Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776

Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago-and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society-a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a 'new order of the ages' that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of prerevolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly 'modern' character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto 'dark ages') of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, Becoming America shows us vast revolutionary changes before 1776 among a fantastically diverse assortment of peoples. Here are polyglot populations of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, and French