American Society in the MakingAmerican Society in the Making 2

Scientists speculate that people with the “risk-taking”

gene are more likely to migrate to distant lands. Support

for this hypothesis rests in the fact that the gene is far

more common among nomadic tribes in Africa than

sedentary ones, and is more common among South

American Indians who migrated from East Asia tens of

thousands of years ago than East Asians. The peoples who

came to the New World were genetically predisposed to

risk taking!

Even if this speculation is true, other factors have

influenced the development of a distinctively American

character. Sometimes migrants came to the Americas

because staying put was riskier than moving. Land in the

Americas seemed limitless and, by European standards,

nearly uninhabited. Because the labor to farm it and

extract its wealth was scarce, immigrants could reason-

ably bet that wages would be higher. Immigrants quickly

discovered that the social and cultural institutions of their

home country were often ill-adapted to American condi-

tions, necessitating innovation and further risk taking:

The widely spaced pattern of large American farms, for

example, discouraged the residential clumping of

European villages. Religious enthusiasts and educational

reformers also learned that they had a broader canvas on

which to realize ambitious visions.

Factors as material as the landscape, as quantifiable

as population patterns, and as elusive as chance and cal-

culation, all shaped colonial social developments. Their

■Settlement of New France

■Society in New Mexico, Texas,

and California

■The English Prevail on the

Atlantic Seaboard

■The Chesapeake Colonies

■The Lure of Land

■“Solving” the Labor

Shortage: Slavery

■Prosperity in a Pipe: Tobacco

■Bacon’s Rebellion

■The Carolinas

■Home and Family in the South

■Georgia and the Back Country

■Puritan New England

■The Puritan Family

■Visible Puritan Saints and

Others

■Democracies without

Democrats

■The Dominion of New

England

■Salem Bewitched

■Higher Education in New

England

■A Merchant’s World

■The Middle Colonies:

Economic Basis

■The Middle Colonies: An

Intermingling of Peoples

■“The Best Poor Man’s

Country”

■The Politics of Diversity

■Becoming Americans

■Re-Viewing the Past:

The Crucible

CONTENTS

■Architectural historians regard the Mission of San José de Laguna, completed

between 1699 and 1701, as illustrative of an “architecture of permanence.” This

was hopeful: The previous mission church had been destroyed during the

revolt of the Pueblo Indians ten years earlier.

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