This groundbreaking book examines the history of Spain, England, the United States, and Mexico to explain why development takes centuries.

U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. We have represented this book in the same form as it was first published. Hence any marks seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.

This book is Volume I of A HISTORY OF THE SOUTH, a ten-volume series designed to present a balanced history of all the complex aspects of the South’s culture from 1607 to the present. Like its companion volumes, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century was written by an outstanding student of Southern history. In the America of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just what was Southern? The first colonists looked upon themselves as British, and only gradually did those attitudes and traditions develop which were distinctively American. To determine what was Southern in the early colonies, Professor Craven has searched for those features of early American society which distinguished the South in later years and those features of early American history which help the Southerner to understand himself. The Chesapeake colonies—Virginia and Maryland—formed the first Southern community. These colonies grew out of the same interest which directed European imperialism toward Africa and the West Indies—notably the production of sugar, silk, wine, and tobacco. Craven studies the social, economic, and political development of the Southern colonies as the product of continuing European rivalries that resulted in the colonization of Carolina and Florida. Major emphasis, however, is placed upon British expansion, since Anglo-Saxon influence was dominant in the formation of the South as a region. Craven sees as crucial the middle period of the seventeenth century. Out of the political and social unrest which characterized these years emerged the points of view which gave shape to the American and the Southern tradition.