Dr. Jane T. Merritt specializes in early American History from an Atlantic World perspective. In particular, she has written on eighteenth century Native American encounters in the mid-Atlantic region and is currently exploring the development of consumer markets, British imperial policy, the cultural life of the American colonies, and the emergence of the United States as a commercial empire through a study of the tea trade.
Education:
B.A. Vassar College, 1981
M.A. University of Washington, 1990
Ph.D. University of Washington, 1995
Selected Publications:
"The Gender Frontier Revisited: Native American Women in the Age of Revolution," in A.G. Roeber, ed., Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians and Catholics in Early North America (University Park, PA: Max Kade German-American Research Institute Series, Penn State University Press, 2008): 165-174.
"Tea Trade, Consumption, and the Republican Paradox in pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 128, no. 2 (April 2004): 117-148.
At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700-1763 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2003)
"Cultural Encounters along a Gender Frontier: Mahican, Delaware, and German Women in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania," Pennsylvania History: a Journal of Mid Atlantic Studies 67 (Autumn 2000): 502-531.
"Metaphor, Meaning, and Misunderstanding: Language and Power on the Pennsylvania Frontier," in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds. Contact Points: North American Frontiers, 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 60-87.
"Dreaming of the Savior's Blood: Moravians and the Indian Great Awakening in Pennsylvania," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 54 (October, 1997): 723-746.