内容
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.
