Mark Canada, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke writes: America actually began in two different places for two different reasons. In 1607, some 100 men and boys sailing from England landed in present-day Virginia and founded Jamestown. Inspired by the success of Spanish explorers who had found gold in South America, these adventurers hoped to get rich. Instead of gold, however, they found a hostile environment that probably would have destroyed the colony, but for the resourcefulness of Captain John Smith, who managed to organize and motivate the settlers and save them from starvation. In 1620, a group of English men and women came to America with a different mission. Having given up on the Church of England, which they thought had become too much like the Catholic Church, these Separatist Puritans sought to establish an ideal church in America. Led by William Bradford, these Pilgrims arrived in present-day Massachusetts on a ship called the Mayflower. These people were not Puritans they were the Pilgrim Fathers. They were Sabbatarians, called Brownists, after their leader who was a teacher at St. Olave’s Church in Surrey. They had fled to Holland for safety some few years before (see the paper The Dutch Connection of the Pilgrim Fathers (No. 264)). The Puritans who followed them persecuted them when they arrived. Professor Canada continues: Ten years later, John Winthrop led a different group of Puritans to the same general area, only this time with the plan of setting an example for the church back in England. Over the next century or so, Virginia and the Massachusetts Bay Colony were joined by other colonies, including Pennsylvania, settled largely by Quakers fleeing persecution in England; Connecticut, established by a man fleeing persecution by the Puritans in Massachusetts; Maryland, which the English king granted to an English Catholic named Lord Baltimore; and Georgia, which had been established for English debtors. [The Sabbatarians fled to Rhode Island.] By the 1760s, England and its 13 American colonies were quarreling over settlement, government, and taxes, especially those imposed by the Stamp Act of 1765. Finally, in 1775, skirmishes broke out in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. In 1776, Thomas Paine rallied colonists with a pamphlet called Common Sense, and Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. Over the next five years, General George Washington led the Americans against the British. In 1781, a surrender of some 8,000 British troops at Yorktown, Virginia--coupled with growing resentment against the war in England--led the British to give up the colonies. England officially recognized American independence in the Treaty of Paris, negotiated by Benjamin Franklin and others in 1783. (Colonial America 1607-1783, 1999): uncp.edu/home/canada/work/allam/16071783/history/history.htm Australia was founded because the UK could no longer export convicts and the effects of the socially underprivileged to America.
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:02:50 +0000