Between Two Worlds

During the seventeenth century, some 350,000 English men and women crossed the Atlantic to the promised land of America. But, as Malcolm Gaskill points out, England could seem like a ‘paradise lost’ for those who faced the challenges of survival in the American wilderness, with a new ecology, climate and native peoples with which to contend (p. iv). The question of why so many people decided to uproot their lives, families and ties in England, risk the dangers inherent in crossing the Atlantic, and settle in unknown and distant lands has long been a source of fascination for historians. Similarly, scholars have devoted great attention to pinpointing the moment within early colonial settlement when a distinctly ‘American’ identity emerged to pave the way for the American Revolution in the eighteenth century. But it is not the search for the origins of the United States that is the focus of Gaskill’s extensive history of colonial America, but rather how English migrants in America remained a part of the complex and dynamic history of England. This determination to reintegrate seventeenth-century England and early America into one history sets this book apart from traditional accounts of colonial history. It allows us better to appreciate and understand the extraordinary courage of the men and women who chose to cross the vast ocean in search of new opportunities and fortunes

Aesthetics · American history · American west · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Atlantic World · Colonialism · Courage · Ethnology · Genealogy · Identity (music · New england · Paradise · Political science · Politics · Settlement (finance · Wilderness · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law