Overview

This volume starts with the earliest years of human colonization of the American continent and environs, as it follows the Siberian migrations across the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago. It ends in the period around 1800 when the rough outline of contemporary North America could be perceived. Dropping the usual Anglocentric description of North America's fate, Taylor conveys the far more vivid and startling story of the competing interests - Spanish, French, English, Native, Russian - that over the centuries shaped and reshaped both the continent and its ""suburbs"" in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

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9780142002100

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Reviews

Compelling, readable, and fresh, American Colonies is perhaps the most brilliant piece of synthesis in recent American historical writing. --Phillip J. Deloria, associate professor of history and American culture, University of Michigan

Compelling, readable, and fresh, American Colonies is perhaps the most brilliant piece of synthesis in recent American historical writing. --Phillip J. Deloria, associate professor of history and American culture, University of Michigan<br><br><br><br> <br><br>

j Formidable...provokes us to contemplate teh ways in which residents of North America have dealt with diversity. --The New York Times Book Review A superb overview of colonial America. -- Christian Science Monitor Compelling, readable, and fresh, American Coloniesis perhaps the most brilliant piece of synthesis in recent American historical writing. Phillip J. Deloria, associate professor of history and American culture, University of Michigan

This is a major contribution to North American history. It's the first part of an academic series of books dedicated to the history of America, and as such it's largely concerned with the centuries before the 13 states' declaration of independence, before even Columbus's landing in 1492. It's also a radical book, rethinking the normal heroic story in which English settlers strike out for freedom from the social and political constraints of their homeland, landing on the Eastern seaboard to create a new land of prosperity and equality. And, as Taylor points out, nowhere in the usual histories do we see the Russian presence in Alaska, or English forays into Hawaii. Taylor's approach is multiple, sensitive to a complicated terrain. He looks at Dutch, French and Spanish colonists, seeing them as far more than just an adjunct to the British enterprise, and takes full account of the situation of the many divergent Indian peoples and their forms of cultural resistance. Looking at each region of North America separately, he creates a detailed picture of the sheer social diversity of the new colonies and the way social patterns emerged from widely different cultural backgrounds, as racial identities of colonists and colonised established themselves. He also recognizes the diversity of the slave population, peoples whose languages and cultures - having been drawn from different regions of the vast African continent - were widely different from each other, let alone those of their 'masters'. From the lengthy regional accounts Taylor weaves a tapestry of remarkable stories, detailing how a nation emerged to become its own coloniser, in the sense that those who struck out to the west coast, plundering more land from the indigenous population, were by now American expansionists rather than European settlers. Using a range of scholarship from different disciplines, Taylor tells a story of violence, suppression, fear, rebellion and disease: an overview that does justice to the turbulent centuries that transformed a continent. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Alan Taylor is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His last book was WILLIAM COOPER'S TOWN which won both the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize in American History.

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