Description:
The 18 essays in this volume provide a fresh perspective on the wider context of the encounter between the inhabitants of precolonial Virginia and the English. The collection offers an interdisciplinary consideration of developments in Native America, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Chesapeake, highlighting the mosaic of regions and influences that formed the context and impetus for the English settlement at Jamestown in 1607. The volume reflects an understanding of Jamestown not as the birthplace of democracy in America but as the creation of a European outpost in a neighborhood that included Africans, Native Americans, and other Europeans.
Brief description: Peter C. Mancall is professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California and director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. He is author of Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America and editor of Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology.
Review Quotes: "Superb." -- H-Net