Richard Hakluyt the younger, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, advocated the creation of English colonies in the New World at a time when the advantages of this idea were far from self-evident. This book describes in detail the life and times of Hakluyt, a trained minister who became an editor of travel accounts. Hakluyt’s Promise demonstrates his prominent role in the establishment of English America as well as his interests in English opportunities in the East Indies. The volume presents nearly 50 illustrations—many unpublished since the sixteenth century—and offers a fresh view of Hakluyt’s milieu and the central concerns of the Elizabethan age.
Though he never traveled farther than Paris, young Hakluyt spent much of the 1580s recording information about the western hemisphere and became an international authority on overseas exploration. The book traces his rise to prominence as a source of information and inspiration for England’s policy makers, including the queen, and his advocacy for colonies in Roanoke and Jamestown. Hakluyt’s thought was shaped by debates that stretched across Europe, and his interests ranged just as widely, encompassing such topics as peaceful coexistence with Native Americans, the New World as a Protestant Holy Land, and in, his later life, trade with the Spice Islands.

Hakluyt s Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America

History

Mancall, Peter C.

Europe

Yale University Press

The most comprehensive portrait yet of Richard Hakluyt, indefatigable promoter of English colonization in America Richard Hakluyt the younger, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, advocated the creation of English colonies in the New World at a time when the advantages of this idea were far from self-evident. This book describes in detail the life and times of Hakluyt, a trained minister who became an editor of travel accounts. Hakluyt’s Promise demonstrates his prominent role in the establishment of English America as well as his interests in English opportunities in the East Indies. The volume presents nearly 50 illustrations—many unpublished since the sixteenth century—and offers a fresh view of Hakluyt’s milieu and the central concerns of the Elizabethan age.
Though he never traveled farther than Paris, young Hakluyt spent much of the 1580s recording information about the western hemisphere and became an international authority on overseas exploration. The book traces his rise to prominence as a source of information and inspiration for England’s policy makers, including the queen, and his advocacy for colonies in Roanoke and Jamestown. Hakluyt’s thought was shaped by debates that stretched across Europe, and his interests ranged just as widely, encompassing such topics as peaceful coexistence with Native Americans, the New World as a Protestant Holy Land, and in, his later life, trade with the Spice Islands.

Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

A new look at Thomas Morton, his controversial colonial philosophy, and his lengthy feud with the Puritans Adding new depth to our understanding of early New England society, this riveting account of Thomas Morton explores the tensions that arose from competing colonial visions. A lawyer and fur trader, Thomas Morton dreamed of a society where Algonquian peoples and English colonists could coexist. Infamous for dancing around a maypole in defiance of his Pilgrim neighbors, Morton was reviled by the Puritans for selling guns to the Natives. Colonial authorities exiled him three separate times from New England, but Morton kept returning to fight for his beliefs. This compelling counter-narrative to the familiar story of the Puritans combines a rich understanding of the period with a close reading of early texts to bring the contentious Morton to life. This volume sheds new light on the tumultuous formative decades of the American experience.

The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England

Historical

This collection of documents gives twenty-first century readers a glimpse of the time when the possibility of colonizing North America was anything but certain. Pamphlets, accounts, and engravings from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century capture the process of English colonization from its origins in promotional propaganda to its realization on the shores of North America.

Envisioning America: English Plans for the Colonization of North America, 1580-1640 (Bedford Series in History and Culture)

Americas

Bedford/St.Martin's

Envisioning America and What Did the Declaration Declare?

Ellis, Joseph J.

World Turned Upside Down & Envisioning America

Comics & Graphic Novels

Calloway, Colin G.

Graphic Novels

Envisioning America & Trial of Mary Queen of Scots & Christopher Columbus and the Enterprise of the Indies

Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth

Sullivan, Blair

Symcox, Geoffrey

The English explorer Henry Hudson devoted his life to the search for a water route through America, becoming the first European to navigate the Hudson River in the process. In Fatal Journey, acclaimed historian and biographer Peter C. Mancall narrates Hudson's final expedition.
In the winter of 1610, after navigating dangerous fields of icebergs near the northern tip of Labrador, Hudson's small ship became trapped in winter ice. Provisions grew scarce and tensions mounted amongst the crew. Within months, the men mutinied, forcing Hudson, his teenage son, and seven other men into a skiff, which they left floating in the Hudson Bay.
A story of exploration, desperation, and icebound tragedy, Fatal Journey vividly chronicles the undoing of the great explorer, not by an angry ocean, but at the hands of his own men.

Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson

Travel

Basic Books

An acclaimed historian tells the tale of Henry Hudson's doomed final voyage in search of sea passage across the New World. In 1610, the English mariner Henry Hudson set off on a journey to find the Northwest Passage, the famed water route that all Europeans hoped would speed the time of travel to East Asia. But Hudson's search for the Northwest Passage did not go well. Taking a far northerly route past Iceland, Hudson and his crew on the ship Discovery passed through fields of dangerous icebergs as they rounded the northern tip of Labrador. Braving the harsh arctic climate, the Discovery entered what would eventually become known as Hudson Bay. By winter, the ship was trapped in ice near the shores of James Bay. Provisions grew scarce, tensions among crew-members flared, and when the ice began to thaw the following June, members of his crew mutinied. They forced Hudson, his teenage son, and seven other men onto a shallow-bottomed boat and pushed them away. Historian Peter C. Mancall's "Fatal Journey" is the first book to tell the full story of Hudson and the other 23 men who set sail from London in April 1610. Based on an extraordinary array of primary sources, including narratives from the expedition itself, testimony offered in two trials of the survivors, and indigenous sources from the Hudson Bay area, "Fatal Journey" teases out what the experience must have been like for the men on Discovery. An exhilarating narrative of exploration, desperation, and icebound tragedy, "Fatal Journey" vividly chronicles the undoing of a great explorer-not by an angry ocean, but at the hands of his own men.

Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture along the Upper Susquehanna, 1700–1800

Valley of Opportunity recreates an age when Indians, colonists, and post-Revolutionary settlers embraced a similar dream: to create a successful economy in the rural hinterland of the middle colonies. Peter C. Mancall draws on abundant evidence from seldom-used archives in the region, as well as from libraries on both sides of the Atlantic, to reconstruct their daily economic life. 
The author describes the varied economic transformations that took place in the area, considering these changes from an environmental as well as an economic standpoint. He shows how different groups of people perceived the resources of the region and how their perceptions shaped settlement patterns, land use, and the formation of commercial networks. Ultimately, each of the three peoples looked beyond the mountains that set the boundaries of their physical world and tried to establish ties to the larger commercial network that linked North America to Europe.
Mancall offers connections between the development of a particular region, previously overlooked by most historians, and the wide pattern of American economic change. He breaks through old ethnocentric barriers of settlement history by portraying Indian people in their full diversity and by including Indians and whites as actors of comparable significance, and he shows how attitudes that developed in the colonial period affected economic patterns well beyond the Revolution. Integrating a range of disciplines, from anthropology through ecology and geography to zoology, he seeks to answer the questions: what did different groups of people make of the natural resources of this river valley and how did they allocate the rewards? His answers provide a novel overview of the economic culture of the eighteenth century.
Studded with sharp insights and attention-catching quotations that mirror everyday life of the times, Valley of Opportunity will appeal to those interested in the development of the American economy, the impact of the Revolution on urban Americans, and the relations between the peoples who together created a vibrant world along the edges of European settlement in North America.

Business & Money

Economics

Cornell University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mancall, Peter C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Mancall, Peter C.