The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624

Description

In response to the global turn in scholarship on colonial and early modern history, the eighteen essays in this volume provide a fresh and much-needed perspective on the wider context of the encounter between the inhabitants of precolonial Virginia and the English. This collection offers an interdisciplinary consideration of developments in Native America, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Chesapeake, highlighting the mosaic of regions and influences that formed the context and impetus for the English settlement at Jamestown in 1607. The volume reflects an understanding of Jamestown not as the birthplace of democracy in America but as the creation of a European outpost in a neighborhood that included Africans, Native Americans, and other Europeans.

With contributions from both prominent and rising scholars, this volume offers far-ranging and compelling studies of peoples, texts, places, and conditions that influenced the making of New World societies. As Jamestown marks its four-hundredth anniversary, this collection provides provocative material for teaching and launching new research.

Contributors:
Philip P. Boucher, University of Alabama, Huntsville
Peter Cook, Nipissing University
J. H. Elliott, University of Oxford
Andrew Fitzmaurice, University of Sydney
Joseph Hall, Bates College
Linda Heywood, Boston University
James Horn, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
E. Ann McDougall, University of Alberta
Peter C. Mancall, University of Southern California
Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University
David Northrup, Boston College
Marcy Norton, The George Washington University
James D. Rice, State University of New York, Plattsburgh
Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania
David Harris Sacks, Reed College
Benjamin Schmidt, University of Washington
Stuart B. Schwartz, Yale University
David S. Shields, University of South Carolina
Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, McGill University
James H. Sweet, University of Wisconsin, Madison
John Thornton, Boston University

About The Author

Peter C. Mancall is professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California and director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. He is author of Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America and editor of Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology.

Reviews

“Studded with sparkling essays, some of which should become required reading.”–Journal of Southern History

“With contributions from many of the most preeminent historians in the field, this work belongs in every college/university library.”–Choice

“[A] very fine edited collection. . . . A rewarding read and an important reminder that the first permanent English settlement in North America survived.”–Journal of British Studies

“An impressive volume. . . . Deserve[s] high praise.”–Virginia Magazine

“This collection succeeds in dramatically broadening our perspective on the global context of early American history. . . . A magnificent array of the best scholars working in the field today, and these essays will only contribute to their status.”–Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

“The essays . . . do a fine job of explicating parts of the economic, political, scientific, and ideological milieu out of which the Virginia experiment emerged.”–Clio

“Superb.”–H-Net

“A Herculean task of integration. . . . [Mancall] carries off this task with sophistication and grace.”–Terrae Incognitae

“This volume’s creative vision of our colonial origins places Jamestown’s establishment in 1607 in its rich, often surprising pan-Atlantic context. . . . It sets the standard for reflecting, four hundred years later, on the human diversity and contingency of what turned out, after all, to have been a foundational moment in a history of a nation no less diverse or complex.”–Joseph C. Miller, University of Virginia

“Exploring far-flung places linked by trade, migration, and imagination, this extraordinary collection investigates the origins not only of Virginia but also of our global community today.”–Claudio Saunt, University of Georgia