American Colonies

This article is about the 2001 book. For other uses of the term "American colonies", see American colonies.
American Colonies
First paperback edition, July 30, 2002
First paperback edition, July 30, 2002
AuthorAlan Taylor
LanguageEnglish
PublisherViking Press
Publication date
November 12, 2001
Pages526

American Colonies: The Settling of North America is a book about early American history by Alan Taylor, first published on November 12, 2001, by Viking Press.[1] It is the first volume of the Penguin History of the United States.[2]

The book is divided into three major parts: "Encounters", "Colonies", and "Empires".[2] These sections discuss, respectively, the colonial encounter between European settlers and the Indigenous peoples in North America, including through colonial projects such as New Spain; colonies such as the New England Colonies and the province of Carolina; and imperial domains including New France and British America.[2] American Colonies rejects American exceptionalism, focusing on slavery and the displacement and depopulation of Indigenous peoples.[3] It employs the methods of social history and environmental history, among other approaches.[4]

Andrew Cayton describes the book as a "balanced synthesis" of a trend in historical scholarship emphasizing the pluralism and diversity of colonial-era North America, a place in which Indigenous people of the Americas and enslaved Africans, as well as Europeans, created novel social arrangements.[5] A starred review in Publishers Weekly likewise noted that American Colonies "challenges traditional Anglocentric interpretations of colonial history by focusing more evenly on the myriad influences on North America's development".[6] Osita Nwanevu, in a retrospective review of American Colonies along with Taylor's later works American Revolutions and American Republics, noted that American Colonies is organized in a more conventional, chronological manner than the other two, which focus on themes.[7]

  1. ^ "American Colonies". Kirkus Reviews. September 1, 2001. Archived from the original on October 14, 2021. Retrieved October 13, 2021.
  2. ^ a b c Henretta, James A. (December 2002). "American Colonies". The Journal of American History. 89 (3): 1019–1020. doi:10.2307/3092359. JSTOR 3092359.
  3. ^ Smith, Daniel Blake (2001). "Review of American Colonies". The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. 99 (4): 405–407. ISSN 0023-0243. JSTOR 23384806.
  4. ^ Dowd, Gregory Evans (2003). "Review of American Colonies". The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. 127 (1): 106–109. ISSN 0031-4587. JSTOR 20093604.
  5. ^ Cayton, Andrew R. L. (December 2, 2001). "The Way We Were". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on April 9, 2021. Retrieved October 14, 2021.
  6. ^ "American Colonies". Publishers Weekly. Archived from the original on September 30, 2016. Retrieved October 13, 2021.
  7. ^ Nwanevu, Osita (August 24, 2021). "The Incoherence of American History". The New Republic. ISSN 0028-6583. Archived from the original on October 6, 2021. Retrieved October 14, 2021.