Professor Greene was born in Japan as son of missionaries, obtained PhD from Harvard, and became Professor of History as well as Dean at University of Illinois.
Starts with the record of European enterprises on American soil, with the transfer of social habits and ideals, primarily but not entirely English, to American conditions.[1] Concedes that Paine in Common Sense, noted that "America is the child not of England only but of Europe", and that there were aboriginals and other European powers. In 1574, there were over 200 Spanish towns, with 250,000 inhabitants "ruling over perhaps five millions of civilized or partly civilized Indians {?}, a large proportion of whom were practically serfs. [2]

Understand England of 1606. Ireland was the only foreign dependency and Scotland was a separate Kingdom. Only 5 million people, yet they felt overcrowded [2], particularly by Protestant immigrants driven from the Continent by the intolerance of Philip II [3].

With a flowing accessible writing style, powers through the many colonial failures (Drake, Raleigh, Guiana, Harcourt, Hyde, Pym, Heath, Gorges, Acadia), the Virginia pioneers (1606 Hakluyt, Gilbert, Popham, Puritans, Winthrop, John Smith, Newport, Jamestown, Sandys, the importance of tobacco), the Chesapeake Colonies (1632 Baltimore, Catholicism/tolerance, Susquehannocks, Claiborne, indentured servant class, Warwick, Cavaliers taking refuge [75], 1660 Restoration, Negroes, Wood, Byrd, Berkley, Nathaniel Bacon - Rebellion, 80,000 population), New England Pioneers (Fernando Gorges' charter, 17th c Puritanism, Biblical Christianity, Calvinism, Pilgrims, Mayflower, Plymouth, Bradford, Massachusetts Bay Co. Charter 1629, Winthrop, Cotton, Harvard). ...