Our first lecture is by Christopher Parsons, Associate Professor of History at Northeastern University and author of the recent award-winning book A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America. Professor Parsons also created the interactive digital mapping project The Birth of Boston.
Readings:
The Charter of Massachusetts Bay, 1629.
John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” 1630.
Mug battle trivia question (courtesy of Chris Parsons): Which two streets in Boston reference the first names of what became Boston?
Answer: Tremont and Shawmut. Congrats to Maggie Fitzpatrick and Noah Lusk for getting the answer (Noah Lusk won the mug after a showdown).
Further reading: I read Bernard Bailyn’s The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (Vintage, 1986) for a class in my first semester of university ever (I never left) and still have it at home! I have been reading and enjoying Bailyn’s later and fuller follow-up to that book, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America–The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (Vintage, 2013), which is not without critics (especially for paying little attention to slavery) but is a useful introduction to 17th-century mainly English colonization.