American Colonies: The Settlement of North America to 1800 by Alan Taylor (Engli

Description: American Colonies by Alan Taylor Describes the earliest years of human colonization of the American continent and environs with the Siberian migrations across the Bering Strait. This book conveys the story of competing interests - Spanish, French, English, Native, Russian - that over the centuries shaped both the continent and its suburbs in the Caribbean and the Pacific. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description This volume starts with the earliest years of human colonization of the American continent and environs, as it follows the Siberian migrations across the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago. It ends in the period around 1800 when the rough outline of contemporary North America could be perceived. Dropping the usual Anglocentric description of North Americas fate, Taylor conveys the far more vivid and startling story of the competing interests - Spanish, French, English, Native, Russian - that over the centuries shaped and reshaped both the continent and its "suburbs" in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Notes The first book in the new five-volume Penguin History Of The United States. Suitable for both the general reader and history students, brightens up a familiar story. Author Biography Alan Taylor is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His last book was WILLIAM COOPERS TOWN which won both the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize in American History. Table of Contents IntroductionPart I. Encounters1. Natives, 13,000 B.C.-A.D. 14922. Colonizers, 1400-18003. New Spain, 1500-16004. The Spanish Frontier, 1530-17005. Canada and Iroquoia, 1500-1660Part II. Encounters6. Virginia, 1570-16507. Chesapeake Colonies, 1650-17508. New England, 1600-17009. Puritans and Indians, 1600-170010. The West Indies, 1600-170011. Carolina, 1670-176012. Middle Colonies, 1600-1700Part III. Empires13. Revolutions, 1685-173014. The Atlantic, 1700-8015. Awakenings, 1700-7516. French America, 1650-175017. The Great Plains, 1680-180018. Imperial Wars and Crisis, 1739-7519. The Pacific, 1760-1820AcknowledgmentsBibliographyIndex Review "Formidable...provokes us to contemplate the ways in which residents of North America have dealt with diversity." -The New York Times Book Review"A superb overview of colonial America." -Christian Science Monitor"Compelling, readable, and fresh, American Colonies is perhaps the most brilliant piece of synthesis in recent American historical writing." —Phillip J. Deloria, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor of American Culture and History at the University of Michigan"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)"Crammed full of fascinating material uncovered by historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists in the past half-century." —Newsday Promotional Alan Taylor is the author of "William Coopers Town", which won both the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize in American History. Kirkus UK Review This is a major contribution to North American history. Its the first part of an academic series of books dedicated to the history of America, and as such its largely concerned with the centuries before the 13 states declaration of independence, before even Columbuss landing in 1492. Its also a radical book, rethinking the normal heroic story in which English settlers strike out for freedom from the social and political constraints of their homeland, landing on the Eastern seaboard to create a new land of prosperity and equality. And, as Taylor points out, nowhere in the usual histories do we see the Russian presence in Alaska, or English forays into Hawaii. Taylors approach is multiple, sensitive to a complicated terrain. He looks at Dutch, French and Spanish colonists, seeing them as far more than just an adjunct to the British enterprise, and takes full account of the situation of the many divergent Indian peoples and their forms of cultural resistance. Looking at each region of North America separately, he creates a detailed picture of the sheer social diversity of the new colonies and the way social patterns emerged from widely different cultural backgrounds, as racial identities of colonists and colonised established themselves. He also recognizes the diversity of the slave population, peoples whose languages and cultures - having been drawn from different regions of the vast African continent - were widely different from each other, let alone those of their masters. From the lengthy regional accounts Taylor weaves a tapestry of remarkable stories, detailing how a nation emerged to become its own coloniser, in the sense that those who struck out to the west coast, plundering more land from the indigenous population, were by now American expansionists rather than European settlers. Using a range of scholarship from different disciplines, Taylor tells a story of violence, suppression, fear, rebellion and disease: an overview that does justice to the turbulent centuries that transformed a continent. (Kirkus UK) Review Quote "Formidable...provokes us to contemplate teh ways in which residents of North America have dealt with diversity." -- The New York Times Book Review "A superb overview of colonial America." -- Christian Science Monitor "Compelling, readable, and fresh, American Colonies Excerpt from Book PENGUIN BOOKS AMERICAN COLONIES Alan Taylors previous books include William Coopers 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: Americas 