Colonial America

This volume of essays is designed as supplementary reading for the colonial history survey course, although I hope instructors may find it useful in social history courses and graduate proseminars in colonial history. The essays are distributed over the full time period covered in the colonial course, but no essays on the Revolutionary era are included, since the Revolution is generally given a semester to itself and requires a more intensive selection than could be included in this volume. The essays are mostly concerned with colonial socio-political development. The essays are, in addition, mostly by younger scholars. The book is intended to do no more than to make a series of provocative and enlightening essays accessible to undergraduates and to provide a selection of readings out of which the instructor can choose those that suit his own lectures and reading list. The field of early American history remains one of the most active and rapidly changing sub- specialties in the discipline. Those changes are reflected in the selections for this edition. - Preface.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.