This volume is the eleventh in a series devoted to presenting a transcription of the surviving serial manuscript records for the town of Wilmington, Essex County, New York, in the High Peaks region of the Adirondack Mountains. This volume of transcribed W
This heavily illustrated tour guide to the Adirondacks region was originally published in 1874. Stoddard, professional photographer and native of upstate New York, provides witty descriptions and practical information for visitors.
When we think of the key figures of early American history, we think of explorers, or pilgrims, or Native Americans--not cattle, or goats, or swine. But as Virginia DeJohn Anderson reveals in this brilliantly original account of colonists in New England and the Chesapeake region, livestock played a vitally important role in the settling of the New World. Livestock, Anderson writes, were a central factor in the cultural clash between colonists and Indians as well as a driving force in the expansion west. By bringing livestock across the Atlantic, colonists believed that they provided the means to realize America's potential. It was thought that if the Native Americans learned to keep livestock as well, they would be that much closer to assimilating the colonists' culture, especially their Christian faith. But colonists failed to anticipate the problems that would arise as Indians began encountering free-ranging livestock at almost every turn, often trespassing in their cornfields. Moreover, when growing populations and an expansive style of husbandry required far more space than they had expected, colonists could see no alternative but to appropriate Indian land. This created tensions that reached the boiling point with King Philip's War and Bacon's Rebellion. And it established a pattern that would repeat time and again over the next two centuries. A stunning account that presents our history in a truly new light, Creatures of Empire restores a vital element of our past, illuminating one of the great forces of colonization and the expansion westward.
This book is the result of more than fifteen years of research. The study has been carried on, partly in libraries and town records, partly by conferences with descendants of potters and others familiar with their history, and partly by actual digging on the sites of potteries. The excavation method has proved most successful in showing what our New England potters were making at an early period now almost unrepresented by surviving specimens.