Cultures And Identities In Colonial British America

12 Between Private and Public Spheres: Liberty as Cultural Property in Eighteenth-Century British America -- Notes -- List of Contributors -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W

Never truly a "new world" entirely detached from the home countries of its immigrants, colonial America, over the generations, became a model of transatlantic culture. Colonial society was shaped by the conflict between colonists' need to adapt to the American environment and their desire to perpetuate old world traditions or to imitate the charismatic model of the British establishment. In the course of colonial history, these contrasting impulses produced a host of distinctive cultures and identities. In this impressive new collection, prominent scholars of early American history explore this complex dynamic of accommodation and replication to demonstrate how early American societies developed from the intersection of American and Atlantic influences. The volume, edited by Robert Olwell and Alan Tully, offers fresh perspectives on colonial history and on early American attitudes toward slavery and ethnicity, native Americans, and the environment, as well as colonial social, economic, and political development. It reveals the myriad ways in which American colonists were the inhabitants and subjects of a wider Atlantic world. Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America, one of a three-volume series under the editorship of Jack P. Greene, aims to give students of Atlantic history a "state of the field" survey by pursuing interesting lines of research and raising new questions. The entire series, "Anglo-America in the Transatlantic World," engages the major organizing themes of the subject through a collection of high-level, debate-inspiring essays, inviting readers to think anew about the complex ways in which the Atlantic experience shaped both American societies and the Atlantic world itself.

This work brings together 16 essays in cultural history. Taken together, the essays aim to provide a reassessment of the complex process of cultural adjustment among the settler societies of colonial British and revolutionary America.

This reader collects together articles by key historians, literary critics and anthropologists on the cultures of colonialism in the British Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is divided into three sections: theoretical, emphasizing approaches; the colonisers "at home"; and "away".

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, Technical University of Chemnitz (Anglistik/Amerikanistik ), course: Hauptseminar "British and American Relations since 1607", 21 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The history of English settlement in North America starts in 1607 when disregarding Indians and some earlier attempts of settlers which were abandoned or not documented further. Thus, American history and civilization started with English settlers. But were they still English when they arrived in the New World? Were they not Americans from the early colonization on? Did they not leave part of their Englishness in the mother country when they entered the ship to cross the Atlantic? And did they all have the same motivations and attitudes to leave England? In order to examine their culture and to highlight obvious implementations of an evolving American cultural pattern, this paper examines the settlers’ identities, thus what they identified with and what they disclaimed. It deals with the question whether one can speak of an American culture or national feeling before the American Revolution, i.e. before the United States had become a nation. It tries to conceive or grasp the sensations of the population, their attitudes and feelings about their cultural and national identity.

Through innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and fresh avenues of inquiry, the nine essays collected in A Peculiar Mixture endeavor to transform how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity that characterized the experience of German-speaking people in the middle colonies. They explore how the various cultural expressions of German speakers helped them bridge regional, religious, and denominational divides and eventually find a way to partake in America’s emerging national identity. Instead of thinking about early American culture and literature as evolving continuously as a singular entity, the contributions to this volume conceive of it as an ever-shifting and tangled “web of contact zones.” They present a society with a plurality of different native and colonial cultures interacting not only with one another but also with cultures and traditions from outside the colonies, in a “peculiar mixture” of Old World practices and New World influences. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Marie Basile McDaniel, Philip Otterness, Liam Riordan, Matthias Schönhofer, and Marianne S. Wokeck.

Colonial America presented a new world of natural curiosities for settlers as well as the London-based scientific community. In American Curiosity, Susan Scott Parrish examines how various peoples in the British colonies understood and represented the natural world around them from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth. Parrish shows how scientific knowledge about America, rather than flowing strictly from metropole to colony, emerged from a horizontal exchange of information across the Atlantic. Delving into an understudied archive of letters, Parrish uncovers early descriptions of American natural phenomena as well as clues to how people in the colonies construed their own identities through the natural world. Although hierarchies of gender, class, institutional learning, place of birth or residence, and race persisted within the natural history community, the contributions of any participant were considered valuable as long as they supplied novel data or specimens from the American side of the Atlantic. Thus Anglo-American nonelites, women, Indians, and enslaved Africans all played crucial roles in gathering and relaying new information to Europe. Recognizing a significant tradition of nature writing and representation in North America well before the Transcendentalists, American Curiosity also enlarges our notions of the scientific Enlightenment by looking beyond European centers to find a socially inclusive American base to a true transatlantic expansion of knowledge.

The description for this book, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, will be forthcoming.