Cover; Half-Title; Title; Copyright; Contents; List of Illustrations; Preface; Introduction; 1 Gudrid Thorbjornsdöttir: First Foremother of American Empire; 2 Ungendering Empire: Catalina de Erauso and the Performance of Masculinity; 3 Creole Civic Pride and Positioning "Exceptional" Black Women; 4 Imposing Order: Sarah Kemble Knight's Journal and the Anglo-American Empire; 5 The Midwife's Calling: Martha Ballard's Diary and the Empire of Medical Knowledge in the Early Republic; 6 The Birth Pangs of the American Mother: Puritanism, Republicanism, and the Letter-Journal of Esther Edwards Burr

7 Empire and the Pan-Atlantic Self in The Female American or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield; 8 "The Fever and the Fetters": An Epidemiology of Captivity and Empire; 9 Women Left Behind: Female Loyalism, Coverture, and Grace Growden Galloway's Empire of Self; 10 "Solitary, Neglected, Despised": Cruel Optimism and National Sentimentality; 11 The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement; 12 New World Roots: Transatlantic Fictions, Creole Marriages, and Women's Cultivation of Empire in the Americas; 13 Catharine Brown's Body: Missionary Spiritualization and Cherokee Embodiment

14 Territorial Agency: Negotiations of Space and Empire in the Domestic Violence Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey and Anne Home Livingston15 "Her Book the Only Hope She Had": Self and Sovereignty in the Narratives of Ann Carson; 16 Bodies of Work: Early American Women Writers, Empire, and Pedagogy; Notes on Contributors; Index