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American Beginnings: 1492-1690
Topic: ContactTopic: ExplorationTopic: SettlementTopic: PermanenceTopic: Power
Topic: Permanence
Toolbox Overview: American Beginnings: 1492-1690
Resource Menu: Permanence
Text 1. Prosperity
Text 2. Cities & Towns
Text 3. English Colonies I: New England Colonies
Text 4. English Colonies II: Middle Atlantic Colonies
Text 5. English Colonies III: Chesapeake/Southern Colonies
Text 6. Servitude (Chesapeake Colonies)

PERMANENCE

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Slideshow

Topic Framing Questions
  •  What factors contributed to the permanent presence of Europe in North America by the mid 1600s?
  •  How did Europeans adjust their cultures and institutions to create permanent societies in North America?
  •  What roles did commerce, religion, geographic setting, population diversity, and cultural perspectives play in developing a stable colony?
  •  What did "North America" signify to Europe in the mid 1600s?


1.  Prosperity» Reading Guide

- Spanish: Letters from New Spain (Mexico), 1558-1589
- English: Sugar works in Barbados, 1657
- English: Tobacco production in Maryland, 1666
- French: Fur trade in New France, 1685, 1697
- Maps:

Mexico City, 1550
Barbados, 1657
Maryland, 1664
New France, 1703


Most of the settlements that appear on a map of North America in 1650 exist today in some form, even if moved several miles up the river or renamed after merging with a larger settlement or rebuilt after total destruction in an Indian war. We call them permanent because they're still here. Simple enough, but determining why they're still here leads us to more elusive criteria. Prosperity. Numbers. Geography. Luck. Change of vision. The settlers' commitment or stubbornness, depending on one's view. And the goals of the colonizing nations, obviously. Spain maintained its American empire for "gold, God, and glory," the first dominating the crown's policies. From the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Central America were shipped enormous quantities of ore to Spain, and the thousands of Spanish settlers in the Americas worked in support of the crown's mining and conquest ventures. France had the fewest settlers in North America since its riches came from fish and furs, neither of which required large and permanent settlements.

The English, however, did not establish colonies on direct orders of the crown. Instead, with permission of the crown (charters), private groups of investors established their own settlements in pursuit of their own economic goals. Their first attempts were disastrous. Permanence would require, as historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman states, "a complete overturning of previous notions of what colonies were to be for. . . The keys lay in learning about the environment and what it would grow, and then finding a commodity for which an infinitely expanding market existed or could be created in Europe." By 1650, the English had made this transition. Here we look at four prosperous settlements in North America in the 1600s, colonies of Spain, England, and France.
  • NEW SPAIN (MEXICO). Decades before the founding of Jamestown, Mexico City was the thriving metropolitan center of New Spain. Settlers who been there long enough to create stable lives and successful trades wrote to their relatives in Spain encouraging them (pleading with them at times) to join them and share in the prosperity of New Spain. Here we read from the letters of a farmer, a cloth trader, a tanner, a dealer, a priest, a troubadour, and the wife of a textile mill owner, between the years 1558 and 1589.
    [Correspondence from settlers in Mexico City and Puebla to relatives in Spain, 1558-1589]

  • BARBADOS. Barbados, the easternmost Caribbean island, dominated the islands' sugar trade in the 1600s. For three of those years, from 1647 to 1650, Richard Ligon operated a sugar plantation in Barbados with several colleagues, a venture he details in A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes, written soon after his return to England. By "history" he means "natural history," as he describes the plants, animals, and other resources of the island. His main theme, however, is the wealth from sugar awaiting the willing hardworking "adventurer" (he could have titled the work A True & Exact Primer on the Cultivation of Sugar, or How to Become a Master Planter in One Year). Here we see the western hemisphere as a place where one can invest in existing infrastructure instead of building anew.
    [Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes, 1657]

  • MARYLAND. George Alsop was an indentured servant in Maryland for four years, from 1648 to 1652. After returning to England due to illness, he wrote a promotional piece, A Character of the Province of Mary-Land, to encourage others to emigrate to Maryland and share the prosperity enjoyed by the colony due primarily to one crop, tobacco. He presents a picture of a thriving peaceful colony and gives us a glimpse of the religious diversity already manifest in English America. Later the tobacco market would collapse in the southern colonies for a time, primarily due to overproduction, but at this point Alsop could herald tobacco as "the current Coin of Mary-Land."
    [George Alsop, A Character of the Province of Mary-Land, 1666]

