The Cambridge History of America and the World: Volume 1, 1500-1820

The first volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines how the United States emerged out of a series of colonial interactions, some involving indigenous empires and communities that were already present when the first Europeans reached the Americas, others the adventurers and settlers dispatched by Europe's imperial powers to secure their American claims, and still others men and women brought as slaves or indentured servants to the colonies that European settlers founded. Collecting the thoughts of dynamic scholars working in the fields of early American, Atlantic, and global history, the volume presents an unrivalled portrait of the human richness and global connectedness of early modern America. Essay topics include exploration and environment, conquest and commerce, enslavement and emigration, dispossession and endurance, empire and independence, new forms of law and new forms of worship, and the creation and destruction when the peoples of four continents met in the Americas. Contents Figures Maps List of Contributors to Volume I General Introduction: What is America and the World? Introduction: What Does America and the World “Mean” before 1825? Part I. Geographies 1. Changing American Geographies 2. Maritime Borderlands 3. The Americas and the Contested Aquatic World of the Atlantic, Indian, and the Pacific Oceans 4. Extractive Industries and the Transformation of American Environments Part II. People 5. Jews, Muslims, Pagans, and America 6. Statelessness, Subjecthood, and the Early American Past 7. Mobility and the Movement of Peoples 8. How Native Americans Shaped Early America Part III. Empires 9. The Early Iberian American World 10. Making Colonies and Empires in North America and the Greater Caribbean 11. Imperial Wars, Imperial Reforms 12. Law and Empire, 1500 - 1812 Part IV. Circulation/Connections 13. West Africa, 1500 - 1825 14. The Commercial Worlds of Early America 15. Uncertain America: Settler Colonies, the Circulation of Ideas, and the Vexed Situation of Early American Thought 16. America and the Pacific: The View from the Beach Part V. Institutions 17. Slavery, Captivity, and the Slave Trade in Colonial North America’s Global Connections 18. A Maritime World 19. Antislavery in America, 1760 1820: Comparisons, Contours, Contexts 20. Women, Gender, Families, and States 21. Empires and the Boundaries of Religion Part VI. Revolutions 22. Independence and Union: Imperfect Unions in Revolutionary Anglo America 23. Atlantic Revolutions 24. Citizenship 25. The United States and the Americas Index "The Cambridge history of America and the world offers a transformative account of American engagement in the world from 1500 to the present. Representing new scholarship informed by the transnational turn in the writing of US history and American foreign relations, the four-volume reference work gives sustained attention to key moments in US diplomacy, from the Revolutionary War and the Monroe Doctrine to the US rise as a world power in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. The volumes also cast a more inclusive scholarly net to include transnational histories of Native America, the Atlantic world, slavery, political economy, borderlands, empire, the family, gender and sexuality, race, technology, and the environment. Collectively, they offer essential starting points for readers coming to the field for the first time and serve as a critical vehicle for moving this scholarship in innovative new directions"--Page 4 of cover This volume examines how the United States emerged out of a series of commercial, colonial, and imperial encounters. Collecting the thoughts of dynamic scholars working in the fields of early American, Atlantic, and global history, it presents an unrivalled portrait of the human richness and global connectedness of early modern America.