This map is familiar to almost anyone in the US over the age of 10 – the 13 original colonies that rebelled against England in 1776 to form the United States of America. In grade school, we probably all learned some variant of the song “Fifty Nifty United States,” which includes the lyrics “13 original colonies.” We know that our flag has 13 stripes to acknowledge these colonies.
However, when Sonia (my learner at Literacy for Life) (not her real name) and I started talking about one of the Khan Academy videos I mentioned in last Monday’s post – the one about the unsuccessful effort to establish a colony on Roanoke Island in what later became North Carolina – Sonia quickly began asking me questions about what a colony was, exactly, and what this was all about. I hadn’t anticipated this question, and I had to veer quickly into an overview of the various dates the colonies were settled, along with the reason for their settlement. I decided to prepare (or find) a chart to show Sonia when I get together with her next week.
I was lucky enough to find a chart that contained most of the information I wanted to include. I did a little fiddling with it. Here is the result:
Sonia and I will talk our way through this chart this week. I hope I can explain all of these independent efforts to found colonies in the New World.
But there’s more to the story. I’m in the process of preparing to teach an Osher class for next spring, focused on the Pinckney Family of colonial South Carolina. In researching this class, I have already learned a lot about the “other” British colonies in the Western Hemisphere – the islands in the Caribbean and the Atlantic that Britain settled before it settled anywhere on the North American continent, and the colonies in Canada that it explored very early and then won from the French as a result of the Seven Years War (what we call the French and Indian War) from 1765-63.
I’m not going to go into detail on the dozen or more colonies Britain established in the Caribbean and Atlantic. This map gives you a picture of the extent of this settlement.
A century later, Britain’s prominence in the Caribbean had expanded. Britain may have lost its colonies on the North American mainland, but its power in the Caribbean had grown. I got both of these maps from Wikipedia.
When American history teachers study the colonial period in America, they don’t generally pay much attention to the colonies in the Caribbean. Because they did not join in the rebellion against Britain in 1776, they are left out of any discussion of colonial American history. Recent scholarship has focused on an expanded view of the colonial era, bringing in references to colonies that, although they did not become part of the United States, were important in the colonial era and beyond. The Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture at William & Mary supports scholars and scholarship focused on the expansive field of early American history, including the Caribbean and all of Central and South America. In an interview, Karin Wulf (the former director of the Institute) noted that the musical Hamilton addressed precisely this field of study when Aaron Burr sang “How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished, in squalor grow up to be a hero and a scholar?” There’s actually an answer, as it turns out, but it requires an understanding of all the British colonies in the 1700s, not just the ones on the mainland.
In addition, the colony of South Carolina was much more directly connected to the British colonies in the Caribbean than it was to the colonies further to the north on the Atlantic seaboard. One source I read suggested that South Carolina might more accurately be seen as a colony of Barbados than of Britain, because many of the British settlers who came there had spent time – sometimes generations – in Barbados and other islands in the Caribbean.
Looking to the north, these maps show the importance of other British colonies that did not join in the Revolution.
The Americas are vast, and an understanding of the small part of it occupied by the original 13 colonies has to include an awareness of the rest of it.
This is one reason I love tutoring at Literacy for Life; it gives me an opportunity to learn more about things I thought I already understand.
Wonderfully informative….thanks!
Excellent article at so many levels. Thank you.