  • NEW FRANCE. Although the French had participated for centuries in the cod fisheries off Newfoundland, they did not pursue a colonial presence in North America until beckoned by the promised wealth of furs. Imagine a map of New France in 1650. A few dots along the St. Lawrence River would indicate a few small towns and several dozen Catholic missions. But the business "hub" of New France was made up of the countless trading posts where French traders exchanged European goods for furs provided by the Indians, especially beaver pelts. Here we read of the centrality of the fur trade for New France in two accounts from the late 1600s, the first by the colonial official Louis Armand, Baron de Lahontan, who travelled extensively throughout the interior, and the second by priest and explorer Louis Hennepin (who notes the superior track record of the English and Dutch in creating colonies in this "very large country" of America).
    [Louis Hennepin, A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America, 1697, and Baron de Lahontan, New Voyages to North-America, 1703]
You will discover similar themes in these selections; at times they will seem to mirror each other. Note that the maps of Barbados, Maryland, and New France were created for the publications excerpted here. With their imagery and wording, they illustrate the prosperity of each settlement and the promotional message of their creators. (16 pages, excluding the maps.)



2.  Cities & Towns» Reading Guide

- Spanish: Tour of Mexico City, 1554
- French: Visits to Quebec, 1676, 1684
- English: The growth of Philadelphia, 1685
- English: The need for towns in Virginia, 1661

Santo Domingo, Mexico City, Santa Fé, Quebec, Boston, New Amsterdam, Philadelphia, St. Mary's City, Charles Town—all colonial capitals, representing the wide variety of colonial urbanization. To what extent do they signify a colony's success or permanence? Are seaport towns more significant than interior communities? Does the lack of cities or towns reflect a deficiency in a colony? The answers are, annoyingly, dependent on the colony you're talking about. But one factor appears in the cities that came to herald a colony's permanence: a sense of possession and continuity in the residents, and a sense of awe in its visitors.
  • MEXICO CITY. Built on the site of the destroyed Aztec city of Tenochtitlan as the capital of New Spain, Mexico City grew in a few decades into a metropolitan center of trade, religion, and government, the largest city in North America with thousands of residents. In this dialogue, written in Latin by a Spanish scholar in Mexico City for teaching language, a visitor is taken on a tour of Mexico City in the mid 1550s "that he may view the magnitude of so great a city" with its boulevards, grand plaza, churches, canals, homes of the elite, hospitals and orphanages, and its diverse ethnic population.
    [Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, Civitas Mexicus, 1554]

  • QUEBEC. In contrast to Mexico City, Quebec remained a small town on the St. Lawrence River for decades after it was founded in 1608. In 1663, it had less than 1000 settlers. Still, it was ideally situated for trade, defense, and colonial administration, and it came to symbolize New France with its national palace, six churches, a seminary, and a dependable harbor. In these two letters from French visitors to Quebec, we read their descriptions of the colonial capital as "but a very pretty village" in 1676 and "the Metropolitan of New-France" in 1684.
    [Letter from Jean Enjalran, S.J., 1676, in Relation of New France, 1676-1677 (Jesuit Relations); Letter from Louis Armand, Baron de Lahontan, 1684, in Lahontan, New Voyages to North-America, 1703]

  • PHILADELPHIA. William Penn and Philadelphia are part of elementary-schoolbook America, but William Penn himself spent only four years in America. One of his friends and colleagues in planning the Pennsylvania colony was Robert Turner, who lived in the colony from his arrival in 1683 until his death in 1700. He held numerous official positions during these years and also built the first brick house in Philadelphia, a sign of permanence you will note in other accounts in this section. In this letter to Penn in 1685, Turner describes the progress of house-building and industry in Philadelphia, assuring him that "it goeth on in Planting and Building to admiration."
    [Letter of Robert Turner, 1685, in William Penn, A Further Account of the Province of Pennsylvania, 1685]

  • VIRGINIA. What if there were no significant towns in a colony? The settlers of Virginia in the mid 1660s were widely dispersed in plantations with no towns of any size to serve as centers of community, government, and religion. This latter function, of religious community, so concerned the Anglican Bishop of London that he commissioned an investigation into the failure of Virginia's planters to build an adequate number of churches. The main recommendation of the report: build towns. "It is easy to conclude," stresses the report's author, "that the only way of remedy for Virginia's disease . . . must be by procuring towns to be built."
    ["R.G.," Virginia's Cure: An Advisive Narrative Concerning Virginia, for the Bishop of London, 1662]
Comparing these colonial capitals with the early settlements will amplify your discoveries. Consider Isabella, Fort Caroline, St. Augustine, Jamestown, Santa Fé, Dorchester, and Three Saints Bay. (14 pages.)



3.  English Colonies I: New England» Reading Guide

- Massachusetts: Settlers' wills from Plymouth colony, 1621-1694
- Massachusetts: Three months as an Indian captive, 1675
- Massachusetts: Cotton Mather on New England's history, 1702
- Connecticut: A farmer's year, 1668-1669
- Portraits:

John Freake & Sarah Freake, ca. 1671-1673
Thomas Smith & Maria Catherina Smith, ca. 1680-1694

- Buildings:

Fairbanks House, 1637-1638, Massachusetts
Stanley Whitman House, ca. 1660, Connecticut
Old Ship Church (Meetinghouse), 1681, Massachusetts
Parson Capen House, 1683, Massachusetts


How did England come to populate North America in far greater numbers than its sixteenth-century rivals, Spain and France? How did it come to dominate the continent north of the 30th latitude? "The English succeeded as colonies," explains historian Alan Taylor, "because their society was less successful at keeping people content at home." The poor of Spain and France were not as inclined or encouraged to emigrate, while England offered incentives to its poor, discontented, and dissenters to populate their Atlantic colonies. Successful North American colonies required, as historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman summarizes, "a permanent commitment on the part of individual settlers to the land and the expectation of trade in colonist-produced commodities. It also required replication of something approaching normal European societies. Women were essential. . . . Once these principles were established, the settlers would spread over the land with a rapidity no one anticipated." By 1660 there were 58,000 English settlers in the Atlantic colonies in contrast to 5,000 in New Netherland and 3,000 in New France. (The Spanish population in the hemisphere, primarily in Central and South America, numbered in the hundreds of thousands.)

In the next three groups, we will focus on the English Atlantic colonies, keeping the standard regional division of New England, Middle, and Chesapeake/Southern colonies. For each region, we will pull from a variety of sources—diaries, letters, wills, pamphlets, sermons, poems, memoirs, court records, and official reports—to convey the relative permanence of the colony or of the writer's perception of its permanence. In these seemingly disparate readings, focus on the perspective, tone, and assumptions of the writers. Do they feel they are living in a colony that will endure or one that will fail? Do they feel that they will endure or fail as individuals? For these New England colonists, in addition, religious faith is central to their experience. What role does faith play in these settlers' endurance and sense of permanence?
  • PLYMOUTH COLONY WILLS. From the twenty wills between 1621 and 1694 presented in this collection from the Plymouth Colony Archive Project, select two or three wills to print out and study. Consider including the wills of a woman, and a famous Puritan, and one from the late 1600s.

  • CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE. The widow of a Puritan minister in Massachusetts, Mary Rowlandson and two of her children spent three months as captives of the Narragansett Indians during Metacom's (King Philip's War) in 1676. She was released for a ransom of 20£, paid by her husband. In this selection, she recounts her weariness, hunger, and resourcefulness as she lives with the Indians, often commenting on the behavior of the "praying Indians" who had become Christians and those who had not converted.
    [Mary Rowlandson, A True History of the Captivity & Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, 1682]

  • COTTON MATHER ON NEW ENGLAND'S HISTORY. The English may have come to dominate North America because they were unable to keep people at home, but something else was at work, too. Early on they resolved that, despite Columbus's discoveries in the name of Spain, North America unquestionably belonged to them. In 1702, Cotton Mather, in his ecclesiastical history of New England, could survey Europe's New World exploration and conclude that the English claim trumped all others. His work focuses on a brief period, the years from 1620 to 1698. That he believed such a short span warranted a record for posterity suggests a confidence and sense of accomplishment that bespeak permanence and continuity.
    [Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England, 1702, Vol. I, Bk. I, Ch. 1: "Venisti Tandem? or, Discoveries of America, tending to, and ending in, Discoveries of New-England"]

