Before the Revolution : America's ancient pasts / Daniel K. Richter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Richter, Daniel K.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States--Civilization.

United States.

United States--Civilization--Indian influences.

United States--Civilization--European influences.

United States--Civilization--African influences.

America--History--To 1810.

America.

United States--History--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (560 p.)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation’s pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparent—that far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts that stretch back as far as the Middle Ages, pasts whose legacies continue to shape the present.Exploring a vast range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans more than seven centuries and ranges across North America, Europe, and Africa. Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoples—Indians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, English—as they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico.By seeing these trajectories on their own dynamic terms, rather than merely as a prelude to independence, Richter’s epic vision reveals the deepest origins of American history.

Contents:

Prologue : layered pasts

Progenitors

Legacies of power from medieval North America

Legacies of conquest from medieval Europe

Conquistadores

Crusades of the Christ-bearers to the Americas

Crusades of the protestants to new worlds

Traders

Native Americans and the power of trade

Epidemics, war, and the remapping of a continent

Planters

Searching for order in new and old England

Planting patriarchy in New England and Virginia

Dutch, French, Spanish, and English counterpoints

Imperialists

Monarchical power reborn

Planters besieged

Revolution, war, and a new transatlantic order

Atlanteans

Producing and consuming in an Atlantic empire

People in motion, enslaved and free

Contending for a continent

Gloomy and dark days

Epilogue : present pasts.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674061248

0674061241

OCLC:

923119852