Synopses & Reviews
With this volume, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America. Transcending the usual Anglocentric version of our colonial past, he recovers the importance of Native American tribes, African slaves, and the rival empires of France, Spain, the Netherlands, and even Russia in the colonization of North America. Moving beyond the Atlantic seaboard to examine the entire continent, American Colonies reveals a pivotal period in the global interaction of peoples, cultures, plants, animals, and microbes. In a vivid narrative, Taylor draws upon cutting-edge scholarship to create a timely picture of the colonial world characterized by an interplay of freedom and slavery, opportunity and loss.
"Compelling, readable, and fresh, American Colonies is perhaps the most brilliant piece of synthesis in recent American historical writing." (Phillip J. Deloria, associate professor of history and American culture, University of Michigan)
Review
"Prizewinning historian Taylor, adding another entry in his prestigious output...offers a work of history colored by our age of diversity. Taylor presents a continent benefiting from a plethora of cultural groups, a far cry from the conventional Anglocentric version of U.S. history." Allen Weakland, Booklist (starred review)
Review
"Taylor delves deeply into topics given scant mention in most histories....Even the serious student of history will find a great deal of previously obscure information....[A] balanced understanding of the diverse peoples and forces that converged on this continent early on and influenced the course of American history." Publishers Weekly
Review
"[Taylor] vividly describes the harsh realities of colonial life....Well written and documented, this is recommended for academic and large public libraries." Library Journal
Review
"A noble intention that renders this a laundry-list of facts and theories that fail to form a whole. Worse, there's nothing new here....There are many good histories of Colonial America. This isn't one of them." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Compelling, readable, and fresh, American Colonies is perhaps the most brilliant piece of synthesis in recent American historical writing." Phillip J. Deloria, associate professor of history and American culture, University of Michigan
Synopsis
With this volume, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America. Transcending the usual Anglocentric version of our colonial past, he recovers the importance of Native American tribes, African slaves, and the rival empires of France, Spain, the Netherlands, and even Russia in the colonization of North America. Moving beyond the Atlantic seaboard to examine the entire continent, American Colonies reveals a pivotal period in the global interaction of peoples, cultures, plants, animals, and microbes. In a vivid narrative, Taylor draws upon cutting-edge scholarship to create a timely picture of the colonial world characterized by an interplay of freedom and slavery, opportunity and loss.
Synopsis
A multicultural, multinational history of colonial America from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Internal Enemy and American Revolutions
In the first volume in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America, from the native inhabitants from milennia past, through the decades of Western colonization and conquest, and across the entire continent, all the way to the Pacific coast.
Transcending the usual Anglocentric version of our colonial past, he recovers the importance of Native American tribes, African slaves, and the rival empires of France, Spain, the Netherlands, and even Russia in the colonization of North America. Moving beyond the Atlantic seaboard to examine the entire continent, American Colonies reveals a pivotal period in the global interaction of peoples, cultures, plants, animals, and microbes. In a vivid narrative, Taylor draws upon cutting-edge scholarship to create a timely picture of the colonial world characterized by an interplay of freedom and slavery, opportunity and loss.
"Formidable . . . provokes us to contemplate the ways in which residents of North America have dealt with diversity." -The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
AMERICAN COLONIES starts with the earliest years of human colonization of the American continent and environs with the Siberian migrations across the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago. It ends in around 1800 when the rough outline of the contemporary North America could be perceived.
Dropping the usual Anglocentric description of North America's fate, Taylor brilliantly 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. It is one of the greatest of all human stories.
About the Author
Alan Taylor is professor of history at the University of California at Davis. He is the author of
William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize in American history.
Series editor Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. He has been awarded the Bancroft Prize, Parkman Prize, and a Los Angeles Times Book Award, among other honors.
Table of 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. Encounters
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