Volume 54, Number 7 · April 26, 2007
Our Shaky Beginnings
By Edmund S. Morgan, Marie Morgan
Captain John Smith: Writings with Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First English Settlement of America
by Captain John Smith
Library of America, 1,329 pp., $45.00
The Jamestown Project
by Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 408 pp., $29.95
Jamestown: The Buried Truth
by William M. Kelso
University of Virginia Press, 238 pp., $29.95
Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America
by Benjamin Woolley
HarperCollins, 496 pp., $27.50
A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and theBirth of America
by James Horn
Basic Books, 337 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown
by Helen C. Rountree
University of Virginia Press, 292 pp., $16.95 (paper)
In the procession of anniversary celebrations by which we congratulate our predecessors for begetting us, 2007 is the year to honor our shaky beginnings at Jamestown, Virginia. The 108 men and boys who stepped ashore on May 14, 1607, and the four or five thousand who followed them in the next fifteen years were the victims of a failed business enterprise. But enough of them survived starvation and disease, their sponsors' negligence, and their own mistakes to start the first permanent settlement in what became the United States.
Review, 5312 words
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