Alan Taylor’s “American Colonies”
January 3rd, 2010 at 8:10 pm ETIn this post, Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes a short list of American history titles cited by Professor Ari Kelman of UC Davis (and of the group blog The Edge of the American West) — titles chosen for the “non-expert reader seeking to understand America.”
I want to give my own special shout-out to one of the titles on Kelman’s list: American Colonies: The Settling of North America by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor. I read a fair amount of American and European history for pleasure, and this book (which I read in 2005) is certainly the most engaging book of North American history I read during the decade. In particular, it effectively illustrated for me, as no previous book had done, the extent to which the European settlement of North America was a complex interplay of political and social intrigue between the European settlers and Native American communities (and of American, British, French, Spanish, and Russian colonial interests, and of course the economic interests of large planters and manufacturers) that lasted for well over a century. From the moment I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down — the narrative of settlement, made up of dozens or hundreds of factions each acting in its own interests, propelled me forward.
The book also includes an annotated bibliography, which I remember aggressively mining at the time for further reading.
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Rich Mintz blogs on online fundraising and social media, American history and culture, bicycling and urbanism, food, technology, and other topics. Professionally, he's an expert in fundraising, constituency development, and social media for nonprofits, cultural organizations, cause-related marketers, and corporations. He is based in New York, where he serves as Vice President, Strategy, for 
January 3rd, 2010 at 9:40 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rich Mintz, larryhuynh. larryhuynh said: New blog post: Alan Taylor's "American Colonies" http://richmintz.com/2010/01/alan-taylors-american-colonies/ (via @richmintz) // exciting! [...]