The Search for Liberty

This is a history of the region now known as the United States of America, from earliest times to the American victory over the British and the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The book charts the arrival of the first Americans through Alaska, millennia before the coming of the Norsemen, or of Cabot, Columbus and Raleigh. It tells of the sixteenth century incursions by the Spanish, French and English, their interaction with the American Indians, and describes the early settlements, their culture, activities and trade. The author traces the rise to dominance of the British settlers, and the establishment of the whole of east America within the British Empire. The book closes with an account of the war with the British and of Washington's final triumph. Introduction: The Enterprise of the Indies:.

1. The New Atlantis.

2. The Columbus Conspiracy: the Sources.

3. The First Americans.

4. The Re-discoverers and Their Achievements.

5. The Wonders of the New World.

Part I: The Admiral Who Rarely Put to Sea - Ralegh and Roanoke.

6. West from the Hispaniola.

7. New Spain.

8. The Bristol Venturers.

9. Men of Devon.

10. The Outer Banks.

11. Stirrers Abroad.

12. French North America.

Part II: The First English Settlements: Cities on Hills and Seashores:.

13. Newfoundland.

14. Trading Companies.

15. Virginia.

16. New England.

17. Bermuda.

18. John Smith, John Rolfe and Christopher Newport.

19. Whose was the Land?.

20. White and Red.

Part III: The Puritan Dream: .

21. The Pilgrim Fathers.

22. Christians and Survivors.

23. The Puritans.

24. The New England Confederation.

25. The Puritan International.

26. Maryland.

27. "The City on the Hill.".

Part IV: The Restoration:.

28. The Return of Exiles.

29. The Rewards.

30. The Doctrine: Calvinism.

31. The Dominion of New England.

32. Witchcraft.

33. The Mathers.

34. Royal Bounty.

Part V: The Empire of the North Atlantic in the Seventeenth Century:.

35. Connecticut and Rhode Island.

36. New York.

37. Pennsylvania.

38. Virginia.

39. The Carolinas North and South.

40. New France.

41. In the King's Name.

42. Colonial Policy.

Part VI: The Eighteenth Century: From the St Lawrence to Savannah:.

43. A Middling and a British People.

44. And a Restless People.

45. The Tidewater.

46. The Chesapeake Economy.

47. Beyond the Fall Line.

48. Boston.

49. New York.

50. The Middle Colonies.

51. The Carolinas.

52. Georgia.

Part VII: The Colonial Golden Age:.

53. How Golden the Age?.

54. Slavery.

55. Education.

56. The Enlightenment.

Part VIII: Why, Then, Independence?.

57. The French and Indian War (1756-1763) and the frontier struggle.

58. The Old Colonial System - cui bono?.

59. The West and The Indians.

60. The Patriot King.

61. The Stamp Act.

62. Riots and Rebellion.

63. "Tyranny" and "Tea Deum.".

64. The First Continental Congress.

65. The War of Independence.

66. The Treaty of Paris.

67. How and Why?.

68. The Legacy.

The Significance of the War.

L'Envoi.

Chronologies.

Bibliographies.

Index.

"Esmond Wright's Search for Liberty is all that we have come to expect from the author of many books - wonderful skills of synthesis and narrative history, noted for his wit and wisdom. Although Wright is respectful of new methodologies, he is not governed by them, for he is at heart a storyteller, whose deft portraits of heroes and villains, as well of great historians such as Francis Parkman and S. E. Morison, add to this richly textured fabric of early American history." Professor Don Higginbotham, The University of North Carolina

"This will be a truly outstanding series. Wright's history is a smooth-flowing mix of narration of events, bibliographic essays, biographical sketches, and balanced examination of conflicting theories on disputed historical activities. Overall, a highly reasonable work that should stimulate anyone who reads it." Choice

Esmond Wright is a graduate of the Universites of Durham in England and of Virginia in the United States. After serving in the British Eighth Army in the Second World War, he pursued an academic career, teaching at the Universities of Glasgow, London, Yale, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Ohio State. From 1970 to 1983 he was director of the Institute of US Studies at the University of London. This is a history of the region now known as the United States of America, from earliest times to the American victory over the British and the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The book charts the arrival of the first Americans through Alaska, millennia before the coming of the Norsemen, or of Cabot, Columbus and Raleigh. It tells of the sixteenth-century incursions by the Spanish, French and English, their interaction with the American Indians, and describes the early settlements, their culture, activities and trade. The author traces the rise to dominance of the British settlers, and the establishment of the whole of East America within the British Empire. The book closes with an account of the war with the British and of Washington's final triumph.

A key feature of colonial America was contained in the tension between the strong European tradition and the struggle for a new definition of national cultural and political identity. The European colonizers dreamed of liberty, of the freedom to live and to worship as they chose, and of the opportunities of enterprise untrammelled by the constraints of European society, yet they both demanded and needed the protection and resources of the colonial power. Surveying the development of the ideal, the author examines the Puritan dream of the City of God on earth and its less than perfect manifestations in New England. He describes colonial life in the golden age of mercantile expansion, the reasons for its collapse and the new drive for independence, and traces the origins then of the ideals of liberty incorporated in the Declaration of Independence.