Excerpt from A Short History of the English Colonies in America The history of the thirteen American colonies is at best fragmentary and provincial, and does not assume the importance and value of the history of a nation until the meeting of the Stamp Act Congress at New York in the year 1765. But who and what the people were who fought the war for Independence and founded the United States - what was their life, what their habits, thoughts, and manners - seemed to me, when I began my study of American history, questions of the deepest interest. They were questions, too, which appeared to me never to have been answered in a compact and comprehensive form; and this volume is an attempt to supply the deficiency. The chapters, therefore, which purport to describe the various colonies in and about the year 1765 represent the purpose of the book. They have been worked out, in the course of several years, from a mass of material which has been collected in all directions, and which, although wholly in print, is in many cases as generally unknown as if it still slumbered in manuscript. To these chapters I have appended notes - mere references - partly to support conclusions which I thought might be questioned, and partly to aid other students in the same field. The notes represent, however, only a portion of the books, tracts, and newspapers actually consulted. There are many titles in my note-books of works which yielded nothing, and of others again which offered matter that had to be laid aside from mere superabundance of material: only the most valuable and important figure in the notes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.