To celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, the University of Virginia Press reissues its first-ever publication. The volume’s two accounts of the 1609 wreck of a Jamestown-bound ship offer a gripping sea adventure from the earliest days of American colonization, but the dramatic events’ even greater claim to fame is for serving as the inspiration for William Shakespeare’s last major work, The Tempest.William Strachey was one of six hundred passengers sailing to Jamestown as pa...

This is the story of a city that shouldn’t exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America’s most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, battered by hurricanes. But through the intense imperial rivalries of Spain, France, and England, and the ambitious, entrepreneurial merchants and settlers from four continents who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, this unpromising site became a crossroads for the whole Atlantic...

This is the story of how the American colonies went from dependence to independence. It details the taxes, tea parties and events that lead to the revolution as well as the ties the colonies had to Britain. The book explains how many Americans came to see themselves as an independent people with a unique character. In addition, the British and Loyalist viewpoint is highlighted as well. The roles of George Washington, Ben Franklin, Sam Adams, and Paul Revere are all discussed as well as tha...

In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote, “What then, is the American, this new man? He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced.” In casting aside their European mores, these pioneers, de Crèvecoeur implied, were the very embodiment of a new culture, society, economy, and political system. But to what extent did manliness shape early America’s character and institutions? And what role...

This Violent Empire traces the origins of American violence, racism, and paranoia to the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans' national sense of self.Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series o...

Three generations of English merchant adventurers-not the Pilgrims, as we have so long believed-were the earliest founders of America. Profit-not piety-was their primary motive.Some seventy years before the Mayflower sailed, a small group of English merchants formed "The Mysterie, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown," the world's first joint-stock company. Back then, in the mid-sixteenth centu...

This book brings together a variety of primary sources that inform the reader about the colony's earliest European inhabitants and the sparsely populated and fragile communities in which they lived, resulting in the most comprehensive collection of annotated biographical sketches yet published. From the earliest records relating to Virginia, we learn the basics about many of these original colonists: their origins, the names of the ships they sailed on, the names of the "hundreds" and "planta...

All Americans are familiar with the story of the Pilgrims—persecuted for their religion in the Old World, they crossed the ocean to settle in a wild and dangerous land. But for most of us, the story ends after their brutal first winter at Plymouth with a supposedly peaceful encounter with the Native Americans and a happy Thanksgiving.Now, through the vivid memoirs, letters, and personal accounts in The Pilgrim Chronicles, you will discover the full, compelling story of the...

The story of a unique friendship in colonial America between a Founding Father and a founder of the evangelical movement.In the 1740s, two very different developments revolutionized Anglo-American life and thought—the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening. This book takes an encounter between the paragons of each movement—the printer and entrepreneur Benjamin Franklin and the British-born revivalist George Whitefield—as an opportunity to explore the meaning of the ...

Drawing on letters, illustrations, engravings, and neglected manuscripts, Christopher Iannini connects two dramatic transformations in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world — the emergence and growth of the Caribbean plantation system and the rise of natural science. Iannini argues that these transformations were not only deeply interconnected, but that together they established conditions fundamental to the development of a distinctive literary culture in the early Americas. In fact, eigh...

Unfortunately, one of the best known aspects of Alexander Hamilton’s (1755-1804) life is the manner in which he died, being shot and killed in a famous duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. But Hamilton became one of the most instrumental Founding Fathers of the United States in that time, not only in helping draft and gain support for the U.S. Constitution but in also leading the Federalist party and building the institutions of the young federal government as Washington’s Secretary of Tr...

In 1678, the Puritan minister Samuel Nowell preached a sermon he called "Abraham in Arms," in which he urged his listeners to remember that "Hence it is no wayes unbecoming a Christian to learn to be a Souldier." The title of Nowell's sermon was well chosen. Abraham of the Old Testament resonated deeply with New England men, as he embodied the ideal of the householder-patriarch, at once obedient to God and the unquestioned leader of his family and his people in war and peace. Yet enemies c...