A History of the American People: The Swarming of the English (1)

What with adventurers who were ungovernable and men of industry and ability who wished to be let alone, it was not an easy or a promising place in which to set up the authority of proprietors who were in England and had done nothing to help the men whom they meant to govern. Sir William Berkeley, nevertheless, being himself one of the proprietors, took the first step towards making good the rights of the new masters in 1664, when, by the authority of his associates, he commissioned William Drummond to act as governor among the people at Chowan and Perquimans. ―from Chapter VIII: “New Jersey and Carolina” Before he served as the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921, before he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, THOMAS WOODROW WILSON (1856–1924) was a lawyer and an academic: a university professor of history and politics, and president of Princeton University. It was during his tenure at Princeton that he penned this five-volume history of the United States, and it reflects many of the biases he later brought to national politics, from racial prejudice to anti-immigration attitudes. In Volume I, Wilson sets the stage for the European settlement of North America, as the Elizabethan age of discovery gives way to a new era of commerce and organization. With the arrival of the English in 1607, the curtain opens on a “swarming” of the continent, as colonies are founded and corporations established to mine the resource-rich wealth of the New World. From the Virginia Company and the landing on Plymouth to the impact of the English Civil War and Protestant revolution on the colonies, here is the beginning of the story of the American people. This beautiful replica of the 1902 first edition features all the original halftone illustrations. Students of Wilson and of the ever-changing lens through which history is told and retold will find this an enlightening and illuminating work.