The Jamestown Project (repost)
The Jamestown Project By Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2007 | 392 Pages | ISBN: 0674024745 | PDF | 1 MB
Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2007 | 392 Pages | ISBN: 0674024745 | PDF | 1 MB
The Jamestown story needs retelling, says NYU historian Kupperman (Providence Island) not just because 2007 marks the 400th anniversary of its settlement. It also needs retelling because Americans tend to locate our origins in Plymouth and distance ourselves from Jamestown, which we associate with "greedy, grasping colonists" backed by "arrogant" English patrons. The first decade of Jamestown's history was messy, admits Kupperman, but through that mess, settlers figured out how to make colonization work. Plymouth, in fact, benefited from the lessons learned at Jamestown. What is remarkable is that a colonial outpost on the edge of Virginia, in a not very hospitable location, survived at all. Kupperman, of course, shows how the colonists negotiated relationships with Indians.