The Fur Trade in Colonial New York, 1686-1776
Author: Thomas Elliot Norton
Publisher:
Published: 1974-01-01
Total Pages: 255
ISBN-13: 9780608019161
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Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America
Author: Eric Jay Dolin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-07-05
Total Pages: 494
ISBN-13: 0393079244
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA Seattle Times selection for one of Best Non-Fiction Books of 2010 Winner of the New England Historial Association's 2010 James P. Hanlan Award Winner of the Outdoor Writers Association of America 2011 Excellence in Craft Award, Book Division, First Place "A compelling and well-annotated tale of greed, slaughter and geopolitics." —Los Angeles Times As Henry Hudson sailed up the broad river that would one day bear his name, he grew concerned that his Dutch patrons would be disappointed in his failure to find the fabled route to the Orient. What became immediately apparent, however, from the Indians clad in deer skins and "good furs" was that Hudson had discovered something just as tantalizing. The news of Hudson's 1609 voyage to America ignited a fierce competition to lay claim to this uncharted continent, teeming with untapped natural resources. The result was the creation of an American fur trade, which fostered economic rivalries and fueled wars among the European powers, and later between the United States and Great Britain, as North America became a battleground for colonization and imperial aspirations. In Fur, Fortune, and Empire, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin chronicles the rise and fall of the fur trade of old, when the rallying cry was "get the furs while they last." Beavers, sea otters, and buffalos were slaughtered, used for their precious pelts that were tailored into extravagant hats, coats, and sleigh blankets. To read Fur, Fortune, and Empire then is to understand how North America was explored, exploited, and settled, while its native Indians were alternately enriched and exploited by the trade. As Dolin demonstrates, fur, both an economic elixir and an agent of destruction, became inextricably linked to many key events in American history, including the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812, as well as to the relentless pull of Manifest Destiny and the opening of the West. This work provides an international cast beyond the scope of any Hollywood epic, including Thomas Morton, the rabble-rouser who infuriated the Pilgrims by trading guns with the Indians; British explorer Captain James Cook, whose discovery in the Pacific Northwest helped launch America's China trade; Thomas Jefferson who dreamed of expanding the fur trade beyond the Mississippi; America's first multimillionaire John Jacob Astor, who built a fortune on a foundation of fur; and intrepid mountain men such as Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith, who sliced their way through an awe inspiring and unforgiving landscape, leaving behind a mythic legacy still resonates today. Concluding with the virtual extinction of the buffalo in the late 1800s, Fur, Fortune, and Empire is an epic history that brings to vivid life three hundred years of the American experience, conclusively demonstrating that the fur trade played a seminal role in creating the nation we are today.
The Struggle for Power in Colonial America, 1607–1776
Author: William R. Nester
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2017-10-11
Total Pages: 371
ISBN-13: 1498565964
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmerica’s colonial era began and ended dramatically, with the founding of the first enduring settlement at Jamestown on May 14, 1607 and the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. During those 169 years, conflicts were endemic and often overlapping among the colonists, between the colonists and the original inhabitants, between the colonists and other imperial European peoples, and between the colonists and the mother country. As conflicts were endemic, so too were struggles for power. This study reveals the reasons for, stages, and results of these conflicts. The dynamic driving this history are two inseparable transformations as English subjects morphed into American citizens, and the core American cultural values morphed from communitarianism and theocracy into individualism and humanism. These developments in turn were shaped by the changing ways that the colonists governed, made money, waged war, worshipped, thought, wrote, and loved. Extraordinary individuals led that metamorphosis, explorers like John Smith and Daniel Boone, visionaries like John Winthrop and Thomas Jefferson, entrepreneurs like William Phips and John Hancock, dissidents like Rogers Williams and Anne Hutchinson, warriors like Miles Standish and Benjamin Church, free spirits like Thomas Morton and William Byrd, and creative writers like Anne Bradstreet and Robert Rogers. Then there was that quintessential man of America’s Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin. And finally, George Washington who, more than anyone, was responsible for winning American independence when and how it happened.
