AMERICAN COLONIES starts with the earliest years of human colonization of the American continent and environs with the Siberian migrations across the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago. It ends in around 1800 when the rough outline of the contemporary North America could be perceived.
Dropping the usual Anglocentric description of North America's fate, Taylor brilliantly conveys the far more vivid and startling story of the competing interests--Spanish, French, English, Native, Russian--that over the centuries shaped and reshaped both the continent and its 'suburbs' in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It is one of the greatest of all human stories.
Introduction
Part I. Encounters
1. Natives, 13,000 B.C.-A.D. 1492
2. Colonizers, 1400-1800
3. New Spain, 1500-1600
4. The Spanish Frontier, 1530-1700
5. Canada and Iroquoia, 1500-1660
Part II. Encounters
6. Virginia, 1570-1650
7. Chesapeake Colonies, 1650-1750
8. New England, 1600-1700
9. Puritans and Indians, 1600-1700
10. The West Indies, 1600-1700
11. Carolina, 1670-1760
12. Middle Colonies, 1600-1700
Part III. Empires
13. Revolutions, 1685-1730
14. The Atlantic, 1700-80
15. Awakenings, 1700-75
16. French America, 1650-1750
17. The Great Plains, 1680-1800
18. Imperial Wars and Crisis, 1739-75
19. The Pacific, 1760-1820
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
