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Home > Museum Shop > Books & Media > Jamestown, Québec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings
  Jamestown, Québec, Santa Fe:
Three North American Beginnings
By James C. Kelly and Barbara Clark Smith
Price: $34.95
If 1492 began a period of exploration, 1607 inaugurated another momentous chapter in world history—the colonization of America north of Mexico. This process of settlement was more than just a westward movement. English Jamestown was founded in 1607, followed by Québec, the center of French influence, the next year, and Santa Fe, the main source of Hispanic culture, another year later. Jamestown, Québec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings traces the little-known story of the creation of three centers from which English, French, and Spanish influence radiated across the continent.
Jamestown, Québec, Santa Fe shows the English expanding north from Virginia to New England and south to Carolina; the French moving south from the St. Lawrence Valley down the Mississippi to Louisiana; and the New Mexicans venturing into Arizona and across the plains of Texas. All three European groups had to deal with Native peoples already there. Significant commonalities and profound differences distinguish how they interacted with Native peoples and established their respective political, social, economic, and religious systems. The authors argue convincingly that what happened in the 1600s set in motion many of the forces that have shaped our society ever since and inaugurated some of our nation's enduring challenges: church-state conflict, multiculturalism, geopolitics, participatory government, economic individualism, racial equality, and Native dispossession.
James C. Kelly is director of museums at the Virginia Historical Society. Barbara Clark Smith is colonial history curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
191 pages, hardcover, ISBN 1588342417, Smithsonian Books, 2007
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Jamestown History topics
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