William Penn, a well placed English gentlemen and a Quaker, turned an old debt into a charter for the proprietary colony called "Pennsylvania," (all the land between New Jersey and Maryland) Penn took great pains in setting up his colony; twenty drafts survive of his First Frame of Government, the colony's 1682 constitution. Penn was determined to deal fairly and maintain friendly relations with the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians. He laid out in great detail the city of Philadelphia as well as organized other settlements and established the Free Society of Traders to control commerce with England. He sent back glowing accounts of the colony to his English friends and patrons. This Letter to the Free Society of Traders, published in 1683, has been recognized as the most effective of his promotional tracts. And it proved successful; by 1700 Pennsylvania's population reached 21,000.

General George Washington and the patriot leaders faced an enormous challenge in mounting a military campaign against the British forces during the revolutionary war. For soldiers, they drew upon existing state militias and also raised a Continental army. But no such source for a naval force existed. Instead, Washington's officers acquired the services of American captains and sailors by commissioning them as privateers, or private citizens authorized to attack a military enemy. Colonists had long experience serving as privateers for the British forces during numerous eighteenth-century wars against Spain, France, and the Netherlands. They now turned their skills against Great Britain. Andrew Sherburne's memoirs capture the youth's enthusiastic desire to participate in the military campaign against the British; many others were less enthusiastic about their military service due to its infrequent pay and poor living conditions.

In the late 17th-century, Spain's empire in the Americas extended north to New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California, where Spanish soldiers, settlers, and missionaries began to settle. The missionaries resettled the indigenous Pueblo people into peasant communities, building forts and missions to subdue and convert them to Catholicism. The New Mexico Pueblo people resisted Spanish conversion efforts and forced labor demands. Their sporadic resistance became a concerted rebellion in 1680 under the leadership of the charismatic El Pope. The revolt was the most successful of Native American efforts to turn back European colonists, and for over a decade the Pueblos were free from intrusion. But in 1690 the Pueblos were weakened by drought and Apache and Comanche raiders from the north. Spain retook territory and interrogated and punished the rebels in their "reconquest" of the Pueblo. A Keresan Pueblo man called Pedro Naranjo offered his view of the rebellion and its causes.

Wealthy planters from the Caribbean island of Barbados settled in Carolina in the late seventeenth century and turned Carolina's farms into large plantations that concentrated on growing rice. This transformation was enabled by the many enslaved Africans in the colonies who had grown rice as free men and women in West Africa; scholars have traced the origins of Carolina and Georgia's rice culture back to those African rice fields. In this letter, Johann Martin Bolzius described rice cultivation's highly skilled but backbreaking labor, and the colonies' task system of work. Each slave was assigned a particular duty and, after completing the day's tasks, might have some time to him or herself. Bolzius had left Halle, Germany, in 1733 on route to the new colony of Georgia where he lived upriver from Savannah. He wrote this letter in the form of a questionnaire, providing a vivid description of agriculture and life in the new colony.

Economic and social power became concentrated in late seventeenth-century Virginia, leaving laborers and servants with restricted economic independence. Governor William Berkeley feared rebellion: "six parts of Seven at least are Poore, Indebted, Discontented and Armed." Planter Nathaniel Bacon focused inland colonists' anger at local Indians, who they felt were holding back settlement, and at a distant government unwilling to aid them. In the summer and fall of 1676, Bacon and his supporters rose up and plundered the elite's estates and slaughtered nearby Indians. Bacon's Declaration challenged the economic and political privileges of the governor's circle of favorites, while announcing the principle of the consent of the people. Bacon's death and the arrival of a British fleet quelled this rebellion, but Virginia's planters long remembered the spectacle of white and black acting together to challenge authority.

Francis Daniel Pastorius arrived in Pennsylvania in 1683, commissioned by the Frankfort Land Company and a group of German merchants to obtain 15,000 acres of land for a settlement in the new colony of Pennsylvania. Pastorius, well educated in European universities, reported back to his friends in Germany. This report was later published as Positive Information From America, concerning the Country of Pennsylvania by a German who Traveled There (1684), a promotional tract to encourage other Germans to immigrate. Pastorius found the journey to be difficult but the prospects attractive. He remarked notably upon the ethnic and religious complexity of the colony. Pennsylvania attracted many colonists seeking religious freedom and communal prosperity. Pastorius went on to lead settlement of Mennonites and Quakers at Germantown.

