Greene, Jack. Pursuit of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

== Summary ==
This
book proposes a “social development” model to understand the emergence of
American cultural patterns. This model sees colonial development going through
three distinct stages: simplification (disorientation/new environment) to
Elaboration (acculturation/adaption/settlement and population expansion) to
Replication (acceptance). It thus challenges the assumption that the
development of American culture can be told within a framework derived from the
New England experience and treat the southern colonial experience as an
exception; this is what Greene defines as the “Declension Model.” Greene
contends that American culture emerged beginning around 1660 as a product of
the social convergence of the four broad cultural regions – the Chesapeake, New
England, the Middle Colonies, and the Lower South. Far from being a peripheral
area (deviant), the southern colonies and states were before 1800, the mainstream
of British-American development. It was a region that, he argues, exemplified
the most important element of British-American culture: the conception of
America as a place in which free people could pursue their own individual
happinesses in safety and with a fair prospect. Thus, New England was more of
the deviant region, rather than the normative. 
See also: Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom