Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History

Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History
Author: James Ciment
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 3151
Release: 2016-09-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317474163

No era in American history has been more fascinating to Americans, or more critical to the ultimate destiny of the United States, than the colonial era. Between the time that the first European settlers established a colony at Jamestown in 1607 through the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the outlines of America's distinctive political culture, economic system, social life, and cultural patterns had begun to emerge. Designed to complement the high school American history curriculum as well as undergraduate survey courses, "Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History" captures it all: the people, institutions, ideas, and events of the first three hundred years of American history. While it focuses on the thirteen British colonies stretching along the Atlantic, Colonial America sets this history in its larger contexts. Entries also cover Canada, the American Southwest and Mexico, and the Caribbean and Atlantic world directly impacting the history of the thirteen colonies. This encyclopedia explores the complete early history of what would become the United States, including portraits of Native American life in the immediate pre-contact period, early Spanish exploration, and the first settlements by Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish, and English colonists. This monumental five-volume set brings America's colonial heritage vibrantly to life for today's readers. It includes: thematic essays on major issues and topics; detailed A-Z entries on hundreds of people, institutions, events, and ideas; thematic and regional chronologies; hundreds of illustrations; primary documents; and a glossary and multiple indexes.

Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life

Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life
Author: William J. Gilmore
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 572
Release: 1992-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780870497681

Gilmore (history, Stockton State College) is concerned with the half century following independence, during which rural New England changed from a traditional agricultural region into a commercialized one. He examines the links among cultural, social, and economic aspects of this transformation, an ingredient of which was an ideological commitment to reading and learning. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A Powerful Mind

A Powerful Mind
Author: Adrienne M. Harrison
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2015-10-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1612347258

His formal schooling abruptly cut off at age eleven, George Washington saw his boyhood dream of joining the British army evaporate and recognized that even his aspiration to rise in colonial Virginian agricultural society would be difficult. Throughout his life he faced challenges for which he lacked the academic foundations shared by his more highly educated contemporaries. Yet Washington’s legacy is clearly not one of failure. Breaking new ground in Washington scholarship and American revolutionary history, Adrienne M. Harrison investigates the first president’s dedicated process of self-directed learning through reading, a facet of his character and leadership long neglected by historians and biographers. In A Powerful Mind, Harrison shows that Washington rose to meet these trials through a committed campaign of highly focused reading, educating himself on exactly what he needed to do and how best to do it. In contrast to other famous figures of the revolution—Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin—Washington did not relish learning for its own sake, viewing self-education instead as a tool for shaping himself into the person he wanted to be. His two highest-profile and highest-risk endeavors—commander in chief of the Continental Army and president of the fledgling United States—are a testament to the success of his strategy.

The Great Father

The Great Father
Author: Francis Paul Prucha
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 1402
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780803287341

"This is Francis Paul Prucha's magnum opus. It is a great work. . . . This study will . . . [be] a standard by which other studies of American Indian affairs will be judged. American Indian history needed this book, has long awaited it, and rejoices at its publication."-American Indian Culture and Research Journal. "The author's detailed analysis of two centuries of federal policy makes The Great Father indispensable reading for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of American Indian policy."-Journal of American History. "Written in an engaging fashion, encompassing an extraordinary range of material, devoting attention to themes as well as to chronological narration, and presenting a wealth of bibliographical information, it is an essential text for all students and scholars of American Indian history and anthropology."-Oregon Historical Quarterly."A monumental endeavor, rigorously researched and carefully written. . . . It will remain for decades as an indispensable reference tool and a compendium of knowledge pertaining to United States-Indian relations."-Western Historical Quarterly. "Perhaps the crowning achievement of Prucha's scholarly career."-Vine Deloria Jr., America."For many years to come, The Great Father will be the point of departure for all those embarking on research projects in the history of government Indian policy."-William T. Hagan, New Mexico Historical Review. "The appearance of this massive history of federal Indian policy is a triumph of historical research and scholarly publication."-Lawrence C. Kelly, Montana. "This is the most important history ever published about the formulation of federal Indian policies in the United States."-Herbert T. Hoover, Minnesota History. "This truly is the definitive work on the subject."-Ronald Rayman, Library Journal.The Great Father was widely praised when it appeared in two volumes in 1984 and was awarded the Ray Allen Billington Prize by the Organization of American Historians. This abridged one-volume edition follows the structure of the two-volume edition, eliminating only the footnotes and some of the detail. It is a comprehensive history of the relations between the U.S. government and the Indians. Covering the two centuries from the Revolutionary War to 1980, the book traces the development of American Indian policy and the growth of the bureaucracy created to implement that policy.Francis Paul Prucha, S.J., a leading authority on American Indian policy and the author of more than a dozen other books, is an emeritus professor of history at Marquette University.

