The Jamestown Project

The Jamestown experiment receives a new slant in this carefully researched book. Indeed, Kupperman...treats all of the factors that converged to bring forth the realization of the project, emphasizing the extraneous aspects of the founding of the Virginia colony rather than the unfolding of the New World venture itself. Not until two-thirds of the way through does the author take up the actual Virginia settlement. Kupperman places Jamestown in the context of a hundred years of European expansion. The book is especially valuable for thorough introductions of important players hitherto neglected by historians. -- H.M. Ward * Choice *
Americans have too long obscured Jamestown's history by shrouding it in nationalistic myths and overwrought stories of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas. With extraordinary skill, Karen Ordahl Kupperman corrects the record by placing the settlement into its proper context as one among a number of early modern English ventures. Happy Four Hundredth Birthday, Jamestown: you now have the history you have always deserved. -- Peter C. Mancall, author, Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America
If anyone is equipped to say something really new about Jamestown at its four hundredth anniversary, it is Karen Kupperman, with her deep knowledge of early modern colonial ventures of all sorts. This marvelous book teaches us why our usual way of thinking about Jamestown as the "first English colony" is utterly wrong--and why, nonetheless, Jamestown invented patterns that every other English colony would follow. -- Daniel K. Richter, author of Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America
The Jamestown Project is the culmination of nearly everything that Karen Kupperman has written in the last three decades. She makes a compelling case that early Virginia, despite its false starts and appalling mortality, taught the English what successful colonization required. A rare combination of exhaustive research, original ideas, and graceful writing. -- John Murrin, Princeton University
Kupperman, marrying vivid narration with trenchant analysis, has done the history of Jamestown, and of early America, a great service. * Publishers Weekly *
In this four hundredth anniversary year of Jamestown, historian Kupperman enlarges its story to encompass the Atlantic world that gave rise to it. The view from England toward the New World is what the author strives to reconstruct, successfully so. A century behind rival Spain in colonizing ventures, English captains eyed the east coast of North America with myriad possibilities in mind: as a base for raiding Spanish ships, as harboring a water route to the East Indies, and as an opportunity for reestablishing Christianity on a purified footing. The encounter of these concepts with the reality that was America--its people, climate, and landscape––is where Kupperman's account thrives, as she explores the experiences of various colonizing ventures, of which Jamestown was but one. Kupperman argues that Jamestown survived by attracting tremendous public interest in England, which translated into sustained supply for a decade, and by a trial-and-error method for motivating settlers through incentives rather than compulsion. A fine contextualization of the oft-told Jamestown epic. -- Gilbert Taylor * Booklist *
Kupperman re-creates the sights and sounds of homeland and wilderness that together reveal the trials, errors, and triumphs that made Jamestown a go for people on the ground but prevented absent investors from making money...Should delight both scholars and general readers. -- Thomas J. Davis * Library Journal *
Offers an impressive synthesis of almost thirty years of scholarship on Atlantic colonization. Kupperman gracefully describes the colonial project from multiple perspectives, both Native and European. -- Frances Flannery * Journal of the American Oriental Society *
[A] probing account. -- Michael Kenney * Boston Globe *
The strength of [this] Jamestown history lies in how [it] charts the intellectual, cultural and political landscape in Europe, the Mediterranean and other parts of the Americas that produced, a decade or so before Plymouth, what became the first permanent English settlement on this side of the Atlantic. What Kupperman...make[s] clear is that Jamestown should be seen not simply as prologue to Massachusetts Bay--though prologue it was, for good and for ill--but also as an element of a much larger brew of global political, religious and economic forces...An elegant, intellectually rich account...Kupperman makes a compelling case that Jamestown succeeded only after a kind of democracy began to develop there. Purely commercial operations, controlled by companies from afar, could not inspire and sustain the kind of commitment that transatlantic settlement required. -- Jon Meacham * Los Angeles Times *
The Jamestown Project is a major book of wide-ranging erudition that invites readers into a world very different from ours and reveals that England colonized North America in a different context than our old school books presented. English explorers, pirates, clergymen, rich investors and government officials living on the edge of Europe and in the shadows of great empires--Spanish, Portuguese and Ottoman--planted a small colony on the edge of a distant continent as an early chess move in the bold game of empire building...For many reasons, The Jamestown Project belongs on the bookshelf of every serious student of the English origins of the American people. -- Brent Tarter * Richmond Times-Dispatch *
Karen Kupperman expertly articulates another traditional foundation tale in The Jamestown Project, a superb, clear-eyed history...Kupperman's accurate, balanced take on the relative roles of Jamestown and Plymouth in our collective memory acknowledges Jamestown's sins, yet credits the earlier colony with painfully forging the business and political model--capitalist, representative democracy--that permitted English civilization to endure in the New World...Most Americans remain ignorant of basic Jamestown facts, a lacuna that Kupperman fills. -- Carlin Romano * Philadelphia Inquirer *
[Kupperman] is the preeminent contemporary scholar of English exploration and colonization. -- Alan Taylor * New Republic *
Karen Kupperman adopts a boldly innovative perspective on the Jamestown settlement...Hers is an altogether different interpretative path. For her, the founding of Virginia was neither a particularly English nor a particularly American story. What draws her attention are the many ordinary people during the early modern period who moved easily from culture to culture. They crossed political and religious boundaries, sometimes looking for the main chance, but often finding themselves swept up by forces which they did not quite understand, but with which they dealt on their own terms....Without a doubt, Kupperman's most striking accomplishment is placing the history of early Jamestown persuasively in a global context. -- T. H. Breen * Times Literary Supplement *
Kupperman's informative account of the many events and forces influencing the settlement is a valuable piece of the Jamestown story. -- George Kegley * Roanoke Times *