  • A FARMER'S YEAR. Thomas Minor was born in England, was baptized as an Anglican, and immigrated to Massachusetts in 1630, moving to Connecticut in 1643. Active in the church and community as well as on his farm, he kept a journal from 1653 to 1684. This selection presents his entries for one year, March 1668 to March 1669, in cryptic yet revealing entries.
    [The Diary of Thomas Minor, Stonington, Connecticut, 1653-1684]
We recommend viewing the paintings and buildings before reading the selections. The paintings are the earliest formal American portraits of the wealthy class and speak clearly to the proud permanence of these New Englanders. The buildings include a Puritan church and three houses—a minister's house, a worker's "growing house," and an added "lean-to" house. They will place you squarely in the context of these readings. (∼26 pages.)



4.  English Colonies II: Middle Atlantic» Reading Guide

- Pennsylvania: The arrival of German settlers, 1683
- Pennsylvania: A poem on the colony's success, 1692
- New York: A governor's report to England, 1687
- Houses:

Pennsbury Manor, 1682-1684 (reconstructed), Pennsylvania
Pastorius Homestead, 1683, Pennsylvania
Philipse Manor House, 1693, New York


The Middle Colonies—the region with the most diverse population, the most varied commercial ventures, and the most mobile boundary lines in the 1600s. For the first half of the century there was no such region as the English "Middle Colonies," for the region was bifurcated by powerful New Netherland and (less powerful) New Sweden, blocking a clear line of English claim between its New England and Chesapeake colonies. England was determined to change this state of affairs and by 1664 it had assimilated the rival colonies. Soon King Charles II chartered three new colonies—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Carolina—and English emigration boomed anew.

Here we read three selections representing Pennsylvania and New York. In a few pages of prose and poetry they express a regional identity with familiar traits from the New England and Chesapeake colonies as well as the emerging "American" characteristics of autonomy, pragmatism, and entrepreneurial initiative. They also reflect the English colonists' growing commercial and political relationships with the Indians. (These readings also serve as footnotes to #1: Prosperity and #2: Cities & Towns.)
  • ARRIVAL OF GERMAN SETTLERS. In 1683 a group of German Mennonites and Quakers bought a tract of land near Philadelphia and founded the settlement of Germantown. They were led by Francis Daniel Pastorius who soon wrote a promotional piece to encourage more Germans to emigrate to Pennsylvania. In this selection, we read of the Germans' voyage from Europe, the towns and people of Pennsylvania, and the 15,000-acre purchase from William Penn.
    [Francis Daniel Pastorius, Positive Information From America, concerning the Country of Pennsylvania, by a German who has migrated thither, 1684]

  • A POEM ON PENNSYLVANIA'S SUCCESS. Richard Frame, about whom we can offer little background, wrote the poem "A Short Description of Pennsilvania" in 1692. The verses are unsophisticated but infectious in their unabashed enthusiasm for all the things "known, enjoyed, and like to be discovered" in the colony, including its natural resources, its towns, and its thriving industries.
    [Richard Frame, "A Short Description of Pennsilvania," poem, 1692]

  • A GOVERNOR'S REPORT on NEW YORK. Almost twenty years after New York became an English colony after the defeat of New Netherland in 1664, it remained economically unstable and politically contentious. Through the steady efforts of Thomas Dongan, appointed governor in 1682, New York achieved stability and commercial strength as an English colony. In this 1687 report to the Committee of Trade in England, Dongan reviews the economic progress and diverse settlement of New York, expressing concern that "his Majesty's natural-born subjects" do not comprise even half of the colony's population. Another concern is the French exploration of the Mississippi River and the resulting settlement that "will prove not only very inconvenient to us but to the Spanish also."
    [Gov. Thomas Dongan, Report to the Committee of Trade (London) on the Province of New York, 1687]
Again, we encourage you to view the three seventeenth-century homesteads—of William Penn, Frances Pastorius, and Frederick Philipse—before reading the selections. No oil portraits accompany this section; for the middle colonies they will appear in abundance in the 1700s. (13 pages.)