John Dane, a tailor, was born in Berkhampstead, England, around 1612. In the late 1630s, which he recollects here as a period of "a great coming to New England," he and his family emigrated to Ipswich, Massachusetts. He died in Ipswich in 1684. Dane's parents, like many Puritan parents, raised their children to carry what historian Philip Greven calls an "inner disciplinarian" within their own consciences at all times. Dane's mother reminded him: "Go where you will, God will find you out." In this narrative, Dane, who always remembered her warning, related the temptations he faced over the course of his life--to steal, to accept the advances of women, to avoid church--and the prices he negotiated with an all-seeing God. (The spelling of this selection has been regularized to make it easier to read.)

Henry Hudson, employed by the Dutch India Company, anchored off of Manhattan in 1609 and traded with local Indians. Hudson then headed up the river (later named the Hudson River) seeking Northwest Passage to Asia. Other Dutch settlers soon followed. Delawares and Mahicans, who had been living along the coast of New Jersey and up the Hudson River when the Dutch arrived, were driven westward by expanding European settlements. The Reverend John Heckwelder, a Moravian missionary in the Ohio Valley, took down this particular narrative in the 1760s "as it was related to me by aged and respected" Delawares and Mahicans. Indian stories of the first encounters between Indians and Europeans often depicted the Europeans as "the great Mannitoo" or Supreme Being. This account went on to describe the trading and hospitality that followed the first encounter and the Europeans' eventual desire for land above all else.

On March 18, 1741, the first of a series of suspicious fires broke out in New York's Fort George. When a few weeks later a black man was seen running from the scene of one of these fires the cry went up: "The negroes are rising!" The extent of the plot, or even if there really was a plot, has never been absolutely proven. What is true is that the threat of a slave uprising was enough to send the city's white population into hysteria. Of the 181 people arrested during the "Great Negro Plot," 34 were sentenced to death and 72 were transported from New York. In this excerpt from the trials, several important witnesses provided evidence. Peggy was a white prostitute who lived in the home of John Hughson, a riverfront tavenkeeper and, like shoemaker John Romme, a receiver of stolen goods. Peggy's room was paid for by Caesar, a slave with whom she had a child. Today the trial transcripts are valuable for what they reveal about the shady, waterfront world shared by slaves, free blacks, and poor whites in 18th-century New York.

In the 1730s and 1740s many rural folk rejected the enlightened and rational religion that came from the cosmopolitan pulpits and port cities of British North America. Instead, they were attracted to the evangelical religious movement that became known as the Great Awakening. The English Methodist George Whitefield and other itinerant ministers ignited this popular movement with their speaking tours of the colonies. In this account farmer Nathan Cole described hearing the news of Whitefield's approach to his Connecticut town, as fields emptied and the populace converged: "I saw no man at work in his field, but all seemed to be gone. " Like many others during the Great Awakening, Cole achieved an eventual conversation by focusing not on intellectual issues but on emotional experience. Cole took away an egalitarian message about the spiritual equality of all before God, a message that confronted established authorities.

The entry of Europeans into the Indian's world caused a series of dislocations through disease, trade, and warfare. Indian leaders, who encountered new diplomatic and trading partners, found themselves caught between a familiar old and an unsettling new world. John Lawson, employed by Carolina's proprietor to explore the colony's backcounry and aspiring to a career as a natural scientist, spent months traveling through the Carolina interior in the company of colonists and Indians. This excerpt from Lawson's published account of the trip describes the final leg of the journey, when Lawson relied on Enoe Will, the chief of the Eno-Shakori. Will was a well known and trusted guide among colonial traders. He confided to Lawson that he feared he had alienated some of his own people, and now sought European protection. But Will remained close to his native religion and roundly rejected Lawson's offer of conversion to Christianity.

Tragically, contact between Indians and the Europeans extended beyond just trade goods; the invasion of foreign microbes devastated Indian communities well beyond the coastal region. When John Lawson visited the Carolina interior in the 1690s, he encountered the Congaree people, whose numbers and villages had been dramatically reduced by smallpox and other diseases. In 1660, Lawson, born into a London gentry family and aspiring to a career as a natural scientist, had set sail for the Carolina colony that was founded after the restoration of the British monarchy. He traveled more than a thousand miles as an employee of the colony's proprietors, who were eager to attract additional colonists and foster economic development. Lawson's keen eye for the native and non-native people, flora, and fauna of the region was evidenced in his journal A New Voyage to Carolina, published in 1709.

Samuel de Champlain was a trader, soldier, explorer, diplomat, and author. The critical figure in French efforts to establish the colony of New France along the St. Lawrence river, he set up a small trading post at Quebec, the capital of the colony, in 1608. Given the small numbers of French colonists and their primary interest in the fur trade, Champlain recognized that success depended on alliances with the native peoples of the northern region. In June 1609, Champlain and nine French soldiers joined a war party of Montganais, Algonkaian, and Hurons to fight their enemies, the Iroquois. They met their foe, probably about 200 Mohawks, along the lake later named Lake Champlain. The French firearms caused death and consternation among the Indians and introduced such weapons to native conflicts. Over the next decades, Champlain chronicled his explorations and observations of New France in several volumes, providing important information on life and warfare in seventeenth-century North America.

