Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.--"Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology and History in Eighteenth-Century America" is the title of a new book by a Mississippi State historian.
Assistant professor Peter C. Messer traces the emergence of distinctively American attitudes about society, politics and government. A member of the university's history department faculty since 2002, he is a specialist in early American and early modern European societies.
"Stories of Independence" is published by Northern Illinois University Press. Within its 268 pages, Messer describes how the ways that early Americans recorded their history from colonial times through the immediate post-independence decades helped shape the young nation's future.
A doctoral graduate of Rutgers University, he previously published "Writing Women in History: Defining Gender and Citizenship in Post-Revolutionary America" in the journal Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.
He also has contributed to the Journal of the Early Republic an article titled "From Revolutionary History to a History of Revolution: David Ramsay and the American Revolution." Ramsay was a popular 18th century historian famous for his "Life of George Washington" and "History of the American Revolution."
For more information on Messer's "Stories of Independence," visit www.niupress.niu.edu.