From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers

From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers
Author: Allan Kulikoff
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 501
Release: 2014-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807860786

With this book, Allan Kulikoff offers a sweeping new interpretation of the origins and development of the small farm economy in Britain's mainland American colonies. Examining the lives of farmers and their families, he tells the story of immigration to the colonies, traces patterns of settlement, analyzes the growth of markets, and assesses the impact of the Revolution on small farm society. Beginning with the dispossession of the peasantry in early modern England, Kulikoff follows the immigrants across the Atlantic to explore how they reacted to a hostile new environment and its Indian inhabitants. He discusses how colonists secured land, built farms, and bequeathed those farms to their children. Emphasizing commodity markets in early America, Kulikoff shows that without British demand for the colonists' crops, settlement could not have begun at all. Most important, he explores the destruction caused during the American Revolution, showing how the war thrust farmers into subsistence production and how they only gradually regained their prewar prosperity.

The Fable of the Southern Writer

The Fable of the Southern Writer
Author: Lewis P. Simpson
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2003-10-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807153508

"With a breadth and depth unsurpassed by any other cultural historian of the South, Lewis Simpson examines the writing of southerners Thomas Jefferson, John Randolph, Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Arthur Crew Inman, William Styron, and Walker Percy. Simpson offers challenging essays of easy erudition blessedly free of academic jargon.... [They] do not propose to support an overall thesis, but simply explore the southern writer's unique relationship with his or her region, bereft of myth and tradition, in the grasp of science and history." -- Library Journal

A History of Virginia Literature

A History of Virginia Literature
Author: Kevin J. Hayes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2015-05-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107057779

This History explores the development of literary culture in Virginia from the founding of Jamestown to the twenty-first century.

Music of the Colonial and Revolutionary Era

Music of the Colonial and Revolutionary Era
Author: John Ogasapian
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2004-10-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0313061890

The colonial days of America marked not only the beginnings of a country, but also of a new culture, part of which was the first American music publishers, entrepreneurs, and instrument makers forging musical communities from New England to New Spain. Elements of British, Spanish, German, Scots-Irish, and Native American music all contributed to the many cultures and subcultures of the early nation. While English settlers largely sought to impose their own culture in the new land, the adaptation of native music by Spanish settlers provided an important cultural intersection. The music of the Scots-Irish in the middle colonies planted the seeds of a folk ballad tradition. In New England, the Puritans developed a surprisingly rich—and recreational—musical culture. At the same time, the Regular Singing Movement attempted to reduce the role of the clergy in religious services. More of a cultural examination than a music theory book, this work provides vastly informative narrative chapters on early American music and its role in colonial and Revolutionary culture. Chapter bibliographies, a timeline, and a subject index offer additional resources for readers. The American History through Music series examines the many different types of music prevalent throughout U.S. history, as well as the roles these music types have played in American culture. John Ogasapian's volume on the Colonial and Revolutionary period applies this cultural focus to the music of America's infancy and illuminates the surprisingly complex relationships in music of that time.

The English Embrace of the American Indians

The English Embrace of the American Indians
Author: Alan S. Rome
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-12-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319461974

This book makes a wide, conceptual challenge to the theory that the English of the colonial period thought of Native Americans as irrational and subhuman, dismissing any intimations to the contrary as ideology or propaganda. It makes a controversial intervention by demonstrating that the true tragedy of colonial relations was precisely the genuineness of benevolence, and not its cynical exploitation or subordination to other ends that was often the compelling force behind conflict and suffering. It was because the English genuinely believed that the Indians were their equals in body and mind that they fatally tried to embrace them. From an intellectual exploration of the abstract ideas of human rights in colonial America and the grounded realities of the politics that existed there to a narrative of how these ideas played out in relations between the two peoples in the early years of the colony, this book challenges and subverts current understanding of English colonial politics and religion.

The Good Forest

The Good Forest
Author: Karen Auman
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2024-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820366129

Georgia, the last of Britain’s American mainland colonies, began with high aspirations to create a morally sound society based on small family farms with no enslaved workers. But those goals were not realized, and Georgia became a slave plantation society, following the Carolina model. This trajectory of failure is well known. But looking at the Salzburgers, who emigrated from Europe as part of the original plan, providesa very different story. The Good Forest reveals the experiences of the Salzburger migrants who came to Georgia with the support of British and German philanthropy, where they achieved self-sufficiency in the Ebenezer settlement while following the Trustees’ plans. Because their settlement compriseda significant portion of Georgia’s early population, their experiences provide a corrective to our understanding of early Georgia and help reveal the possibilities in Atlantic colonization as they built a cohesive community. The relative success of the Ebenezer settlement, furthermore, challenges the inherent environmental, cultural, and economic determinism that has dominated Georgia history. That well-worn narrative often implies (or even explicitly states) that only a slave-based plantation economy—as implemented after the Trustee era—could succeed. With this history, Auman illuminates the interwoven themes of Atlantic migrations, colonization, charity, and transatlantic religious networks.