Customer Reviews

American Colonies: The Settling of North America (The Penguin History of the United States, Volume1) (Hist of the USA)

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I first noticed the Native American void in history books just a few years ago. I was trying to find which tribes lived near Frederick Co. Maryland, and the information simply wasn't there. I am a hired researcher, so when I say the information wasn't there, I mean that it would take the average person about a year to track down anything at all on the topic. There is a real void in the history of the Americas and there are very few books that treat pre-colonial, non-European American history with any sense of depth or fairness.

This book truly gives you a full-scale idea of what shaped the Americas into what they are today. Finally you can read about what was happening with the native population during the time of contact and conquest. Finally you can get an idea about the environmental and economical impacts of colonialization, both in the Americas and in Europe.

This book is truly a history of "actions" and not "thoughts". Often what we learn in American schools today is what the Puritans were thinking about doing, or what our founding fathers wanted to create out of the Americas. Instead, we learn about the actions they actually took. Which colonies took up the practice of slavery, and why? How succesful where the Puritans in being pure? What was Colombus really thinking?

While the book feels slanted to the leftist mentality, I think you'll find the author treats all groups fairly, focused on their actions and not their intentions. The few books I've read that tried to cover a more holistic history of the Americas usually go too far in the opposite direction, painting all colonists as depraved ravagers, and all natives as white-washed saints. Instead, this book portrays both peoples in their full depth, portraying a complicated, terrible and all too human history.

While I mostly address the native vs. European issue in this review, there is much more going on here. Impacts of trade, morality, religion, government all play out. This is the book we all should have read in our Intro to American History class.

To finish up, this is one of those rare books that I think everyone should read. We will never understand how we can do better unless we learn what we have done wrong. I was truly floored at how much new information was here. Why is it so difficult to find books that cover the full scope of U.S. history? How can we understand what's going on in our country, if we don't understand how it even came to exist?

This book is easy to read, well-written, and amazingly well-researched. If you want a real idea about what shaped the Americas into what they are today, this is what you should be reading. (10 out of 10)

In "American Colonies," historian Alan Taylor has created an easily accessible yet highly informative overview of the crucial first era of the history of North America. Taylor does an admirable job of elaborating on the simple framework of names and dates that bore so many contemporary students; he discusses geography, agriculture, trade, as well as the cultures and religions of the myriad groups (both native and European) that created colonial America.

Rather than attempting to cover the entire continent in a continuous chronology, Taylor breaks the book into 19 chapters, each describing one geographic area during a given time period (e.g. "Virginia 1570-1650," "New England 1600-1700"). I found this organizational choice to be very effective; it makes the scope of the topic manageable and also allows one to easily research a specific area. The chapter setup is all the better due to the content choices Taylor has made. Rather than focus solely on the 13 British colonies, the book also spends time on the Spanish and French settlements. I fear that many people think Columbus discovered North America in 1492 and then nothing happened until the Pilgrims landed in 1620. Taylor corrects that misperception by including two chapters on the Spanish settlements in Mexico, New Mexico, and Florida before even touching on the British colonies. There are also two chapters on New France and Canada that give greater meaning to the Seven Years War. I was most pleased, however, with the chapter discussing the British West Indies, a geographic area completely ignored by many US History courses. Yet as Taylor explains, the West Indies at that time were FAR more valuable to the Crown than the mainland colonies! These chapters are a much needed corrective, but they are not given disproportionate coverage: a large majority of the book focuses on what was to become the continental United States.

The story of the early United States is largely a story of European-Indian interactions, another topic Taylor handles well. Rather than taking Native Americans for granted, he spends the first chapter explaining their origins, the migrations across the Bering Strait, and their lives before European contact. But the eventual clash of cultures is the dominant story and Taylor states the case bluntly: beginning with the Taino on Hispaniola (p. 38-39), Europeans conquered, murdered, and enslaved native peoples on an unthinkable scale. But Taylor lets the evidence speak for itself and does not lecture the reader or take the opportunity to moralize. Furthermore, he dispels several myths about Indians that seem to be creeping into popular belief. Indians were not inherently peaceful peoples: the Five Nation Iroquois had gruesome rituals of torture ("The seventeenth century was a merciless time for the defeated on either side of the Atlantic" [p. 103]) and raided the Huron to near extinction. Nor were they pre-modern environmentalists: "Natives usually showed restraint, not because they were ecologically minded in the twentieth century sense, but because spirits, who could harm people, lurked in the animals and plants" (p. 19). All in all, I thought the book presented a very balanced and detailed account of the Native Americans.

