American Colonies: The Settling of North America, Vol. 1

629 Pages·2002·4.74 MB·English

by  Alan Taylor

PENGUIN BOOKS
AMERICAN COLONIES
Alan Taylor’s previous books include William Cooper’s Town: Power and
Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, which won the 1996
Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for history. He is a professor of history at the
University of California at Davis. American Colonies is the first volume in the
Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner, award-winning
author of Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution and the DeWitt
Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University.
Booklist Selection, Best Books of 2001
Praise for American Colonies
“Drawing on the latest scholarship, Taylor expands our understanding of our
own history in this comprehensive and exciting book. Full of surprising
revelations, this superb book is history at its best.”
—BookPage
“A balanced synthesis of recent scholarship. … Alan Taylor expertly weaves
together the arguments and evidence of dozens of historians and anthropologists
… plac[ing] the familiar themes of early American history within a broad
context created by the intersection of the histories of Africa, Europe, and the
Americas. [Taylor’s] strategy allows him to highlight the histories of peoples
and places neglected in accounts of colonial North America. More than just a
formidable work of historical synthesis, American Colonies provokes us to
contemplate the ways in which residents of North America have dealt with
diversity.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“At long last, we have an overview of colonial North America that addresses its
full geographic, international, and multicultural sweep. In American Colonies,
Alan Taylor transcends the heroic saga of freedom-loving Englishmen clustered
along the Atlantic coast with a full-blown narrative that extends from the
continent’s earliest inhabitants through Christian-Muslim interactions in
fifteenth-century Africa and Europe to the onset of the American Revolution and
Captain Cook’s Pacific voyages. Taylor challenges us to rethink the complexity
and significance of America’s colonial past.”
—Neal Salisbury, Professor of History, Smith College
“Alan Taylor puts everything we thought we knew about early America in a
refreshing international context. All over the country, teachers will be throwing
out stale lecture notes. Students will be sitting up attentively. Here is a history
that responds to the skeptical questions we ask in the twenty-first century.”
—Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women
and the Obligations of Citizenship
“[A] superb overview of colonial America. Alan Taylor … draws upon an
extraordinary array of recent scholarship to present a much more comprehensive
and complex story. In the process, he punctures many myths and misperceptions.
Taylor skillfully integrates social history into his narrative. His accounts of
gender roles, family life, and religious beliefs help illuminate the political and
economic processes that shape America’s role within the international
community. Perhaps Taylor’s greatest contribution to our understanding of early
American history is contextual. He is one of the few colonial historians to devote
a whole chapter to the settlement of the West Indian islands and their role in the
development of South Carolina, and perhaps the only one to include
developments on the Great Plains and in California, Alaska, and Hawaii before
the Revolution. He also broadens our understanding of the multinational aspects
of early American history. American Colonies provides the most comprehensive
and textured account of the diverse strands that formed the fabric of early
American history. It is destined to become the standard work in its field.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“Crammed full of fascinating material uncovered by historians, archaeologists,
and anthropologists in the past half-century.”
—Newsday
“Alan Taylor has ranged widely over the best new scholarship in ethnohistory,
environmental, imperial, Atlantic, Pacific and Borderlands history, using it not
simply to inform, but to transform the narrative of early North America.
Compelling, readable, and fresh, American Colonies is perhaps the most brilliant
piece of synthesis in recent American historical writing.”
—Philip J. Deloria, Associate Professor History and American Culture,
University of Michigan and author of Playing Indian
“Even the serious student of history will find a great deal of previously obscure
information. The book offers a balanced understanding of the diverse peoples
and forces that converged on this continent and influenced the course of
American history.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
AMERICAN
COLONIES
ALAN TAYLOR
The Penguin History of
the United States
Eric Foner, Editor
PENGUIN BOOKS
Overleaf: Taino Indians panning for gold, using Spanish tools.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published
in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin
Putnam Inc. 2001
Published in Penguin Books 2002
22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Copyright © Alan Taylor, 2001
All rights reserved
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS: James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota:
title page; Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Mass.: p. 3; from Rhys Isaac’s The Transformation of Virginia,
1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), courtesy of the University of North Carolina
Press (Chapel Hill): p. 138, right and left; American Antiquarian Society,
Worcester, Mass., courtesy of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center and
the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (Williamsburg, Va.): p. 222; Rauner
Special Collections, Dartmouth College Library: p. 388. All others courtesy of
the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.
Map illustrations by Jeffrey Ward
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER
EDITION AS FOLLOWS: Taylor, Alan, 1955– American colonies / Alan
Taylor; Eric Foner, editor.
p. cm.—(The Penguin history of the United States; 1) Includes bibliographical
references (p.) and index.
ISBN: 978-1-101-07581-4
1. United States—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775.
I. Foner, Eric. II. Title. III. Series.
E188.T35 2001
973.2—dc21 2001017552
Printed in the United States of America Set in Janson
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For Emily
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Part I
ENCOUNTERS
1.Natives, 13,000 B.c.–A.D. 1492
2.Colonizers, 1400–1800
3.New Spain, 1500–1600
4.The Spanish Frontier, 1530–1700
5.Canada and Iroquoia, 1500–1660
Part II
COLONIES
6.Virginia, 1570–1650
7.Chesapeake Colonies, 1650–1750
8.New England, 1600–1700
9.Puritans and Indians, 1600–1700
10.The West Indies, 1600–1700
11.Carolina, 1670–1760
12.Middle Colonies, 1600–1700
Part III
EMPIRES
13.Revolutions, 1685–1730
14.The Atlantic, 1700–80
15.Awakenings, 1700–75
16.French America, 1650–1750
17.The Great Plains, 1680–1800
18.Imperial Wars and Crisis, 1739–75
19.The Pacific, 1760–1820
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX