Publisher 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 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 celebrates its four-hundredth anniversary, this collection provides provocative material for teaching and launching new research.

Author Biography

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. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Review

"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"

Long Description

The 18 essays in this volume provide a fresh perspective on the wider context of the encounter between the inhabitants of precolonial Virginia and the English. The 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.

Review Quote

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

Promotional "Headline"

"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

Details