, including the Caribbean and Spanish territories. Challenging previous assumptions, these essays address such topics as rape as a tool of conquest; perceptions and responses to Native American sexuality; fornication, bastardy, celibacy, and religion in colonial New England; gendered speech in captivity narratives; representations of masculinity in eighteenth- century seduction tales, the sexual cosmos of a southern planter, and sexual transgression and madness in early American fiction. The contributors include Stephanie Wood, Gordon Sayre, Steven Neuwirth, Else L. Hambleton, Erik R. Seeman, Richard Godbeer, Trevor Burnard, Natalie A. Zacek, Wayne Bodle, Heather Smyth, Rodney Hessinger, and Karen A. Weyler.

IN 1801 Yale College President Timothy Dwight reflected on the enormous changes that the nation had undergone during the previous century. "In the year 1700," Dwight told his student audience, "five of the United States were mere forests, without a civilized inhabitant." From such humble roots the nation had stretched and changed in ways that stunned Dwight. The intervening hundred years had transformed that "mere forest" into "an independent empire" boasting a flourishing commercial economy and an exploding population. Increasing in both size and prosperity, the young United States found itself suddenly "possessing a considerable influence in the great affairs of mankind."' For Dwight, who fashioned himself the first native-born Ameri