The American people, everyone now agrees, are a nation. But we are more than a little perplexed about how and when it happened. Although about 170,000 Englishmen crossed the Atlantic to the mainland colonies before 1700, nowhere did they create a society that can accurately be described as just “an English world in America.” Traversing the ocean did generate startling changes almost immediately. But if the wilderness itself had been the major active agent in these transformations, we would expect all the intruders to have been affected in similar ways. They were not. A more significant force was the sheer...

In his biography of Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College from 1778 to 1795, John Murrin’s Ph.D. adviser Edmund S. Morgan wrote that “one often gets the impression … that he was a monstrous warehouse of knowledge, spreading his interests … widely … and dissipat[ing] so much energy in the sheer joy of learning that there was little left for … reshaping … into something larger for the world to read. Stiles, in short, was one of those scholars who never cease to gather materials for a book but cannot bring themselves to write it.” Of course what Stiles should...

John Murrin’s theory of Anglicization is nothing if not ambitious.¹ Between 1688 and 1763, Murrin suggests, England’s disparate North American colonies became steadily more united in a newfound shared British identity, a process that had the unintended effect of creating the foundation for resistance to imperial reform during the 1760s and 1770s. Anglicization enabled Murrin to propose a grand narrative for American history, an explanatory link between the remarkably disparate seventeenth-century colonies and the intercolonial resistance and rebellion that created the American Republic, making sense of a long eighteenth century that had stymied historians unable to chart a coherent course...

Cadwallader Colden’sHistory of the Five Indian Nationswas first published in 1727, fifty years after the creation of the Covenant Chain alliance that bound the British colonies to the Haudenosaunee, or Five Nations of the Iroquois League. The Haudenosaunee were strategically located between the British and French Empires in North America but beyond the control of either. Both of these rival empires had alliances with the Haudenosaunee, but neither had the promise of allegiance in case of war. Only when war was a reality could one see whether relationships soothed over the intervening years had paid off by who...

In 1914, in his essay on the frontier of Massachusetts, Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the original colonists of New England arrived with bags of inappropriate military technology. They lumbered themselves with “corslets and head pieces, pikes, matchlocks, fourquettes and bandoleers.” During the seventeenth century, and especially after King Philip’s War in the mid-1670s, the colonists gave up all that baggage along with the stale customs of European warfare and began to mobilize local men to defend frontier towns. According to Turner, the results were dramatic: “The settler on the outskirts of Puritan civilization took up the task of bearing...

Anglicization, the multifaceted process by which the mainland British colonies became more like England by the mid-eighteenth century, coincided with another process that we might labelAnglicanization, the consolidation and expansion of the colonial Church of England. Although the Church of England was already long established in Virginia, in the early eighteenth century there were reinvigorated efforts to improve its standing throughout the British colonies, including regions legally and numerically dominated by other Protestant groups that Anglican churchmen continued to label collectively as dissenters. Anglicanization may be considered one aspect of Anglicization, in that the expansion of the king’s church...

When John Winthrop and his followers landed in 1630 at the new colony of the Massachusetts Bay, it was far from clear how “English” they intended to remain. One hundred and thirty years later—though important religious and political ideas persisted from those early generations—Britishness lay at the core of the colonists’ self-definition. Trade with Britain was central to economic life, and British culture and fashion were eagerly imbibed. Under its second, 1691 charter, Massachusetts accepted the substantial powers of the royally appointed governor (powers, albeit, more circumscribed than in most royal colonies). Parliament’s right to regulate trade for...

White Americans’ shared racism was basic to their decision to break away from Britain and unite as a new republican nation. Threats posed by George III to the American racial hierarchy in the critical year between the Battle of Lexington and Concord and the Declaration of Independence helped to convince reluctant patriots that independence was necessary for the preservation of their society. Thereafter white people’s confidence that neighboring colonies would remain dedicated to pursuing their interests at the expense of Indians and blacks undergirded their support for the military campaign against Britain and then the effort to create a national...

In his 1999 presidential address at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), John Murrin recounted a humorous story about his reading of Thomas Jefferson’s military policy when he was an early graduate student. In an 1808 message to Congress, President Jefferson explained his administration’s plan of employing “such moderate garrisons in time of peace as may merely take care of the post, and to a reliance on the neighboring militia for its support in the first moments of war.” According to Henry Adams, Jefferson’s program was “that the settlers should protect the...

Venturing to find Anglicization in the story of early American taxation might appear a fool’s errand. The colonies were lightly taxed, and revolutionary America moved away from any recognizably English model of public finance, as it embraced “Country” ideas over “Court” ones, in John Murrin’s “great inversion.”¹ America’s clear trajectory by 1815 was to establish a low-tax regime that did not replicate England’s extensive system of exactions. The present essay affirms this basic narrative but proposes that significant Anglicizing forces were at work in American taxation from the late colonial years through the War of 1812. American taxation before the...