ENG 111 - Gleason

A Companion to Colonial America consists of twenty-three original essays by expert historians on the key issues and topics in American colonial history. Each essay surveys the scholarship and prevailing interpretations in these key areas, discussing the differing arguments and assessing their merits. Coverage includes politics, religion, migration, gender, ecology, and many others.

Specter of Peace advances a novel historical conceptualization of peace as a process of "right ordering" that involved the careful regulation of violence, the legitimation of colonial authority, and the creation of racial and gendered hierarchies. The volume highlights the many paths of peacemaking that otherwise have hitherto gone unexplored in early American and Atlantic World scholarship and challenges historians to take peace as seriously as violence. Early American peacemaking was a productive discourse of moral ordering fundamentally concerned with regulating violence. The historicization of peace, the authors argue, can sharpen our understanding of violence, empire, and the early modern struggle for order and harmony in the colonial Americas and Atlantic World. Contributors are: Micah Alpaugh, Brendan Gillis, Mark Meuwese, Margot Minardi, Geoffrey Plank, Dylan Ruediger, Cristina Soriano and Wayne E. Lee.

Colonial America comes alive in this depiction of the daily lives of families--mothers, fathers, children, and grandparents. The Volo's examine the role of the family in society and typical family life in 17th- and 18th-century America. Through narrative chapters, aspects of family life are discussed in depth such as maintaining the household, work, entertainment, death and dying, ceremonies and holidays, customs and rites of passage, parenting, education, and widowhood. Readers will gain an in-depth understanding of the world in which these families lived and how that world affected their lives. Also included are sources for further information and a timeline of historic events. Volumes in the Family Life through History series focus on the day-to-day lives and roles of families throughout history. The roles of all family members are defined and information on daily family life, the role of the family in society, and the ever-changing definition of family are discussed. Discussion of the nuclear family, single parent homes, foster and adoptive families, stepfamilies, and gay and lesbian families are included where appropriate. Topics such as meal planning, homes, entertainment and celebrations are discussed along with larger social issues that originate in the home, such as domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and divorce. Ideal for students and general readers alike, books in this series bring the history of everyday people to life.

This reader provides students with key documents from colonial American history, including new English translations of non-English documents. The documents in this collection take the reader beyond the traditional story of the English colonies. Readers explore the Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian, German, and even Icelandic colonial efforts throughout North America, including California, New Mexico, Texas, the Great Plains, Louisiana, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New England. Throughout, the collection provides not only the perspectives of Europeans but also of Native Americans and Africans. By looking beyond traditional sources, students see the power and diversity of Native Americans and learn that European domination of the continent was not inevitable. They see different forms of slavery and ways that slaves dealt with their captivity. By considering multiple perspectives, students learn that colonial history was largely the attempts of various peoples to understand strangers and adapt them to their own will.