5.  English Colonies III: Southern/Chesapeake» Reading Guide

- Virginia: A governor's recommendations, 1663
- Carolina: Founders' promises to new settlers, 1666
- Carolina: A young settler in Charles Town, 1682
- Portraits:

Rebecca Bonum Eskridge, ca. 1690
William Fitzhugh, 1697

- Buildings:

Bacon's Castle, ca. 1655, Virginia
St. Luke's Church, ca. 1680s, Virginia
Adam Thoroughgood House, 1680s-1710, Virginia

- Map: Charles Town, 1671

It is in the southern colonies that we see the most dramatic transition from instability to permanence. The first settlers in Jamestown and the Roanoke colonies were adventurers rather than farmers, for the most part, and their leaders lacked the experience or will for the longterm building of stable colonies. Many had no intention of staying in the colonies forever: making quick riches and returning home were the goals. As historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman writes, "Not until Europeans began to think of America as a place to come and live out their lives, establishing homes to be passed on to their children, would these apparently unpromising lands be colonized."* By the mid 1600s, the Chesapeake colonies had made this change. Would the new colony of Carolina benefit from their hard-won experience?
  • VIRGINIA'S STATUS. In 1624, after nearly two decades of failure, Jamestown was placed under the control of the crown instead of the investment company that founded it. By the 1650s, with a tobacco production boom and an emigration boom of poor people arriving from England as indentured servants, Virginia had turned its course toward permanence. Many servants who survived their indenture were able to start their own farms. Prosperity? Not yet, except for the few wealthy planters favored by William Berkeley (bark-lee), the appointed governor from 1641-52 and 1660-77. In 1663 he wrote a status report on the colony, affirming the "natural advantages it has above all other His Majesty's Plantations" and proceeding to list the reasons why Virginia "has not in all this supposed long tract of time produced those rich and staple Commodities, which I shall in this Discourse affirm it is capable of." Basically, he recommends that Virginia abandon its economic dependence on the "vicious weed of tobacco." A few years later, Virginia would fall into harder times from tobacco overproduction, trade limitations imposed by England, attacks by Dutch rivals, and the consequences of the restoration of the English monarchy, and in 1675 a settlers' rebellion would break out. But for this "discourse and view" Berkeley could report that, while the Virginia of 1663 had much room for improvement, it was not the Jamestown of 1624.
    [Gov. William Berkeley, A Discourse and View of Virginia, 1663]

  • CAROLINA PRIVILEGES. In the same year that Berkeley reviewed Virginia's progress, the extensive lands to its south were granted to eight supporters of King Charles II. Remember that from 1663 until 1710 "Carolina" meant the current states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and the northern third of Florida (and "from sea to sea," the norm in English colonial charters). In 1663 the eight Lords Proprietor published a promotional pamphlet listing the six major privileges offered to "industrious and ingenious persons" including any "maid or single woman with a desire to go over." The privileges included cheap land, low taxes, liberty of conscience, a popularly elected government, and overall, the opportunity to work for "fortunes far beyond what he could ever hope for in England."
    [Robert Horne (publisher), A Brief Description of the Province of Carolina, 1666]

  • EARLY CHARLES TOWN. Seven years after Carolina was chartered, its first settlement was established at Charles Town (Charleston) in 1670. Twelve years later Thomas Newe, a young educated man in his mid twenties, arrived in the new settlement which "two years since had but 3 or 4 houses, hath now about a hundred houses in it." In three letters to his father he describes the growing river plantations, the trade with Barbados, the ongoing Indian wars, the Spanish threat from nearby St. Augustine, and his sighting of Halley's Comet. He asks his father to conduct financial business for him, reporting that he "can not yet make any return; for money here is but little," and to send various items to aid his transition to a colonial life. Newe died in 1683 of an unknown cause at age 28.
    [Letters of Thomas Newe in Charles Town to his father, 17/29 May, 23 August 1682]
Before you read the selections, view the two portraits and three buildings from Virginia, as well as the 1671 map of Charleston (there are no significant extant structures from seventeenth-century Charleston). What do they suggest about the differences between the Chesapeake colonies and the other English Atlantic colonies? (20 pages, excluding the map.)



6.  Servitude (Chesapeake Colonies)» Reading Guide

- Maryland: A former servant's praise of servitude, 1663
- Virginia: A former servant's "sorrowful account" of servitude, ca. 1680
- Virginia: A servant uprising, 1640
- Indenture Contracts:

Maryland, 1683
Virginia, 1684


Until the late 1600s, the labor supply for the Chesapeake plantations was indentured servants, not enslaved Africans. Of the 120,000 emigrants to the Chesapeake colonies in the 1600s, 90,000 were indentured servants. Escaping the poverty of England, they contracted to work for four to seven years before being freed with enough clothes and tools—and in some cases free land—to establish their own homesteads. Their experiences varied, of course, depending on their master, their work, their health, and their temperament. Many died before they could attain freedom. Here we read two opposing views of servitude by former servants in the Chesapeake colonies, followed by the punishments ordered by a Virginia court after a servant uprising in 1640.
  • IN PRAISE OF SERVITUDE. Probably due to political strife in England rather than poverty, George Alsop worked as an indentured servant in Maryland from 1648 to 1652. After returning to England due to illness, he wrote A Character of the Province of Mary-Land. He devotes a full chapter to the defense of servitude against those who "prick up their ears and bray against it." Servitude, he insists from experience, "checks in the giddy and wild-headed youth" of England, offering them a chance to escape a doomed undisciplined life for the opportunity to thrive in America.
    [George Alsop, A Character of the Province of Maryland, 1666)

  • A "SORROWFUL ACCOUNT" OF SERVITUDE. Admitting he was one of the "giddy and wild-headed youth" that Alsop deplored, James Revels wrote a four-part poem relating his fourteen-year indenture in Virginia, which he earned as a sentence for thievery. In simple rhyming couplets he describes his early life of crime, his arrival in Virginia, and his hard labor on a tobacco plantation before being bought by a more considerate master. "My countrymen," he concludes, "take warning e'er too late / Lest you shou'd share my unhappy fate." (The poem is meant to be sung to the tune of "Death and the Lady": link below in Supplemental Sites). Truth be told, while Revels and Alsop relate different experiences of servitude, they join in extolling its reformative power. Little is known about Revels, and no published edition of the poem exists before 1767, yet scholars generally agree that "The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon's Sorrowful Account" is a document of the 1600s.
    [James Revel, "The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon's Sorrowful Account of His fourteen Years Transportation at Virginia in America," poem, ca. 1680, publ. 1767]

  • A SERVANT UPRISING. In 1640 six white servants and a black slave were punished for stealing arms and a boat to escape down the Elizabeth River to a nearby Dutch plantation. From this brief court decision that reviews the uprising and lists the men's punishments, we can infer the men's reasons for escaping and the planters' fear of future rebellions. We can also make inferences about the relationship between servitude and slavery and about Virginia's attitude toward blacks in 1640.
    [Decisions of the General Court of Virginia, 1640]
By the late 1660s Virginia could no longer depend on English indentured servants for forced labor, and its transition to a slave-based economy began. From only 150 black slaves in 1640, Virginia had nearly 3,000 slaves forty years later, a transition we will consider in the next topic, POWER. In viewing the two indenture documents, note the contract agreements, the signatures, and the template form. (18 pages.)



Images:
-Mexico City: detail of map by Sebastian Münster entitled Von den newen Inseln: der Statt Themistitan in den newen Inseln gelegen/figurierung, in Münster's Cosmographia Universalis, 1597. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography & Map Divison, G4414.M6 1597 .M9 TIL Vault.

-Quebec: inset in map by Jean Baptiste Louis Franquelin entitled Carte de l'Amérique Septentrionnale: depuis le 25, jusqu'au 650 deg. de latt. & environ 140, & 235 deg. de longitude, 1688 (twentieth-century copy). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division: G3300 1688 .F7 Vault Oversize.

-Philadelphia: Detail of map by Thomas Holme entitled A mapp of ye improved part of Pensilvania in America, divided into countyes, townships, and lotts, surveyed by Tho. Holme, published with William Penn's Letter to the Committee of the Free Society of Traders, 1683. Reproduced by permission of the New York Public Library, The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, Digital ID #433922.



Quoted statements from:
-Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Silver Professor of History, New York University; Fellow, National Humanities Center, 1984-85). "North America and the Beginnings of European Colonization," in series Essays on the Columbian Encounter. Washington: American Historical Association, 1992.
-Alan S. Taylor (Professor of History, University of California-Davis; Fellow, National Humanities Center, 1993-1994). American Colonies: The Settling of North America. New York: Viking/Penguin, 2001.



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