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Seasons of Misery

Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America

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Seasons of Misery

By: Kathleen Donegan
Narrated by: Deborah VanFleet
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About this listen

The early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis - both experiential and existential - at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed.

Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World.

©2014 University of Pennsylvania Press (P)2016 Redwood Audiobooks
Americas Colonial Period United States Survival Latin American Caribbean

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It just confirms my feeling of shame in being English. Narration a little stilted but the account is clear and hides nothing of the appalling behaviour of the English towards native Americans and their own people.

Horrifyingly honest

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