While historians of Southern slavery have increasingly come to have access to slave sources, there has been a dearth of easily accessible documents on indentured white servants of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This volume of advertisements for runaway indentured servants helps to address that need. The first of four volumes providing a full collection of these advertisements, this volume covers Pennsylvania from 1729 to 1760, while the following volumes will cover Pennsylvania from 1761 to 1820, South Carolina, Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, and Massachusetts. This collection will provide a valuable source of information about unfree white classes in early America, saving hours of research time. Two appendices, one listing planters by name and one listing runaways by name, provide access to the people mentioned in the advertisements. Appendix tables also provide useful statistics about the runaways.
