The first ventures into social history—what people ate, how they were
housed, the clothing they wore, how they kept warm, how they moved
about—these and other things were stimulated by the writings of the
colonists about themselves. One of the fundamental problems they faced
was their identity: at first all of them would have said that they were
Englishmen; but as years passed, we begin to hear three words that suggest
a blurring of this identity. Increasingly, England was referred to as the
“mother”; the new lands, originally thought of as “plantations,” came to be
identified as discrete “colonies” that were the “daughters” of England. In
them we can discern a common historical experience of growing up and
growing apart. That is everywhere the nature of colonialism.
Unveiling the minds of the men and women who lived not only long
ago but in circumstances very different from ours is one of the most difficult
challenges of history. When people write for others to read, they often mag-
nify or diminish or even invent or suppress, so what they really thought or
did is often elusive. Private diaries are therefore especially valuable. One of
the more bizarre pieces of scholarship was the deciphering of the code
used by William Byrd to record his frank and sometimes salacious account
of his life. Landon Carter’s diary, which is more accessible, has more
recently become available and is the basis of an excellent account of
eighteenth-century Virginia. From them we get rare and intimate views of
the thoughts of prominent members of the Virginia aristocracy in the early
eighteenth century. Letters and papers become increasingly rich and abun-
dant later in the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin provided us with a
gold mine; George Washington’s diary is now available on a compact disc;
most of the figures who played key roles in the Revolution—except for
Samuel Adams, who destroyed his—have left us their voluminous corre-
spondence. These sources can be mined both for accounts of the major
events and also for intimate details of the writers’ lives.
Such materials virtually forced an enlargement of the scope of
American history. It was no longer enough to know that institutions
existed; they had to be seen in action, and the purposes of the men who
manipulated them had to be explored. Then overarching themes could be
announced to attempt to bring order into the myriad details.
Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 provided one of the most stimulat-
xii Introduction