Carol Berkin's multicultural history reconstructs the lives of American women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-women from European, African, and Native backgrounds-and examines their varied roles as wives, mothers, household managers, laborers, rebels, and, ultimately, critical forces in shaping the new nation's culture and history. About the Author: Carol Berkin is Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is the author of A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution , Women's Voices/Women's Lives: Documents in Early American History , and coeditor, with Mary Beth Norton, of Women of America: A History .