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

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

Overleaf: Taino Indians panning for gold, using Spanish tools.

PENGUIN BOOKS

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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 Isaacs The Transformation of Virginia, 17401790 (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 StatesHistoryColonial period, ca. 16001775.

I. Foner, Eric. II. Title. III. Series.

E188.T35 2001

973.2dc21 2001017552

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Janson