Philip Morgan's selection of essays by leading historians, represents the extraordinary vitality of recent historical literature on early America. The book opens up areas such as cultural diversity, ethnicity, and gender, and reveals the importance of methods such as anthropology and historical demography to the study of early America. By fitting these approaches into broader patterns of interpretation, the essays suggest ways of integrating these new findings and synthesizing the vast proliferation of recent research to provide students with a more coherent vision of colonial America.