Seasons of Misery

Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America

De: Kathleen Donegan

Narrado por: Deborah VanFleet

The early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis - both experiential and existential - at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed.

Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World.

©2014 University of Pennsylvania Press (P)2016 Redwood Audiobooks

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This book was terrible--just a bunch of the latest overblown common-sensef-free edu-babble. Plus the narrator went way too fast--she was either excited by the content or trying to get it over with.