Valley of Opportunity recreates an age when Indians, colonists, and post-Revolutionary settlers embraced a similar dream: to create a successful economy in the rural hinterland of the middle colonies. Peter C. Mancall draws on abundant evidence from seldom-used archives in the region, as well as from libraries on both sides of the Atlantic, to reconstruct their daily economic life.

The author describes the varied economic transformations that took place in the area, considering these changes from an environmental as well as an economic standpoint. He shows how different...

In the early modern age more people traveled farther than at any earlier time in human history. Many returned home with stories of distant lands and at least some of the objects they collected during their journeys. And those who did not travel eagerly acquired wondrous materials that arrived from faraway places. Objects traveled various routes--personal, imperial, missionary, or trade--and moved not only across space but also across cultures.

Histories of the early modern global culture of collecting have focused for the most part on European Wunderkammern, or "cabinets of...

In the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, nature and culture swirled in people's minds to produce fantastic images. In the South of France, a cloister's painted wooden panels greeted parishioners with vivid depictions of unicorns, dragons, and centaurs, while Mayans in the Yucatan created openings to buildings that resembled a fierce animal's jaws, known to archaeologists as serpent-column portals.

In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the...