Ranging from Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania to the backcountry regions of the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and northern New England, "The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America" offers an ambitious overview of political life in pre-Revolutionary America.

Richard R. Beeman is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is coeditor of Beyond Confederation: The Origins of the American Constitution and National Identity and author of The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746-1832, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.