Field of Study

Early American History to 1820; Gender, Social, and Demographic History; Swedish / European History, 1500-1900

Selected Publications

"Overcoming Nausea: The Brothers Hesselius and the Great American Mystery," in English Atlantics Revisited, ed. Nancy L. Rhoden.  London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007.

The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover edited with Kevin Berland.  Chapel Hill, 2000.

On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century.  New York University Press, 1992.

Family Patterns in Nineteent Century Sweden: Variation in Time and Space with Bobbi S. Low and Alice L. Clarke.  Umea, Sweden: Demographic Database, 1992.

The Diary and Life of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674-1744: Personality and Culture in a Silent Land.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

The Fertility Transition in Sweden: The Evidence of Small Geographic Units, 1805-1890.  Umea, Sweden: Demographic Database, 1983.

Settlement and Unsettlement in Early America.  Cambridge University Press, 1981. 

Literacy in Colonial New England: A Study of the Social Context of Literacy in the Pre-Modern West.  New York: Norton, 1974.

A New England Town: The First Hundred Years.  New York: Norton, 1970.  Chosen one of the ten "significant books in American history, 1969-1974" in a poll of the profession printed in The American Scholar, Summer 1975.  Expanded edition with retrospective essay, 1985.