Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a high level treatment of the subject and probably only for specialists in the area or serious readers. It presumes a lot of previous knowledge, but if you're interested, don't let that stop you as you can pick up a lot of that on your way through this book. The book includes essays by established top scholars in the area, as well as promising younger scholars whose contributions are already starting to be recognized.
I was most interested in the chapters on the Choctaw and Iroquois experience in early colonial America. The Choctaw article, for example, details how much the native American population in the Carolinas had declined as a result of war and disease, especially smallpox, which wiped out whole villages. The descriptions are graphic, one referred to an epidemic that occurred around 1700 that killed the Indians so quickly that the forests were littered with the dead and the stench of decay was everywhere, and the vultures and carrion feeders were having a field day. So it's not for the weak hearted perhaps, either.
Other interesting things I picked up were how the Iroquois dealt with the death of a loved one. They were allowed a shorter grieving period in which they were excused from normal tribal duties, and could isolate themselves from the tribe in the sense of having little verbal contact with others in order to deal privately with the grief, and a longer period of up to a year during which it was recognized they might still need further time to fully work through the grief and return to their normal place in the tribe. In other words, there was formal recognition of, and a custom to deal with, the death of loved ones that allowed significant down time before returning to their normal role and duties in the tribe. Contrast that with the normal workaday environment in the U.S. in which many employees are granted a few days bereavement leave and are expected to return to work after that.
These are just two of the interesting things I learned from this book. The other articles on social and political organization, early religion, and so on, were interesting too, but I was most interested in the articles on early contact with native Americans, and how their way of life differed from and was affected by, the settlers. For that this book served very well.

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As an anthology of readings by top scholars in the field of Early American History, Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development provides students with an insightful and critical view of the Colonial period.The Fifth Edition is heavily revised to reflect shifting emphasis on the continentalist approach to early American history. With seventeen new essays, including essays on the New France and Spanish borderlands, this reader continues to be a best-selling text in the Colonial America course.

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