Although I read this book on my own time, I could not help but appreciate what a great book it would be for students, either high school or college. (It is the first volume of The Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner.) First, Taylor does not assume a great deal of prior knowledge and goes out of his way to clearly explain concepts that other books might not. For example, Taylor explains the English Parliament in a way that would be very helpful to those not familiar with British history while not boring those of us who know more (p. 120). The Glorious Revolution (p. 278) and the advent of Quakers (p. 264) are both handled in a similarly informative way. The book also includes the relevant maps for each chapter, a great boon to students familiarizing themselves with geography. Finally, the book is based almost exclusively on secondary sources. This point concerned me at first, but I came to love the fact that for any topic I could look in the extensive bibliography and find an entire book on that particular subject.

Given this praise, why only four stars? Basically, I'm stingy with the five star reviews. While I found this book extremely informative and easy to read, it was never thrilling. This lack of excitement is no fault of the author, the topic is just too broad to be gripping: colonial America covers too much time, too much space, and too many figures (none of whom can be adequately fleshed out in such a broad survey). Ultimately I found "American Colonies" to be a consistently good book (perhaps the best on the subject as a whole) but not an excellent book. I do, however, very much look forward to reading Professor Taylor's other book, "William Cooper's Town," for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

...something much broader, deeper, richer, and ultimately much more satisfying. Histories of colonial North America usually have as their starting points the arrival of the British and end with the American Revolution. Not so here. Taylor's scope is broad enough to include the history of early Native Americans, not just at the time of discovery, but hundreds of years earlier. Even more interestingly this view is not limited to the Native Americans in what would eventually become the US, but looks at those living throughout North America, Central America, and the Caribbean.

The richness of this history comes by way of the various cultures that are included. From the perspective of the East coast of the continent, the story of colonialism involves the British and the Native Americans. When the view extends North to Canada then we include the French. What Taylor does is show the perspective from all angles, and this means that Spanish and Dutch influences were also important, the former especially so in the West.

Chapters on the history of different regions rather than single countries or islands highlights the fact that there were diverse influences which oftentimes overlapped and interacted. There are chapters on the Carolinas, the West Indies, New England, the Pacific Coast and Chesapeake region. Certainly not left out of this analysis is the huge role Africa and its sons and daughters played in the settlement of our continent.

This is the first Volume in the Penguin History of the United States. It seems ironic then that the books main argument is that the colonization, settlement and growth of the AMERICAN COLONIES was a process in which the eventual emergence of the US was only a very dim vision on the far horizon. The book is well written, thoroughly researched and deeply insightful. Although it is colonial history, its tale as told here has as much resonance and meaning for us today as it must have had in living it.

This is one of the few books I thought worthy of packing to Afghanistan for reading during my deployment.

"American Colonies" strikes me as a balanced and well-researched overview of the colonial experience, whether English, French or Spanish. Alan Taylor paints our colonial history warts and all, which might not appeal to some readers; however, he does not descend into hyperbole. His narrative spans virtually all of the colonial establishments of North America, including the West Indies and the Russian efforts in the Pacific Northwest.

I maintain that the work is balanced because the author supports his contentions with a bibliography full of original sources, and he treats the indigenous peoples with the same unblushing honesty that he does the Europeans (if not at such length; the European colonies are the focus, after all). Mr. Taylor addresses the drastic over-harvesting of beaver by the Montagnais, the Five Nations' virtual obliteration of the Hurons and other neighboring groups, the slave-raiding the Chickasaw practiced against the Choctaw, and the profit-motivated slave-taking which the 'Creek', Yamasee, Cherokee, 'Westo', Savannah and Catawba cheerfully inflicted upon the Guale, Timucua, Apalachee, Tuscarora and others.

All nations, all peoples have elements in their history which are not particularly flattering. Wise people admit and recognize those incidents, consider and judge them in the light of contemporary attitudes and historical imperatives, and draw appropriate conclusions. With "American Colonies", Alan Taylor has made it possible for us to do those things.

Highly recommended. Most people will learn a great deal from this book. If his more unpleasant revelations prompt one to further research, so much the better.

Taylor provides an extensive - 526 pages including bibliography and index - overview of European colonial initiatives in the Atlantic, North America and parts of the Caribbean from the early 1400s - when Portuguese and Spanish proto-colonists got their feet wet, so to speak, by colonizing the Azores, Canaries and Medeiras - through Spanish and Russian efforts on the West Coast in the early 1800s. Substantial space is given to colonial efforts of the French, Dutch, and Spanish as well as English settlement in the eastern Caribbean and the east coast of what eventually became the United States.

