Becoming America
Subtitle: the revolution before 1776
By: Jon Butler.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 324
Subjects: United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775; United States -- Civilization -- To 1783
Description: "Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago - and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society - a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution.

Jon Butler's view of the colonies in this epoch reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history.".

"Becoming America shows us transformations before 1776 among an unusually diverse assortment of peoples. Here is a polyglot population of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty.".

"Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to Africans or Indians.

Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and remade itself many times during the next centuries - a society that, for ninety years before 1776, was becoming America."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 251-311) and index.