The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607--1689: A History of the South

by Wesley Frank Craven

Overview

This book is Volume I of A HISTORY OF THE SOUTH, a ten-volume series designed to present a balanced history of all the complex aspects of the South’s culture from 1607 to the present. Like its companion volumes, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century was written by an outstanding student of Southern history.


In the America of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just what was Southern? The first colonists looked upon themselves as British, and only gradually did those attitudes and traditions develop which were distinctively American. To determine what was Southern in the early colonies, Professor Craven has searched for those features of early American society which distinguished the South in later years and those features of early American history which help the Southerner to understand himself.


The Chesapeake colonies—Virginia and Maryland—formed the first Southern community. These colonies grew out of the same interest which directed European imperialism toward Africa and the West Indies—notably the production of sugar, silk, wine, and tobacco. Craven studies the social, economic, and political development of the Southern colonies as the product of continuing European rivalries that resulted in the colonization of Carolina and Florida. Major emphasis, however, is placed upon British expansion, since Anglo-Saxon influence was dominant in the formation of the South as a region.


Craven sees as crucial the middle period of the seventeenth century. Out of the political and social unrest which characterized these years emerged the points of view which gave shape to the American and the Southern tradition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807164921
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	12/03/2015
Series:	A History of the South
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	452
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Wesley Frank Craven was professor of history at New York University. He received the B.A. and the M.A. degrees from Duke University. His graduate study of history at Duke was under the late W.K. Boyd and W.T. Laprae; he later studied under Wallace Notestein at Cornell University, where he received the Ph.D. degree. He was appointed to the faculty of New York University in 1928, where he remained, except for a three-year period (1943-46) when he was on military leave for historical work with the Army air forces. His research and writing interests were chiefly in the early English Settlement of America. He was the author of The Dissolution of the Virginia Company (1932), An Introduction to the History of Bermuda (1938), and contributions to the Dictionary of American Biography and to historical journals. He served on the editorial boards of both the Journal of Modern History and The Journal of Southern History.