American Colonies

by Alan Taylor, Eric Foner (Editor)

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780142002100
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/30/2002
Series:	The Penguin History of the United States , #1
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	209,362
Product dimensions:	6.13(w) x 9.24(h) x 1.14(d)

About the Author

Alan Taylor’s books include 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; The Internal Enemy, also awarded the Pultizer Prize; The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. Taylor holds the Thomas Jefferson Chair in American History at the University of Virginia.

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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

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"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

 

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

Hayward offers his examination, from an unabashedly conservative perspective, of American history from 1964 through the 1980 inauguration of Ronald Reagan as president, in the first part of a two-volume account. Senior fellow at the conservative Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, he argues that liberalism reached its peak in 1964, and that the hollowness of liberal thought, played out in the flawed presidencies of Nixon, Ford and Carter, creating a political atmosphere that allowed Reagan to preside over a fundamental change in the direction of American government. In Hayward's Manichean universe, opposite the rightness of Reagan's conservatism is the wrongness of all things liberal. Labeled with the "l word," among many others, are the war on poverty, feminism, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, d?tente, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, the movie Dr. Strangelove and the "chattering class" of intellectuals. Hayward forwards many provocative opinions, among them that the Vietnam War was a success, delaying the fall of Saigon long enough to convince Communists that Southeast Asia could not be easily won; Hayward also believes that Watergate was an ideological dispute over whether the executive branch or Congress would have supremacy. The author assembles a wide variety of facts; unfortunately, he often includes them indiscriminately and tediously, as in his minute-by-minute description of the 1976 presidential primary. In the end, this is an ultraconservative polemic masquerading as history. (Nov.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In this first book in the "Penguin History of the United States" series, Taylor (history, Univ. of California, Davis; William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic) examines American colonial history from a wide-ranging perspective. Instead of offering the traditional story of the English colonies and "American exceptionalism," Taylor examines the complex mix of peoples, events, and influences that shaped the New World. He notes that the intermingling of cultures, people, plants, and animals from different parts of the world was unparalleled in speed and volume and had devastating consequences for the environment and most of the participants. Only a very select few prospered during the 17th and 18th centuries, a period in which North America actually lost population owing to diseases, wars, and early deaths. He vividly describes the harsh realities of colonial life and examines the important roles played by French, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, and English colonists as well as Native Americans and African slaves. Well written and documented, this is recommended for academic and large public libraries. Robert Flatley, Frostburg State Univ., MD Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A history of American colonialism, broadly defined. The history of Colonial America used to be much shorter; it started with the Mayflower and ended with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Freedom and progress were the main themes of the narrative, and the lesson was clear: the values of that time produced a successful nation. That approach has long since been scraped as overly simplistic, and since the 1960s, historians have attempted to address the various paradoxes of American history, the stories of the unfree (or less-free)-in particular blacks, Indians, and women. Pulitzer-winner Taylor (History/Univ. of California, Davis; William Cooper's Town, 1999, etc.) sets out to construct a truer history by righting the wrongs of exclusion. Indians arrived in the continent over 12,000 years ago, so their story is given greater length. Spanish explorers occupied the Americas 100 years before any other group of Europeans, so their story is included in greater detail as well. The French and Russians tried to colonize parts of America, might as well throw them in. And the British get a broader look, too, since independence from England did not mean that the Indians waved the white flag. Lest the story be too limited in scope, Taylor uses a variety of historical tools to investigate the centuries of evidence, "an Atlantic perspective, environmental history, and the history of colonial and native peoples." 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: Historians since Edmund Morgan have examined the implications of the cultural mix in the New World, and the environmental history (whichTaylor seems most interested by, but least dedicated to) reads like an homage to Jared Diamond. There are many good histories of Colonial America. This isn't one of them.

Kirkus Reviews