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212 books match the query 'Colonial Period (1600-1775)' and 4 start with k
Kaskaskia Under the French Regime
Natalia Maree Belting. Foreword by Carl J. Ekberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003
“The Illinois Habitant,” writes Natalia Maree Belting, “was a gay soul; he seemed shockingly carefree to later, self-righteous puritans from the American colonies. He danced on Sunday after mass, was passionately attached to faro and half a dozen other card games, and played billiards at all hours. He gossiped long over a friendly pipe and congenial mug of brandy in the half-dusk of his porch or in the noisy tavern.”
First published in 1948, Kaskaskia under the French Regime is a social and economic history of French Kaskaskia from 1703 to 1765. Using a readable, journalistic style, Belting brings to life the prairie terrain, the Kaskaskia mission, early architecture, building methods and materials, the beginnings of government, domestic tools and utensils, commerce, and the social customs of the pioneer.
In 1703, Kaskaskia was little more than a mission station in Illinois territory inhabited by a few French traders, their Indian wives, and a priest. Later in the century, the settlement became a flourishing French village filled with rows of low one-story French-style houses lining the streets. But the unique native and French bonds began when the explorers Louis Joliet and Pierre Marquette discovered a peaceful tribe, the Kaskaskia, while journeying along the Illinois River.
This historic friendship grew into a unique colonial culture, the remnants which can be seen through numerous primary source documents. Belting draws on and translates from eighteenth century French the Kaskaskia Manuscripts, in which French notaries recorded parish marriage contracts, property transactions (including slave sales), and estate inventories. She also examines the papers of the Marquis de Vaudreuil, among them the most complete census ever conducted in French Illinois, which provides a household-by-household enumeration of the population. What results is a comprehensive depiction of the lives and livelihood of French settlers in colonial Illinois.
King George's War and the Thirty Year Peace
The Third Contest for North AmericaMichael G. Laramie
Westholme Publishing, 2027
King George’s War and the Thirty-Year Peace continues the contest for North America from the end of Queen Anne’s War in 1713, marking the beginning of the Thirty-Year Peace, through the start of King George’s War in 1744, to its conclusion with the signing of Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle four years later. While there would be little fighting between the French, Spanish, and British colonies in North America during the Thirty-Year Peace—the Franco-Spanish conflict of 1719 being an exception—for the French and British internally it did not prove to be peaceful. Conflicts with former Indigenous allies erupted, including with the Three Years War, the Yamassee War, and the Natchez and Chickasaw Wars. In the south the peace was ruptured by the opening of the War of Jenkin’s Ear in 1739, which led to an attempt by South Carolina and the new colony of Georgia to seize Spanish St. Augustine, and a counter-attack by St. Augustine and Cuba aimed at the destruction of the two British colonies. While this Anglo-Spanish conflict would shift farther south into the Caribbean, to the north, news of another war between France and Britain would arrive in 1744. King George’s War, the North American component of Europe’s War of Austrian Succession, would start in Nova Scotia with French attacks on the weakly held British colony. This provocation inspired a response in the form of one of the boldest expeditions of the colonial period—Massachusetts Governor William Shirley’s successful campaign against Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. With the French fortress in British hands and the cry of delenda est Canadaechoing through the American colonial assemblies, Shirley turned to the conquest of French Canada and convinced London to dispatch a fleet to assist in the capture of Montreal and Quebec. In Paris, news of Louisbourg’s surrender elicited an unexpected reaction in the form of one of the largest French naval expeditions ever sent to North America, with explicit orders to retake Cape Breton and expel the British from Nova Scotia. Thus, by the summer of 1746, both British and French sentries scanned the eastern horizon daily for a fleet that would determine the destiny of the conflict, but neither would be happy with what they found.
The final volume in Michael G. Laramie’s acclaimed histories of the European struggle for North America that set the stage for the French and Indian War, King George’s War and the Thirty-Year Peace: The Third Contest for North America, 1714–1748, takes the reader along with the combatants into the field and waterways, including Native American, French, Spanish, Provincial, and British. Based on a rich variety of primary sources and fully illustrated with original maps, this volume joins the author’s King William’s War and Queen Anne’s War as the modern history of these lesser-known—but enormously important—conflicts that shaped the political story of North America.
King Philip's War
Civil War in New England, 1675-1676James D. Drake
University of Massachusetts Press, 1999
Sometimes described as “America's deadliest war,” King Philip's War proved a critical turning point in the history of New England, leaving English colonists decisively in command of the region at the expense of native peoples. Although traditionally understood as an inevitable clash of cultures or as a classic example of conflict on the frontier between Indians and whites, in the view of James D. Drake it was neither. Instead, he argues, King Philip's War was a civil war, whose divisions cut across ethnic lines and tore apart a society composed of English colonizers and Native Americans alike. According to Drake, the interdependence that developed between English and Indian in the years leading up to the war helps explain its notorious brutality. Believing they were dealing with an internal rebellion and therefore with an act of treason, the colonists and their native allies often meted out harsh punishments. The end result was nothing less than the decimation of New England's indigenous peoples and the consequent social, political, and cultural reorganization of the region. In short, by waging war among themselves, the English and Indians of New England destroyed the world they had constructed together. In its place a new society emerged, one in which native peoples were marginalized and the culture of the New England Way receded into the past.
King William's War
The First Contest for North America, 1689–1697Michael Laramie
Westholme Publishing, 2027
Fought in New York, New England, and Canada, the Conflict that Began the Long French and English Struggle for the New World
While much has been written on the French and Indian War of 1754–1763, the colonial conflicts that preceded it have received comparatively little attention. Yet in King William’s War, the first clash between England and France for control of North America, the patterns of conflict for the next seventy years were laid, as were the goals and objectives of both sides, as well as the realization that the colonies of the two nations could not coexist.
King William’s War actually encompassed several proxy wars being fought by the English and the French through their native allies. The Beaver Wars was a long running feud between the Iroquois Confederacy, New France, and New France’s native allies over control of the lucrative fur trade. Fueled by English guns and money, the Iroquois attempted to divert the French fur trade towards their English trading partners in Albany, and in the process gain control over other Indian tribes. To the east the pro-French Wabanaki of Maine, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick had earlier fought a war with New England, but English expansion and French urgings, aided by foolish moves and political blunders on the part of New England, erupted into a second Wabanaki War on the eve of King William’s War. Thus, these two conflicts officially became one with the arrival of news of a declaration of war between France and England in 1689. The next nine years saw coordinated attacks, including French assaults on Schenectady, New York, and Massachusetts, and English attacks around Montreal and on Nova Scotia. The war ended diplomatically, but started again five years later in Queen Anne’s War.
A riveting history full of memorable characters and events, and supported by extensive primary source material, King William’s War: The First Contest for North America, 1689–1697 by Michael G. Laramie is the first book-length treatment of a war that proved crucial to the future of North America.