Preface
Prologue: Worlds Collide
Part I: Planters, 1607-1640
1: Brave Heroic Minds
2: Earth's Only Paradise
3: Each Man Shall Have His Share
4: The Vast and Furious Ocean
5: Full of Wild Beasts and Wild Men
6: A City upon a Hill
7: To Clearer Light and More Liberty
8: In Darkness and the Shadow of Death
Part II: Saints, 1640-1675
9: Calamities of our Brethren
10: Marching Manfully On
11: Devouring Caterpillars and Gnawing Worms
12: A Heap of Troubles and Confusion
13: Have You Better Hearts Than Your Forefathers?
14: Alas! Our Nehemiahs Are Gone
Part III: Warriors, 1675-1692
15: Exquisite Torments and Inhumane Barbarities
16: Juggling Parasites and the Giddy Multitude
17: A Swarm Out of That Hive
18: New England Their Native Land
19: The Little Daughter of New England in America
20: With Devils and Damned Spirits
Epilogue: New Worlds
Index
Malcolm Gaskill is Professor of Early Modern History at the
University of East Anglia. Educated at Cambridge University, he has
taught at several UK universities and was formerly Fellow and
Director of Studies at Churchill College, Cambridge. An authority
on witchcraft and witch-trials, he is the author of numerous books
and articles on the social and cultural history of England between
the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, including Witchcraft: a Very
Short
Introduction(2010), also published by Oxford University Press.
Students and researchers will certainly benefit from reading
Between Two Worlds. Gaskill has illuminated a wealth of new
evidence about the lives of Americas earliest English
settlers...
*Misha Ewen, The Seventeenth Century.*
Malcolm Gaskill has taken on a daunting challenge. He aims at
nothing less than providing a general interpretative history of
England's seventeenth-century New World colonies, all of them, from
Newfoundland to Barbados. That he offers a strikingly original
account of the conquest and settlement of English America makes
Gaskill's splendidly written book even more impressive.
* T.H. Breen New England Quarterly*
One of this book's greatest strengths is its suitability for a wide
readership of experts, students, and enthusiasts. Historians will
be satisfied with the quality, relevance, and importance of
Gaskill's central arguments, which are effectively developed
throughout the book, but the lively prose, illustrations, and the
breadth of the narrative also positions this book extremely well
both for adoption in undergraduate and graduate classrooms and for
prominent placement in commercial bookstores.
*Ken MacMillan, Journal of British Studies*
Gaskill has written an absorbing and ambitious tale
*Reviews in History*
Gaskill's work may pave the way for future Atlantic historians to
elaborate on not only the differences in colonization patterns
among the European nations, but also, what these differences meant
for the colonists and the way they perceived themselves in relation
to the mother country
*Madison Historical Review*
According to Malcolm Gaskill's lively history of the first century
of colonization, the last thing these intrepid emigrants intended
to do was give birth to America... A powerful antidote to
narratives that celebrate an exceptionalist American history
untethered to its English past
*Times Literary Supplement*
Malcolm Gaskill's absorbing account of 17th-century English
colonisation in various parts of North America works against the
grain of preconception to restore "a neglected dimension of the
history of England".
*The Guardian*
Gaskill's chapter headings are as colourful as his prose, which is
also taut, direct and orderly... His hold on overlapping narratives
remains impressive and confident. In fact the book may appeal most
to those who want a rollicking adventure story, told with pace and
much detail.
*History Today*
beautifully written, sweeping and yet fine-grained account ...
There are many fine books on British and Irish migration to
colonial America, and this deserves a foremost place among them,
not least for its originality in being as much about England as it
is about America ... Throughout this account, his scholarship and
originality are worn lightly
*Donald M. MacRaild, Times Higher Education*
Gaskill has presented us with a work of impressive scope, and also
great depth ... This book represents an important contribution to
our understanding of the earliest years of American history, while
also reminding us of how America in turn shaped England and its
early imperial history.
*Joan Redmond, Reviews in History*
An entertaining romp through kaleidoscopic images of colonists
coping with the shock of the new while clinging to the older
verities of their origins . . . Readers can delight in Gaskill's
winning narration of the old certainties in a new style.
*Wall Street Journal*
The conversion of English adventurers into American pioneers
emerges, beautifully and brutally.
*New Yorker*
This book is not meant to be a history of 17th century America,
though it succeeds rather well in that regard. Gaskill instead
seeks to chart the development of a distinctive American identity
in the new world. He succeeds quite brilliantly.
*Gerard de Groot, The Times*
[An] elegant and vivacious narrative ... Gaskill, who has dug deep
in the primary sources, imposes order on an extraordinary range of
material.
*Blair Worden, Literary Review*
extraordinary scholarship
*Independent, Rachel Trethewey*
Malcolm Gaskill re-creates the Englishness of early America in a
transatlantic history that is deeply researched yet vividly told.
Through his epic stories of adventure we gain a new appreciation of
the planters, saints and warriors who established the English roots
of modern America - men and women who helped make a New World out
of the culture and language of the Old.
*David Reynolds, author of America, Empire of Liberty*
Between Two Worlds offers a comprehensive history of the English
people's experience in America in the seventeenth century, in its
continuing and changing relation to events in England. By including
people in all the colonies and at all levels of society, we gain a
true and compelling picture of these experiences.
*Karen Kupperman, author of The Jamestown Project*
A well-written, refreshing examination of seventeenth-century
America (including both mainland and Caribbean settlements) from
the English perspective. Written by an accomplished English
historian, Between Two Worlds will provide readers with many new
insights into the conservative English people who became Americans
almost in spite of themselves.
*Mary Beth Norton, Professor of American History at Cornell
University and author of In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft
Crisis of 1692*
This is a superb book. It could stand alone as a sweeping and
comprehensive account of the first century of English settlement in
The New World. But Malcolm Gaskill goes further and offers us a
fascinating view of the formation of an English America in which
colonists gradually become Americans and the English at home become
increasingly distant. Between Two Worlds is simply the best book on
the subject.
*James Horn, author of A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the
Birth of America*
We don't really know ourselves until we travel elsewhere. For those
who thought they knew their American or British history, Malcolm
Gaskill's new book does just that. He takes two familiar histories
that are often told separately, of England and colonial America,
and shows how inseparable they actually were. Between Two Worlds is
not just beautifully written and grippingly told-it is also
arrestingly original.
*Andrew Preston, author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith:
Religion in American War and Diplomacy*
This is the finest book that I have read for showing how the first
English colonies in America influenced the homeland, and vice
versa. In the process, it shows splendidly how complex and divisive
the experience of settlement was, and yet how much it already
shaped the future United States.
*Ronald Hutton*
Gaskill presents us with a nuanced portrait of a searching and
uncertain colonial people trying to make sense of an England whose
changing social order and customs had seemingly left them
behind.
*Michael Householder, American Historical Review*
Gaskill is to be commended for this remarkably nuanced history
which shows how colonial encounters transformed mentalities on both
sides of the Atlantic. It offers a compelling account of how
questions of identity, exile, discovery, loyalty and courage were
transformed as they crossed colonial frontiers.
*Naomi Pullin, English Historical Review*
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