The Encyclopedia of New York State
Author: Peter Eisenstadt
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2005-05-19
Total Pages: 1960
ISBN-13: 9780815608080
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Encyclopedia of New York State is one of the most complete works on the Empire State to be published in a half-century. In nearly 2,000 pages and 4,000 signed entries, this single volume captures the impressive complexity of New York State as a historic crossroads of people and ideas, as a cradle of abolitionism and feminism, and as an apex of modern urban, suburban, and rural life. The Encyclopedia is packed with fascinating details from fields ranging from sociology and geography to history. Did you know that Manhattan's Lower East Side was once the most populated neighborhood in the world, but Hamilton County in the Adirondacks is the least densely populated county east of the Mississippi; New York is the only state to border both the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean; the Erie Canal opened New York City to rich farmland upstate . . . and to the west. Entries by experts chronicle New York's varied areas, politics, and persuasions with a cornucopia of subjects from environmentalism to higher education to railroads, weaving the state's diverse regions and peoples into one idea of New York State. Lavishly illustrated with 500 photographs and figures, 120 maps, and 140 tables, the Encyclopedia is key to understanding the state's past, present, and future. It is a crucial reference for students, teachers, historians, and business people, for New Yorkers of all persuasions, and for anyone interested in finding out more about New York State.
Cadwallader Colden, 1688–1776
Author: Philip Ranlet
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2019-10-29
Total Pages: 503
ISBN-13: 076187142X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this book, Philip Ranlet examines the prolific political career of Cadwallader Colden. Colden was the long lasting lieutenant governor of royal New York. A determined foe of entrenched interests in New York such as the manor lords, the lawyers, and the fur smugglers, he remained a vigorous supporter of the royal prerogative. He handled Indian relations for many years and was the first true historian of the Iroquois. Also one of the preeminent scientists of the colonial period and the Enlightenment itself, he established botany in America and also tried to revise the work of Sir Isaac Newton. Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden continued to battle the enemies ofBritish rule until his death during the American Revolution in 1776 at 88 years old.
Set in Stone
Author: Kenneth Shefsiek
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-02-23
Total Pages: 316
ISBN-13: 1438464371
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWinner of the 2017 Hendricks Award presented by the New Netherland Institute In 1678, seven French-speaking Protestant families established the village of New Paltz in the Hudson River Valley of New York. Life on the edge of European settlement presented many challenges, but a particular challenge for these ethnic Walloon families, originally from the southern Spanish Netherlands, was that they lived in a Dutch cultural region in an English colony. In Set in Stone, Kenneth Shefsiek explores how the founders and their descendants reacted to and perpetuated this multiethnic cultural environment for generations. As the founding families controlled their town economically and politically, they creatively and selectively blended the cultures available to them. They allowed their Walloon culture to slip away early in the village's history, but they continued to combine Dutch and English cultures for more than 150 years. When they finally abandoned the last vestiges of Dutch culture in the early nineteenth century, they did so just as descendants of English colonists began to claim that the national commitment to liberty and freedom was grounded in the nation's English heritage. Not willing to be marginalized, descendants of the New Paltz Walloons constructed an alternative national narrative, placing their ancestors at the very center of the American story.
North America’s Indian Trade in European Commerce and Imagination, 1580-1850
Author: George Colpitts
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2013-11-29
Total Pages: 315
ISBN-13: 9004259988
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn North America's Indian Trade in European Commerce and Imagination, Colpitts offers new perspectives on Europe's contact with America by examining the ideas, debates and questions arising in the trading that linked newcomers with Native people. European capitalization of the Indian Trade, beginning in the 16th century, forced newcomers to confront the meaning and legitimacy of traditional gift economies and assess the vice and virtue of the commerce they pursued in the New World. Making use of French and English colonization texts, published narratives and state colonial papers, the author explores how European capital investments, credit, profits and commercial linkages elaborated and complicated understandings of North American people in the period of colonization.
The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire
Author: Francis Jennings
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1984
Total Pages: 468
ISBN-13: 9780393303025
DOWNLOAD EBOOKContinues: The invasion of America. 1976, c1975.
Atlantic American Societies
Author: Alan Karras
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2002-03-11
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 1134894074
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWithin the chronological framework of Implantation, Maturation and Transition, this book provides the history of European expansion in the Americas from the age of Columbus through the abolition of slavery. Suggesting a shift in the traditional units of analysis away from nationally defined boundaries, this volume considers all of the Americas - and Africa - to encourage students to see the larger interimperial issues which governed behaviour in both the new world and the old. It also provides students with a mechanism for viewing interimperial rivalries from the largest possible perspective, by focusing, not only on commercial and demographic history and military and economic interaction between metropolitan regions and their colonies, but on the interdependence of European, African, and Amerindian peoples and culture.
Facing East from Indian Country
Author: Daniel K. Richter
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009-06-01
Total Pages: 329
ISBN-13: 0674042727
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States. Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating. In rediscovering early America as Indian country, Richter employs the historian's craft to challenge cherished assumptions about times and places we thought we knew well, revealing Native American experiences at the core of the nation's birth and identity.
