Today, New York stands as the capital of American culture, business, and cosmopolitanism. Its size, influence, and multicultural composition mark it as a corner-stone of our country. The rich and varied history of early New York would seem to present a fertile topic for investigation to those interested colonial America. Yet, there has never been a modern history of old New York--until this lively and detailed account by Michael Kammen. Gracefully written and comprehensive in scope, Colonial New York includes all of the political, social, economic, cultural, and religious aspects of New York's formative centuries. Social and ethnic diversity have always been characteristic of New York, and this was never so evident as in its early years. This period provides the contemporary reader with a backward glance at what the United States would become in the twentieth-century. Colonial New York stood as a precursor of American society and culture as a whole: a broad model of the American experience we witness today. Kammen's history is enlivened by a look at some of the larger-than-life personalities who had tremendous impact on the many social and political adjustments necessary to the colony's continued growth. Here we meet Peter Stuyvesant, director of New Netherland and an executive of the West India Company--a man facing the innumerable difficulties of governing a large, sprawling colony divided by Dutch, English, and Indian settlements. Ultimately, history would view him as a failure, but his strong, Calvinist approach left such an indelible stamp on the burgeoning colony that readers will be tempted to do a little revisionist thinking about his tenure. Looking at a later governor, Lord Cornbury, gives us the very opposite example of a man despised by his contemporaries as the most venal of all the colonial governors (he was an occasional public cross-dresser, wearing the clothes of his distant cousin, Queen Anne), but who forcefully guided the colony through a transition to Anglican rule. The book culminates in chapters that investigate New York's strategic role in the bloody French and Indian War, and the key part it played in the economic protests and political conflict that finally led to American independence. The intricate and tangled web of alliances, loyalties, and shifting political ground that underlies much of colonial New York's past has clearly daunted many historians from taking on the task of writing an understandable account. Michael Kammen has accepted this challenge and gives us much more than a mere chronicle. Rather, he paints a compelling portrait of colonial life as it truly was. Although this important book is thorough and informed by primary sources, Colonial New York's clear and vivid prose offers a delightful narrative that will entertain both general readers and serious scholars alike. It pays special attention to localities and contains numerous illustrations that are attentive to the decorative arts and the material culture of early New York. Surprising and enlightening, Colonial New York is a delight to read and provides new perspectives on our nation's beginnings.
A critically acclaimed and accessible biography of one of the towering figures of New England's colonial period; winner of The Conference on Christianity and Literature's Book Award. Powerful preacher, political negotiator for New England in the halls of Parliament, president of Harvard, father of Cotton Mather, Increase Mather was the epitome of the American Puritan. He was the most important spokesman of his generation for Congregationalism and became the last American Puritan of consequence as the seventeenth century ended. The story begins in 1639 when Mather was born in the Massachusetts village of Dorchester. He left home for Harvard College when he was twelve and at twenty-two began to stir the city of Boston from the pulpit of North Church. He had written four books by the time he was thirty-two. Certain he was God's chosen instrument and New England God's chosen people, he disciplined mind and spirit in service to them both. Tempted to "Atheisme" and unbelief, afflicted early by nightmares and melancholy, then by hope and joy, he was a pioneer in recognizing the excitement of the new sciences and sought to reconcile them to theology. This well-wrought biography, the first of Increase Mather in forty years, draws on the extensive Mather diaries, which were transcribed by Michael Hall.
Puliter Prie-winning historian Michael Kammen examines the cultural impact of the Constitution on the United States, explores the Constitutions place in the public consciousness and its role as a symbol in American life from ratification in 1788 to our own time, and expounds on what the Constitution has meant to the American people (perceptions and misperceptions, uses and abuses, knowledge and ignorance), Kammen shows that although there are recurrent declarations of reverence for our American "Ark of the Covenant," most of us neither know nor fully understand our Constitution.
This comprehensive resource follows the pivotal and often overlooked efforts of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Dutch, the French, and the English colonies to control the strategic waterways of the Hudson-Champlain corridor from their discovery to the fall of New France. From Champlain and Hudson's initial voyages some 400 years ago, to the surrender of Montreal in 1760, The European Invasion of North America: Colonial Conflict Along the Hudson - Champlain Corridor, 1609–1760 offers unprecedented coverage of the 150-year struggle between New World rivals along this natural invasion route—a struggle which would ultimately determine the destiny of North America. Unlike other volumes on this period, The European Invasion of North America includes extensive coverage from the French and Dutch as well as British perspectives, examining events in the context of larger colonial confrontations. Drawing on hundreds of firsthand accounts, it recaps political maneuvers and blunders, military successes and failures, and the remarkable people behind them all: cabinet ministers in Paris, Amsterdam, and London; colonial leaders such as Stuyvesant, Frontenac, and Montcalm; shrewd diplomats of the Iroquois Confederacy; and soldiers and families on all sides of the conflict. It also highlights the growing friction between Britain and her American colonies, which would soon lead to a different war.
From the beginning, what has given our culture its distinctive texture, pattern, and thrust, according to Michael Kammen, is the dynamic interaction of the imported and the indigenous. He shows how, during the years of colonization, some ideas and institutions were transferred virtually intact from Britain, while, simultaneously, others were being transformed in the New World. As he unravels the tangled origins of our culture, he makes us see that unresolved contradictions in the American experience have created our national style. Puritanical and hedonistic, idealistic and materialistic, peace-loving and war-mongering: these opposing strands go back to the genesis of our history.
Michael Kammen is a major American historian, whose books have received the Bancroft and Parkman prizes. This book collects his essays on American culture, of which he is one of the major historians.
Winner of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for history, Kammen addresses three themes concerning the state of historical inquiry in America. Beginning with how history as a professional discipline has changed over the past century, the book treats the relationship of the historian's craft to American nationalism, the value of historical knowledge, and the shifting attitudes of historians toward society. Kammen appraises the significance of historiography as a measure of cultural change and shows how the past has been manipulated for social and ideological reasons, and how memories of the national and regional past have conflicted with the realities of historical experience. He also explains how traditional modes of interpreting the past have lost their cohesive force and why historians should pursue new approaches to the cultural history. ISBN 0-8014-1924-7: $24.95.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian offers a brilliant biographical study of George Seldes, one of America's leading champions of American popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s, and traces the amazing growth of popular culture, from silent films and talkies to radio and jazz to the coming of television.
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