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Colonial America: Jamestown

A research topic guide covering Colonial America.

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Marooned

For readers of Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower, a revolutionary argument for replacing Plymouth Rock with Jamestown as America's founding myth. In school, students are taught two origin stories for Colonial America. The first is the story of the pilgrims- hardworking, devoted, religious people who made a colony and thrived. The second is that of Jamestown, where lazy louts committed treasonous acts and nearly starved to death before they were rescued by food supplies and martial law from England. But both of these interpretations come from English sources- they were written up by the very governors and lords the American people threw off roughly 150 years later. In Marooned, Joseph Kelly reexamines the events of Jamestown and comes to a radically different and decidedly American interpretation of these first Virginians. In this gripping account of shipwrecks and mutiny and America 's earliest settlements, Kelly argues that the colonists at Jamestown were literally and figuratively marooned, cut loose from civilization, and cast into a state of nature. In Jamestown, the British caste system meant little- those who wanted to survive needed to work and fight and intermingle with the nearby native populations. The desperation of the colony meant that for the first time, centuries before Locke or Jefferson penned the words, all men were equal, and the colonists themselves began to insist on being their own masters and choosing their own fates.

Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown

Pocahontas may be the most famous Native American who ever lived, but during the settlement of Jamestown, and for two centuries afterward, the great chiefs Powhatan and Opechancanough were the subjects of considerably more interest and historical documentation than the young woman. It was Opechancanough who captured the foreign captain "Chawnzmit"--John Smith. Smith gave Opechancanough a compass, described to him a spherical earth that revolved around the sun, and wondered if his captor was a cannibal. Opechancanough, who was no cannibal and knew the world was flat, presented Smith to his elder brother, the paramount chief Powhatan. The chief, who took the name of his tribe as his throne name (his personal name was Wahunsenacawh), negotiated with Smith over a lavish feast and opened the town to him, leading Smith to meet, among others, Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas. Thinking he had made an ally, the chief finally released Smith. Within a few decades, and against their will, his people would be subjects of the British Crown. Despite their roles as senior politicians in these watershed events, no biography of either Powhatan or Opechancanough exists. And while there are other "biographies" of Pocahontas, they have for the most part elaborated on her legend more than they have addressed the known facts of her remarkable life. As the 400th anniversary of Jamestown's founding approaches, nationally renowned scholar of Native Americans, Helen Rountree, provides in a single book the definitive biographies of these three important figures. In their lives we see the whole arc of Indian experience with the English settlers - from the wary initial encounters presided over by Powhatan, to the uneasy diplomacy characterized by the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, to the warfare and eventual loss of native sovereignty that came during Opechancanough's reign. Writing from an ethnohistorical perspective that looks as much to anthropology as the written records, Rountree draws a rich portrait of Powhatan life in which the land and the seasons governed life and the English were seen not as heroes but as Tassantassas (strangers), as invaders, even as squatters. The Powhatans were a nonliterate people, so we have had to rely until now on the white settlers for our conceptions of the Jamestown experiment. This important book at last reconstructs the other side of the story.

1619

The essential history of the extraordinary year in which American democracy and American slavery emerged hand in hand in colonial Virginia. Along the banks of the James River, Virginia, during an oppressively hot spell in the middle of summer 1619, two events occurred within a few weeks of each other that would profoundly shape the course of history. In the newly built church at Jamestown, the General Assembly -- the first gathering of a representative governing body in America -- came together. A few weeks later, a battered privateer entered the Chesapeake Bay carrying the first African slaves to land on mainland English America. In 1619, historian James Horn sheds new light on the year that gave birth to the great paradox of our nation: slavery in the midst of freedom. This portentous year marked both the origin of the most important political development in American history, the rise of democracy, and the emergence of what would in time become one of the nation's greatest challenges: the corrosive legacy of racial inequality that has afflicted America since its beginning.

The Jamestown Brides

Jamestown, England's first real foothold in the New World, was fraught with danger - from starvation and disease to violent skirmishes between colonists and the native populations. Mortality rates were impossibly high: Six out of seven settlers died within the first few years. How clear theseand other perils were made to the fifty-six young women who left their homes and boarded ships in England in 1621, nearly fifteen years after Jamestown's founding, is not known. But we do know who they were. Their ages ranged from sixteen to twenty-eight, and they were deemed "young and uncorrupt."Each had a bride price of 150 pounds of tobacco set by the Virginia Company, which funded their voyage. Though the women had all gone of their own free will, they were to be sold into marriage, generating a profit for investors and helping ensure the colony's long-term viability.Without letters or journals (young women from middling classes had not generally been taught to write), Jennifer Potter turned to the Virginia Company's merchant lists - which were used as a kind of sales catalog for prospective husbands - as well as censuses, court records, the minutes ofVirginia's General Assemblies, letters to England from their male counterparts, and other such accounts of the everyday life of the early colonists. In The Jamestown Brides, she spins a fascinating tale of courage and survival, exploring the women's lives in England before their departure and theirexperiences in Jamestown. Some were married before the ships left harbor. Some were killed in an attack by the native population only months after their arrival. A few never married at all. In telling the story of these "Maids for Virginia" Potter sheds light on life for women in early modernEngland and in the New World.