This volume reprints the eleven essays published in the first fifty years of the William and Mary Quarterly that were voted by the W&MQ readership as the most significant & influential. Several species of early American history are represented, including intellectual history, social history, women's history, labor history, political history, and history of mentalités.

The contributors include several of the most influential & respected scholars of early America of the past seventy-five years. Brief 'Afterwords' to the articles were contributed by the authors still alive at the time of publication of this collection.

1. Perry Miller, "Errand Into the Wilderness" (1953).

2. Cecilia M. Kenyon, "Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative Government" (1955).

3. Edmund S. Morgan, "The American Revolution: Revisions in Need of Revising" (1957).

4. Gordon S. Wood, "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution" (1966).

5. Edmund S. Morgan, "The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution" (1967).

6. Jesse Lemisch, "Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America" (1968).

7. Pauline Maier, "Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America" (1970).

8. Rhys Isaac, "Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists' Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765 to 1775" (1974).

9. Lois Green Carr & Lorena S. Walsh, "The Planter's Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland" (1977).

10. James A. Henretta, "Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America" (1978).

11. Alfred F. Young, "George Robert Twelves Hewes (1742-1840): A Boston Shoemaker and the Memory of the American Revolution" (1981).