Over 20,000 migrants from England crossed the Atlantic to the new colony of Massachusetts Bay in the decade of the 1630s. This sudden influx of settlers became known to historians as the "Great Migration." Once in New England, they quickly dispersed to various towns. About forty families followed Sir Richard Saltonstall and the Reverend George Phillips four miles up the Charles River to found the community of Watertown in July 1630. Many had relocated from the East Anglian region of England, where William Pond, the correspondent's father, lived. These families attempted to set up a familiar farm economy based on grain and livestock, but early dreams of an easy trade with the Indians proved elusive. Their concerns focused on feeding themselves and achieving economic sufficiency.

After the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660, a group of proprietors received a royal grant to establish the colony of South Carolina. They envisioned an agricultural economy based on mixed farming, cattle raising, and trade in deerskins with the local Indians, diverging from the Chesapeake's tobacco and slave economy to the north. The Carolina proprietors sought settlers from the Caribbean by offering inexpensive land for family farms. But conditions were harsh, work was heavy, and poor nutrition was common, as Oxford University-educated Thomas Newe made clear in this 1682 letter to his father. A small minority of wealthy colonists seized economic and political control of the colony. They concentrated in the town of Charleston, drove out the local Indians, and occupied huge tracts of land. Deviating from the society that had been planned, these planters established rice cultivation, thanks to the African slaves whose experience in West Africa formed the basis for the economy. By 1707 South Carolina had the first black majority population in North America. Thomas Newe died within a year of writing these letters, at the age of 28.

Migration across the Atlantic often involved a series of stages, drawing people to London before they embarked on their journey. John Harrower, a 40-year-old shopkeeper and tradesman, lived in the far north of the British Isles. Like many of the 40,000 residents of the Scottish Highlands who left after 1760, he faced poverty and little opportunity. Harrower initially planned to travel to the Netherlands but ended up in London. The great metropolis, the largest in the western world, swelled as thousands looked unsuccessfully for employment. After several weeks, Harrower signed an indenture to travel to Virginia as a schoolmaster. He sailed with 71 other male indentees, some from London, but many others from across England and Ireland. With his relatively privileged training, Harrower was fortunate and found a new life on a tidewater plantation. These excerpts from his journal tell of his time in London, journey across the Atlantic, and arrival in Virginia.

Metacom or King Philip, leader of the Wampanoags near Plymouth colony, led many other Indians into a widespread revolt against the colonists of southern New England in 1675. The conflict had been brewing for some time over a set of longstanding grievances between Europeans and Indians. In that tense atmosphere, John Easton, Attorney General of the Rhode Island colony, met Philip in June of 1675 in an effort to negotiate a settlement. Easton recorded Philip's complaints, including the steady loss of Wampanoag land to the Europeans; the English colonists' growing herds of cattle and their destruction of Indian crops; and the unequal justice Indians received in the English courts. This meeting between Easton and Metacom proved futile, however, and the war (which became the bloodiest in U.S. history relative to the size of the population) began late that month.

Indian people of the Eastern Woodlands (northeastern North America) followed a seasonal schedule of hunting, fishing, gathering wild food, and the cultivation of crops. They relied upon cultivated crops such as corn, beans, and squash for much of their food. Men primarily provided the meat and fish, while women were responsible for supplying cultivated vegetables along with wild berries, nuts, and fruit. While men helped clear the fields, women did the planting, weeding, and harvesting in the warm months. Many European observers remarked upon what they saw as drudgery inflicted upon Indian women. However, Joseph-Franois Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary and writer, was also a keen ethnographic observer of the details of Iroquois life. In this account, he noted the similarities between farm women's work in Europe and among the Iroquois.

When Boston native Benjamin Franklin entered Philadelphia in 1723, he had few coins in his pocket and scarce entrepreneurial skills. However, Franklin did have valuable training as a printer, and he came armed with some significant introductions to local printers. Printers and other craftsmen relied upon a network of masters, journeymen, and patrons to learn the craft and support themselves. Colonial printers needed expensive imported equipment, yet they had to make do with a limited market for their services--perhaps publishing a newspaper, an occasional pamphlet, or government publication. Franklin wrote his autobiography, from which this account is excerpted, many years after his career as an active printer had ended and his renown as a statesmen, scientist, and moral philosopher had spread.