Kirjahaku

Richard Hakluyt the younger, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, advocated the creation of English colonies in the New World at a time when the advantages of this idea were far from self-evident. This book describes in detail the life and times of Hakluyt, a trained minister who became an editor of travel accounts. "Hakluyt's Promise" demonstrates his prominent role in the establishment of English America as well as his interests in English opportunities in the East Indies. The volume presents nearly 50 illustrations - many unpublished since the sixteenth century - and offers a fresh view of Hakluyt's milieu and the central concerns of the Elizabethan age. Though he never travelled farther than Paris, young Hakluyt spent much of the 1580s recording information about the western hemisphere and became an international authority on overseas exploration. The book traces his rise to prominence as a source of information and inspiration for England's policy makers, including the queen, and his advocacy for colonies in Roanoke and Jamestown. Hakluyt's thought was shaped by debates that stretched across Europe, and his interests ranged just as widely, encompassing such topics as peaceful coexistence with Native Americans, the New World as a Protestant Holy Land, and in, his later life, trade with the Spice Islands.

Valley of Opportunity recreates an age when Indians, colonists, and post-Revolutionary settlers embraced a similar dream: to create a successful economy in the rural hinterland of the middle colonies. Peter C. Mancall draws on abundant evidence from seldom-used archives in the region, as well as from libraries on both sides of the Atlantic, to reconstruct their daily economic life. The author describes the varied economic transformations that took place in the area, considering these changes from an environmental as well as an economic standpoint. He shows how different groups of people perceived the resources of the region and how their perceptions shaped settlement patterns, land use, and the formation of commercial networks. Ultimately, each of the three peoples looked beyond the mountains that set the boundaries of their physical world and tried to establish ties to the larger commercial network that linked North America to Europe.Mancall offers connections between the development of a particular region, previously overlooked by most historians, and the wide pattern of American economic change. He breaks through old ethnocentric barriers of settlement history by portraying Indian people in their full diversity and by including Indians and whites as actors of comparable significance, and he shows how attitudes that developed in the colonial period affected economic patterns well beyond the Revolution. Integrating a range of disciplines, from anthropology through ecology and geography to zoology, he seeks to answer the questions: what did different groups of people make of the natural resources of this river valley and how did they allocate the rewards? His answers provide a novel overview of the economic culture of the eighteenth century.Studded with sharp insights and attention-catching quotations that mirror everyday life of the times, Valley of Opportunity will appeal to those interested in the development of the American economy, the impact of the Revolution on urban Americans, and the relations between the peoples who together created a vibrant world along the edges of European settlement in North America.

Alcohol abuse has killed and impoverished American Indians since the seventeenth century, when European settlers began trading rum for furs. In the first book to probe the origins of this ongoing social crisis, Peter C. Mancall explores the liquor trade's devastating impact on the Indian communities of colonial America.Mancall recounts how English settlers quickly found a market for alcohol among the Indians, and traffic in rum became a prominent source of revenue for the British Empire. In spite of the colonists' growing awareness that some Indians abused alcohol and that drinking threatened the stability of countless Indian villages already decimated by European diseases, they expanded the liquor trade into virtually every Indian community from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. In response, Indians created one of the most important temperance movements in American history, a movement that was nevertheless unable to halt the lucrative commerce.The author follows the trail of rum from the West Indian producers to the colonial distributors and on to the Indian consumers in the eastern woodlands. To discover why Indians participated in the trade and why they experienced such a powerful desire for alcohol, he addresses current medical views on alcoholism and reexamines the colonial era as a time when Indians were forming new strategies for survival in a world that had been radically changed. Finally, Mancall compares Indian drinking in New France and New Spain with that in the British colonies.Forever shattering the stereotype of the drunken Indian, Mancall offers a powerful indictment of English participation in the liquor trade and a new awareness or the trade's tragic cost for the American Indians.