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. [Taylors] 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 continents earliest inhabitants through Christian-Muslim interactions in fifteenth-century Africa and Europe to the onset of the American Revolution and Captain Cooks Pacific voyages. Taylor challenges us to rethink the complexity and significance of Americas 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 Americas role within the international community. Perhaps Taylors 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 INTRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX INTRODUCTION Christopher Columbus and the worlds he bridged, as imagined by a European artist of the early seventeenth century. From Caspar Plautius , Nova Typis Transacta Navigatio ( n.p., 1621 ). TO WRITE A HISTORY of colonial America used to be easier, because the human cast and the geographic stage were both considered so much smaller. Until the 1960s, most American historians assumed that "the colonists" meant English-speaking men confined to the Atlantic seaboard. Women were there as passive and inconsequential helpmates. Indians were wild and primitive peoples beyond the pale: unchanging objects of colonists fears and aggressions. African slaves appeared as unfortunate aberrations in a fundamentally upbeat story of Englishmen becoming freer and more prosperous by colonizing an open land. The other colonies of rival empires--Dutch, French, and Spanish--were a hazy backdrop of hostility: backward threats to the English America that alone spawned the American Revolution and the United States. And no colonial historian bothered with the eighteenth-century Russian colonization of Alaska or the English probes into Hawaii, although both places later became absorbed into the United States. By long convention, "American history" began in the east in the English colonies and spread slowly westward, reaching only the Appalachian Mountains by the end of the colonial period. According to this view, the "seeds" of the United States first appeared with the English colonists in 1607 at Jamestown in Virginia, followed in 1620 by "the Pilgrims" at Plymouth in New England. Earlier Spanish and contemporary French settlements were fundamentally irrelevant except as enemies, as "foreign" challenges that brought out the best in the English as they made themselves into Americans. What we now call "the West" did not become part of American history until the United States invaded it during the early nineteenth century. Alaska and Hawaii made no appearance in national history until the end of that century. That narrow colonial cast and stage made for the fundamentally happy story of "American exceptionalism": the making of a new people, in a new land. By emigrating to the colonies, white men escaped from the rigid customs, social hierarchies, and constrained resources of Europe into an abundant land of challenge and opportunity. That story persists in our national culture and popular history because it offers an appealing simplification that contains important (but partial) truths. Many English colonists did find more land, greater prosperity, and higher status than they could have achieved in the mother country. After about 1640, the great majority of free colonists were better fed, clothed, and housed than their common contemporaries in England, where half the people lived in destitution. And English colonial societies were truncated, lacking the gentry and aristocracy of the mother country, creating a political vacuum at the top to be filled by prosperous merchants and planters. But the traditional story of American uplift excludes too many people. Many English colonists failed to prosper, finding only intense labor and early-graves in a strange and stressful land of greater disease, new crops and predators, and intermittent Indian hostility. And those who succeeded bought their good fortune by taking lands from Indians and by exploiting the labor of others--at first indentured servants, later African slaves. The abundant land for free colonists kept wage labor scarce and expensive, which promoted the importation of unfree laborers by the thousands. Between 1492 and 1776, North America lost population, as diseases and wars killed Indians faster than colonists could replace them. And during the eighteenth century, most colonial arrivals were Africans forcibly carried to a land of slavery, rather than European volunteers seeking a domain of freedom. More than minor aberrations, Indian deaths and African slaves were fundamental to colonization. The historian John Murrin concludes that "losers far outnumbered winners" in "a tragedy of such huge proportions that no ones imagination can easily encompass it all." Moreover, not all of colonial America was English. Many native peoples encountered colonizers not as we Details ISBN0142002100 Author Alan Taylor Pages 544 Series Penguin History of the United States Language English ISBN-10 0142002100 ISBN-13 9780142002100 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 973.2 Illustrations Yes Imprint Penguin Books Ltd Subtitle The Settlement of North America to 1800 Place of Publication London Country of Publication United Kingdom Residence CA Short Title AMER COLONIES REV/E Edition Description Revised DOI 10.1604/9780142002100 Series Number 1 UK Release Date 2003-07-31 AU Release Date 2003-07-31 NZ Release Date 2003-07-31 Publisher Penguin Books Ltd Year 2003 Publication Date 2003-07-31 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:1081773;

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