A tragic theme throughout the book is the encounter between Europeans and Native Americans that decimated the latter, primarily through inadvertent introduction of diseases but also through warfare, slavery, appropriation of their land and destruction of the environment on which the Indians relied. Taylor also describes how the Indians repeatedly collaborated with or benefited from European traders and colonists when they perceived - often erroneously - that the Europeans' actions benefited their own economic and strategic interests. And, yes, the Indians traded in slaves - either other Indians or Africans - as well. The role and some of the impact of enslaved Africans on Colonial development is also described throughout the book.

Regarding the English colonies that became the original thirteen United States it's helpful for Taylor to remind that most of the colonies had unique beginnings that influenced their cultures and economies and politics for many years after the American revolution. For example, South Carolina essentially began as a colony of the fabulously wealthy colony of Barbados, and initiated use of enslaved Africans on a scale that dwarfed the Chesapeake tobacco plantations. And Pennsylvania started relatively late but grew quickly and prosperously as the initial English Quakers were quickly outnumbered by industrious German family farmers as opposed to indentures servants or slaves.

I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Euro-American settlement, the formative history of the United States and the interaction of Europeans with Native Americans.

I expected something different from the title, "American Colonies" and from a quick scan of the table of contents. From this, I anticipated the standard, stock account of the settlement of North America. In buying this book, I hoped to find a history written with deep political, economic, and military insights, as one might find in other histories dealing with this time. Having finished the book, I am pleasently surprised that it did not meet my expectations.

"American Colonies" is written more from an anthropological standpoint than from a more traditonal perspective. The result is that "American Colonies" provides a general account of the American colonial ordeal that makes it a good balance to other histories and other viewpoints. It is a useful and versatile book and a good addition to one's bookshelf.

Although his historic and geographic scope is broad - he covers just about every aspect of colonial history of North America (he really glosses over the Vikings), the scale of the research and point of view is limited. Through the bibliography, it appears that Taylor focuses on recent scholarship for his book, citing works predominantly written in the past thirty years. This is not to say of course that "American Colonies" suffers from this narrow approach; it doesn't, of course, but it does explain the somewhat narrow focus at times in the author's ability to address other topics in depth.

Therefore, I wouldn't make this book your seminal work if you had to name a single book to read on the subject. It is most effective if it is taken into account with other works on the period, the book's mostly enthnocentric, cultural/societal, antrhopological perspectives provide a nice complement to other histories, giving a more complete treatment of a complex era - the tail end of the age of exploration and beginning of the the colonial period - in world history.

With comments about the limited depth of the book's focus already stated, "American Colonies" does provide a good overview and breakdown of the historical elements and issues that, in part, shaped the future of the continent. What is particularly nice about Taylor's book is that he takes seemingly disparite events in North American history - the conquest of New Mexico, the settlement of the eastern seaboard, and the travails of the French along the St. Lawrence, for example - and puts them in one book. The chapters, as others have mentioned in their reviews, are relatively short and the writing style is definitely readable.

Despite its utility and versatile, "American Colonies" is not without flaws. Although the author is an acknowledged and lauded expert on the period, the bibliography is weak and not authoritative, thereby limiting its value. The maps are a little wanting; they have little detail and are of little help.

More than any other history book I have read this book confirms Edward Gibbon's dictum that history is "little more than the register of crimes, follies, ad misfortunes of mankind. It is a history of the Americas starting with pre-Columbian times and continuing until about the time of the American Revolution. While I am hardly an expert, the author is very familiar with the literature on his topic. His opinions seem well reasoned to me and are consistent with what I do know independent of this book.

The overwhelming impression of this book is just how nasty brutish and short life was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in both Europe and the Americans. How badly the Native Americans were treated is common knowledge. But the desperation behind the greed and cruelty of the Europeans is less well known. Most of the people who came to the "new world" were driven by poverty to risk all with the odds against them. It is hard to believe that anything as wonderful as the United States could have had such terrible beginnings.

The worst thing the Europeans did was done accidentally. Europeans brought diseases with them and infected the Native Americans. The author cites new research and studies by anthropologists that suggest that in the century after Columbus the native population of about 50 million shrank by 90%. This is more than anything else what made the cruel conquest possible. And the author says that the English learned how to treat the Indians by their conquest of Ireland. Until the Nazis unleashed the holocaust, history may have known horrors equal to the conquest of Ireland, but nothing worse.

The Europeans were little better to each other. In an early settlement on the Chesapeake one man who stole some oats had a rod thrust through his tongue and then he was chained to a tree to die from starvation. This shows how close to the edge of starvation the colony must have been to resort to such drastic actions.

