John Edwin Pomfret (1898–1981)

1735 Founding the American Colonies 1583-1660, by John E. Pomfret with Floyd M. Shumway (read 1 Aug 1982) This is a volume in the New American Nation series. It is well-written and of considerable interest, and I know more than ever about things like that now. Only recently have I become aware that Plymouth and Massachusetts were two separate colonies, and only now have I realized that Connecticut and New Haven were also separate colonies. As this book so well says: "...what now seems to have been inevitable was once not only unforeseen but actually unforeseeable. Many of the Englishmen who planned the colonization of America were intelligent, energetic, and persistent, yet even the most perceptive of them could not anticipate either the hardships or the opportunities that awaited the early pioneers. In particular, they could not predict the way in which environment would subtly but surely alter the institutions that the colonists brought with them and would even transform the colonists themselves."… (mehr)