**2** Chap. 2.d

This chapter focuses on epidemics in New England before 1780. Barker describes his move from Barnstable, Massachusetts, to Gorham, Maine, with information about the town, dietary habits, and physicians in Cumberland County. He cites the diary of the Reverend Thomas Smith, who began his ministerial duties at the First Parish Church in Falmouth (Portland) in 1727 and cared for his parishioner’s medical as well as spiritual needs, keeping a diary of diseases and epidemics beginning in 1735. Diary entries describe the severe epidemic of throat distemper, also known as cynache maligna or putrid sore throat, in 1735, with recurrences in 1754, 1784, and 1801–1802. Various treatments including the use of blistering are discussed, as well as the use of mercury (calomel) in a long excerpt from John Warren’s article, “View of mercurial practice” published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1813.

**30** Chap. 3d4.th

Barker gives clinical descriptions and therapy of the 1784–1785 epidemic of throat distemper that occurred in Cumberland County, Maine. He cites authorities and includes a long excerpt from “Observations and Remarks on the Putrid Malignant Sore-throat, from 1784 to 1786” by Hall Jackson of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who also quotes from numerous authorities. Therapies considered include Bark (cinchona/quinine), marsh rosemary, blisters, and mercury.

Navigating the “Bureaucratic Beast” in North Carolina Hurricane Recovery

Hurricane Florence swept up the eastern United States coast and slowly moved through North Carolina as a tropical storm in September 2018. Producing twenty to thirty inches of rain, Florence caused dangerous flooding, displacement, and widespread wind damage and power outages. While coastal areas were hard hit by the storm, many impoverished in-land areas spanning multiple river basins were also heavily flooded. Although the winds have ceased and the waters receded, the disaster continues to unfold in bureaucratic contexts with uneven effects temporally and spatially for affected locals. Local organizations and the Federal Emergency Management Agency assess damages, process funding applications, and work to rebuild. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic research in Cumberland County, NC, we illuminate the ways in which the temporality of bureaucratic processes is a form of bureaucratic violence that exacerbates suffering in the context of crisis and how local organizations attempt to recover and rebuild in the face of pervasive top-down bureaucratic obstacles.

8 Aim for a Free State and Settle among Quakers

This chapter examines escapes from slavery and settlement patterns in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and Greenwich Township, Cumberland County, New Jersey, ca. 1820 to 1860. It analyzes the mundane interactions between the white Quakers and African Americans as well as their sometimes heroic collaboration in the fight against slavery. It identifies a conflict between the image of the good Quaker, as fictionalized by Harriet Beecher Stowe or exemplified in the lives of Lucretia Mott, Levi Coffin, or Isaac T. Hopper, and the Quakers who played no active role in antislavery. It further argues that the mythology of the good Quaker in the antislavery movement and in the Underground Railroad often underplays African American agency.

The Black Boys and Blurred Lines

In 1765, frontiersmen in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania forcibly prohibited British officials and colonists from participating in the Indian trade, intercepting and destroying goods intended for Native Americans in the Ohio Country. Imperial officials and civil leaders in Pennsylvania condemned the actions of the so-called “Black Boys,” suggesting that they represented a form of insurrection. Close analysis of the Black Boys’ stated motivations, however, suggests that they did not seek an overthrow of royal rule. Instead, they sought a renegotiation of political power on the frontier, one in which local concerns and wishes tempered the exercise of imperial authority.