Most people who emigrated from England were bound to four years service before they got their freedom. Not many lived long enough to gain it. Fewer still became rich. But there were more impoverished laborers in England to replace them. And there were the horrors of slavery-mostly black African, since Indians died too quickly.

The only decent story is that of William Penn and the Quakers. Under his guidance they dealt fairly with the Indians near them and paid a fair price for their land, of which they had plenty to sell due to smallpox. In Barbados one Quaker was killed and the rest expelled for having the temerity to teach black African slaves the Christian gospel-and this at a time when almost everyone believed Christian faith was the only escape from eternal damnation. But the plantation owners did not want to have to deal with Christian slaves-they might feel they had to treat them better. French Jesuits and Spanish Franciscans also tried to convert the Indians, but with little success.

If you want to know the early history of the Americas this book is the place to start. But the story has few bright parts. It is story of greed and death. Try to have compassion for the invaders. Their plight was little better than that of the conquered.

On first glance it might appear odd that Alan Taylor should be one of our leading historians of the revolutionary era. Taylor's two previous works were about the Maine frontier and the life of James Fenimore Cooper's father. What, ask the skeptical, of interest has ever happened in Maine? And Cooper is easily the writer that even conservatives would most like to chuck out of the canon and replace with the Simpsons. But the readers of those two books were richly rewarded as Taylor produced complex, well documented narratives about the ironies and limitations of early American democracy. Taylor's new book deals with the colonial era, the first volume of a the Penguin history of the United States, edited by Eric Foner. In one respect Taylor's work is superior to any previous volume. His work does not deal solely with the 13 American colonies. Instead it deals with all the colonial powers and the aboriginal societies on what is now the current day United States. As well as the English and the Spanish, we also get the Dutch, the French and the Russians. Taylor covers Florida to New Mexico, and California to Oregon. Taylor discusses both Hawaii and Alaska, and because both had a major effect on the thirteen colonies, Quebec and the West Indies. Only Puerto Rico is excluded from Taylor's wide canvas. One can only wonder whether future volumes will go into as much detail about the aboriginal population, the consequences of the Mexican war of independence, and the squalid farce of the "Hawaiian Republic."

Early on Taylor reminds us of the essential truth of the colonial era. Colonial America was not a virgin land, but a widowed land, not a land of freedom, but one of chains. Until 1776 two-thirds of the people who came to this hemisphere did so in chains. (After 1776 the ratio sharply changed to the benefit of freedom.) Untold tens of millions of the aboriginal inhabitants died after 1492, mostly from disease, but also from the vicious behavior from European colonists. Taylor is very good here, as he points out that this European cruelty was in the beginning at least, not so much "racist" as "Christian," in origin. At the same time we can see its precedents in the Spanish conquest of the Azores and Canary Islands, the English conquest of Ireland, and Russian atrocities against Native Siberians. Taylor is very good on Indian (his term) society, and how they ranged from nomadic hunter gatherers to complex urban empires. He is also excellent on ecology, whether it is Indian land practises or why the population of the Western hemisphere was vulnerable to epidemic diseases. He notes that it is anachronistic to view them as environmentalists. But he also notes that whether in New England or California their activities produced complex and fertile ecosystems where the Europeans just saw anarchic wilderness, and which they promptly changed for the worse. At the same time he points out how many "tribes" encountered in later centuries where the combined remnants of many tribes shattered by plague and genocide, how Indians could use European markets and firearms to their own advantage while ultimately becoming dependant on them, and how horses increased the power of some tribes, while increasing tribal inequality and damaging their environment.

There is another irony to the American success story, which Taylor also brings out. The rise of the yeoman republic, the key to early American democracy, was a historical accident. Most male immigrants from England were not very religious and most of them went to Virginia and the West Indies. Most British attention was concentrated on the cash crop colonies. But the small minority who went to relatively poor New England were able to earlier achieve a proper gender balance and then quickly start reproducing at a level unprecedented in Europe. The same thing happened in quasi-feudal Quebec, but at a lower level and ultimately too late to defeat British power. Another irony is that one reason why so many English and Scots went to find prosperity in America was because British capitalism was much more successful in depriving farmers of their property than feudal France.

