| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World. Ed. by Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xvi, 368 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8122-3853-2. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8122-1903-1.)

The editors of this anthology assert that Jamestown and early Virginia are best understood not as the beginning of U.S. history, but rather as a part of the early modern Atlantic world. Such a perspective, they suggest, allows us to see this society in the way that contemporaries did. This understanding is further enhanced by the insights of literary scholars, archaeologists, and other nonhistorians who have begun to focus on early America. The contributions of students of art and literature are especially important because early Virginia and its connections to the wider Atlantic world were shaped much by representations that necessarily and sometimes deliberately distorted physical reality. These themes are echoed and elaborated in Karen Ordahl Kupperman's foreword and Constance Jordan's concluding essay. Although hardly a departure from much of the scholarship of the past two decades, it is useful to have these ideas enunciated in a coherent and extensive fashion.

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