Major Problems in American Colonial History

Including both primary and secondary sources in a single collection provides a rich analytical experience for students. The primary sources give students evidence to explore; the secondary sources expose students to key historical debates. Often the secondary essays refer to one of the primary documents, so students can see how historians integrate evidence in an interpretation.

Each chapter begins with a brief introduction to its topic, while headnotes that place the readings in historical and interpretive perspective introduce each chapter’s primary sources and essays.

A Further Reading section provides students with a wealth of classic and cutting-edge scholarship that relates to key themes in each chapter.

This new edition takes a more continental and thematic approach. Early chapters look at the earliest impulse to colonization within the future United States by Spanish as well as English promoters, and examine their similarities as well as their differences. They also present new research on Indian responses and strategies for managing the colonists’ presence in a variety of settings.

Rather than isolating the New England puritan colonies as completely different from other ventures, this volume looks at all the English colonies in a more comparative way, particularly in chapters 4 and 5. This treatment compares the colonies in distinct periods or phases of development, so that both similarities and differences stand out.

The approach of looking at phases of development and encompassing regions within them continues in subsequent chapters as colonial enterprise extended into the South and the middle colonies. Comparison of Carolina and Pennsylvania is particularly interesting, as they shared ethnic diversity and radical Protestantism while introducing wholly different labor systems.

The comparative and thematic approach continues in chapters on the Great Awakening, the development of the Atlantic economy, the struggle for empire, and the colonies at mid-century. The responses of enslaved Africans and American Indians figure in these chapters as well.

The new edition also includes the voices and activities of women to a greater degree than earlier editions. In this, it reflects recent research and emphases within colonial history, demonstrating the crucial roles that women played as home managers, entrepreneurs, and cultural go-betweens. Other voices that had been silenced or ignored in older scholarship, such as those of African Americans and Indians, play a larger role in this edition. This volume allows teachers to introduce students to interconnections as well as contrasts, and to present a wide range of authentic actors in colonial America.