Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History captures it all: the people, institutions, ideas, events, and the creation of the first three hundred years of American history.

No era in American history has been more fascinating to Americans, or more critical to the ultimate destiny of the United States, than the colonial era. Between the time that the first European settlers established a colony at Jamestown in 1607 through the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the outlines of America's distinctive political culture, economic system, social life, and cultural patterns had begun to emerge. Designed to complement the high school American history curriculum as well as undergraduate survey courses, "Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History" captures it all: the people, institutions, ideas, and events of the first three hundred years of American history. While it focuses on the thirteen British colonies stretching along the Atlantic, Colonial America sets this history in its larger contexts. Entries also cover Canada, the American Southwest and Mexico, and the Caribbean and Atlantic world directly impacting the history of the thirteen colonies. This encyclopedia explores the complete early history of what would become the United States, including portraits of Native American life in the immediate pre-contact period, early Spanish exploration, and the first settlements by Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish, and English colonists. This monumental five-volume set brings America's colonial heritage vibrantly to life for today's readers. It includes: thematic essays on major issues and topics; detailed A-Z entries on hundreds of people, institutions, events, and ideas; thematic and regional chronologies; hundreds of illustrations; primary documents; and a glossary and multiple indexes.

The colonial era is especially appealing in regard to economic history because it represents a study in contrasts. The economy was exceptionally dynamic in terms of population growth and geographical expansion. No major famines, epidemics, or extended wars intervened to reverse, or even slow down appreciably, the tide of vigorous economic growth. Despite this broad expansion, however, the fundamental patterns of economic behavior remained fairly constant. The members of the main occupational groups - farmers, planters, merchants, artisans, indentured servants, and slaves - performed similar functions throughout the period. In comparison with the vast number of institutional innovations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, structural change in the colonial economy evolved gradually. With the exception of the adoption of the pernicious system of black slavery, few new economic institutions and no revolutionary new technologies emerged to disrupt the stability of this remarkably affluent commercial-agricultural society. Living standards rose slowly but fairly steadily at a rate of 3 to 5 percent a decade after 1650. (Monetary sums are converted into 1980 dollars so that the figures will be relevant to modern readers.) For the most part, this book describes the economic life styles of free white society. The term "colonists" is virtually synonymous here with inhabitants of European origin. Thus, statements about very high living standards and the benefits of land ownership pertain only to whites. One chapter does focus exclusively, however, on indentured servants and slaves. This book represents the author's best judgment about the most important features of the colonial economy and their relationship to the general society and to the movement for independence. It should be a good starting point for all - undergraduate to scholar - interested in learning more about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This popular study, lauded by professors and scholars alike, has been diligently revised to reflect the tremendous amount of new research conducted during the last decade, and now includes a totally new chapter on women in the economy. Presenting a great deal of up-to-date information in a concise and lively style, the book surveys the main aspects of the colonial economy: population and economic expansion; the six main occupational groups (family farmers, indentured servants, slaves, artisans, great planters, and merchants); women in the economy; domestic and imperial taxes; the colonial monetary system; living standards for the typical family

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, more than a thousand pirates poured from the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean. There, according to Kevin P. McDonald, they helped launch an informal trade network that spanned the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, connecting the North American colonies with the rich markets of the East Indies. Rather than conducting their commerce through chartered companies based in London or Lisbon, colonial merchants in New York entered into an alliance with Euro-American pirates based in Madagascar. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves explores the resulting global trade network located on the peripheries of world empires and shows the illicit ways American colonists met the consumer demand for slaves and East India goods. The book reveals that pirates played a significant yet misunderstood role in this period and that seafaring slaves were both commodities and essential components in the Indo-Atlantic maritime networks. Enlivened by stories of Indo-Atlantic sailors and cargoes that included textiles, spices, jewels and precious metals, chinaware, alcohol, and drugs, this book links previously isolated themes of piracy, colonialism, slavery, transoceanic networks, and cross-cultural interactions and extends the boundaries of traditional Atlantic, national, world, and colonial histories.

As a firebrand attorney and political agitator, James Otis Jr. helped to shape colonial resistance in the decades leading up to the American Revolution, establishing individual rights and "no taxation without representation" as cornerstones of the patriot cause. After his violent coffeehouse altercation and bouts with mental illness, his younger sister, Mercy Otis Warren, took up his cause. Her incendiary plays and poems rallied colonial opinion in the lead-up to the war, and her chronicle of the period established her as America's first female historian. Minds and Hearts is the dual biography of these remarkable siblings, placing James and Mercy in the spotlight together for the first time, amid the rush of events, competing ideologies, and changing social conditions of eighteenth-century America. Jeffrey H. Hacker crafts a compelling narrative that focuses on the Otises' unique and dramatic relationship and traces their impact on the Revolutionary movement in Massachusetts. If the real American Revolution took place "in the minds and hearts of the people," as John Adams claimed, then the Otises were among the nation's true patriots.

The discovery of America and its further development into a modern state and a nation are the clear instance of how ideology and rhetoric are entwined and how they can encompass widely disparate viewpoints. The essays collected in this book address the topical issues of modern American Studies: cultural difference and otherness; gender, race and ethnicity; class and power. They represent new texts and contexts, approached through the revision, reevaluation, and reconfiguration of cannons, thus accommodating the expectations of the heterodox audience. Femininity reconsidered; an ideology of passing away in contemporary world of technical development; race captured within the framework of identity and gender; the rhetoric of blackness approached through racial exploitation; American conquest ideology revealed in a mission of Manifest Destiny; the 20th century assimilation rhetoric in the relations between Native Americans and the US federal government; the conservative ideology and apologetic rhetoric of the Antebellum South; the critique of the 21st century American legal system; the evolution of the presidential rhetoric which today addresses a large heterogeneous audience – all these topics impose a transnational interpretation of American culture which developed as a result of the cross-cultural transformation of European culture/cultures, moulded on American soil to finally become a unique reformulation of the very idea of America itself.