Taylor has provided a superb synthesis of the existing literature. Given the chronological and geographic scope of his subject, Taylor's work does not have the compelling thesis one finds in such histories as Gordon Craig on Germany, Christopher Hill on Britain or Denis Mack Smith on Italy. Indeed the last chapter, on the Pacific, is somewhat anti-climactic. Taylor is not the most compelling of writers, though there is some black humor when he quotes the rationalizations of Milford, Connecticut in its demands for more Indian land: "Voted that the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to the Saints; voted we are the Saints." And those who don't like Cotton Mather will be grimly unsuprised to learn that this callous Divine wrenched off the jawbone of Metacom (the King Philip of King Philip's war) when the latter's skull lay on display, and then went on to debate whether Metacom's 9 year old son should be executed. (They sold him into slavery instead.) Only six and a half pages are devoted to setting the stage for the American revolution, so we do not get as much on the roots of American democracy as one might like. And his discussion of the Great Awakening does not fully confront Jon Butler's coldly unsentimental critique of it. Taylor does make one factual error: Spinoza did not emigrate to the Netherlands as a response to its wonderful tolerance; he was born there and would in fact encounter the limits of Dutch liberty. But otherwise this is a wonderful textbook that sets the standard for contemporary scholarship.

Many reviewers have commented that Taylor's "American Colonies" gives indigenous peoples a larger role in North American history than most previous studies do. This perspective is relevant to the interpretation of the American Revolution.

Among the Revolution's motives were "liberty" (a better form of government than that provided by London) and "empire" (eliminating British barriers to the colonies' territorial expansion). Since the indigenous people were the ones most affected by the colonists' territorial expansion, giving them a larger role in the history, as Taylor does, makes the history read more in the "imperial" vein. See chapter 18, "Imperial Wars and Crisis: 1739-75."

In an important way, the "liberty" and "empire" motives both came down to land. The colonists knew that a key reason they were freer than the average Briton was that they could move into land acquired from the indigenous peoples. Jefferson summed up their objective as "an empire of liberty," which Taylor uses as chapter 18's final section heading.

The problem with this book is that it tries to be two books in one. Viewed by itself, it is a thoughtful, interesting and modern analysis of the settling of the entire continent of North America and the impact colonists had on native populations and the environment. But it is also the first volume of the new "Penguin History of the United States" series and is therefore ostensibly supposed to provide readers of that series the colonial history of the United States up to the American Revolution. Unfortunately, the goals of these two books are not really compatible; in trying to write both books, Taylor has failed to write either of them as well as he could have. He acknowledges the problem in his introduction, writing that his goal of providing a North American perspective "... is somewhat at odds with the mandate for this volume, as the first in a series meant to cover the history of the United States down to the present."

I think Taylor's conception of colonial history is refreshing, interesting, and informative. I also think he gives well-deserved attention to groups of people and topics that traditional books on the subject have ignored, especially Native Americans and African-Americans and the impact of human settlements on the environment. Taken by itself, I think his book is very good and deserves the positive comments and reviews it has gotten (both in the press and in Amazon reviews). In fact, if it was intended as a stand-alone book about the colonization process itself and its impact on the peoples and environments of North America, I would have given it 4 stars after subtracting 1 star for extraneous historical material (in chapters 13, 15, and 18) that really doesn't fit Taylor's colonization paradigm.

However, I feel it important to also evaluate "American Colonies" as the first volume of the new "Penguin History of the United States". Since Penguin's website indicates that the second volume will focus on the years 1763 to 1848, it is clear that readers will not be getting more details about colonial U.S. history prior to 1763. Viewed in this context, I feel that Taylor has left out too much detail from traditional U.S. colonial history in order to give space to the non-traditional topics he has covered. One obvious example is the fact that Taylor only gives the settlement of Plymouth by the Mayflower 1 paragraph. Additionally, Taylor says very little about the founding of the Connecticut and Rhode Island colonies. Another problem with the book when viewed as a first volume of a U.S. history series is that much of the material is just not that relevant. While Taylor's accounts of the colonizations of Mexico, the Southwest, Alaska, and Hawaii are interesting and do belong in a study of North American colonization, they don't really have much bearing on U.S. history. Taylor's attempt to write two books in one is what lead to these problems and my 3 star rating.

What I'm trying to say here is that a reader who wanted to learn U.S. History from the Penguin series without having to read other books would not get an adequate overview of the colonial history of the United States. While Taylor has written a good book, he has not fulfilled his obligations to readers of the Penguin series who will expect full coverage of all key events in U.S. history. In fairness to Penguin, I should point out that the new Oxford History of the United States does not cover colonial history at all and has other gaps such as the critical years between the ratification of the Constitution in 1789 and 1815.

Postscript: Oxford is adding a new volume by famous historian Gordon S. Wood that covers 1789 - 1815, filling in the gap I had mentioned. It will be available in October, 2009.