Scrupulous in every detail, this work contains the names of 3,600 passengers on the ninety-six ships which brought them to New England between 1620 and 1640. Working with the same records employed by Savage, Drake, and Hotten, and with records unknown or inaccessible to them, Col. Banks here pulls the several classes of records together to form the most complete and authoritative collection of passenger lists for the period ever published. In addition to the names of passengers and ships, places of origin, and places of residence in America, the book includes indexes to surnames, ships, English parishes, and New England towns.

The Planters of the Commonwealth came to the New World "to plant...the seeds of a new nation whose fruit should become another England, with its traditions, culture, and laws." Who were these planters? Where were they from? Why did this "Great Emigration" o

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The English settlers who staked their claims in the Chesapeake Bay were drawn to it for a variety of reasons. Some sought wealth from the land, while others saw it as a place of trade, a political experiment, or a potential spiritual sanctuary. But like other European colonizers in the Americas, they all aspired to found, organize, and maintain functioning towns—an aspiration that met with varying degrees of success, but mostly failure. Yet this failure became critical to the economy and society that did arise there. As Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth reveals, the agrarian plantation society that eventually sprang up around the Chesapeake Bay was not preordained—rather, it was the necessary product of failed attempts to build cities. Paul Musselwhite details the unsuccessful urban development that defined the region from the seventeenth century through the Civil War, showing how places like Jamestown and Annapolis—despite their small size—were the products of ambitious and cutting-edge experiments in urbanization comparable to those in the largest port cities of the Atlantic world. These experiments, though, stoked ongoing debate about commerce, taxation, and self-government. Chesapeake planters responded to this debate by reinforcing the political, economic, and cultural authority of their private plantation estates, with profound consequences for the region’s laborers and the political ideology of the southern United States. As Musselwhite makes clear, the antebellum economy around this well-known waterway was built not in the absence of cities, but upon their aspirational wreckage.