As an anthology of readings by top scholars in the field of Early American History, Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development provides students with an insightful and critical view of the Colonial period. The Fifth Edition is heavily revised to reflect shifting emphasis on the continentalist approach to early American history. With seventeen new essays, including essays on the New France and Spanish borderlands, this reader continues to be a best-selling text in the Colonial America course.
I. A Global Perspective
Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes - Jared Diamond
II. THE EUROPEAN INVASION OF THE AMERICAS
Taking Possession and Reading Texts: Establishing the Authority of Overseas Empires - Patricia Seed
Conquistadores of the Spirit - David J. Weber
Reluctant Exiles: The Problem of Colonization in French North America - Peter N. Moogk
From Servant to Freeholder: Status Mobility and Property Accumulation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland - Russell R. Menard
The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland - Lois G. Carr and Lorena S. Walsh
The African Experience of the "20. and Odd Negroes" Arriving in Virginia in 1619 - John Thornton
Family Structure in Seventeenth-Century Andover, Massachusetts - Philip J. Greven, Jr.
The Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul in Puritan New England - Elizabeth Reis
“Tender Plants”: Quaker Farmers and Children in the Delaware Valley, 1681-1735 - Barry J. Levy
III. THE CLASH OF CULTURES IN AN AGE OF CRISIS
War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience - Daniel K. Richter
The Indians’ New World: The Catawba Experience - James H. Merrell
King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England - Virginia DeJohn Anderson
Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox
The Menacing Shadow of Louis XIV and the Rage of Jacob Leisler: The Constitutional Ordeal of Seventeenth-Century New York - John M. Murrin
The Pueblo Revolt and its Aftermath - Ramón A. Gutiérrez
IV. PROVINCIAL AMERICA
“The Extension of His Majesties Dominions”: The Virginia Backcountry and the Reconfiguration of Imperial Frontiers - Warren R. Hofstra
“Baubles of Britain”: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century - T.H. Breen
Markets and Composite Farms in Early America - Richard M. Bushman
Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village - Cornelia Dayton
Social Transactions between Whites and Blacks - Philip D. Morgan
V. MID-CENTURY CRISES AND TRANSFORMATIONS
Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida - Jane Landers
African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion - John ThorntonFrank Lambert
“Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Great Awakening, 1737-1745Gregory Evans Dowd
The Indians’ Great Awakening
