A Cultural Approach
The cultural and developmental aspects of American history in the 17th and 18th centuries are certainly among the most important and influential factors in the shaping of this country's long and storied history. Historiographically speaking, there are undoubtedly thousands upon thousands of different studies and opinions on the most influential cultural strides of early Americans well as the pros and cons that each colonial region developed in shaping America and readying it for the Revolutionary Era. Each of these four studies brings a slightly different and even, at times, conflicting approach to analyzing the cultural and social roots of early America, but each one provides a fresh perspective that enhances the idea that America is a true "melting pot" of ideas, social values, and cultural traits. Zuckerman, in his article, focuses his attention on the middle colonies and the erroneous tendencies of historians to ignore controversial or pertinent historical issues in favor of obvious, harmless social arguments. Historians have focused on New England as the true "birthplace of America" because of its early literature and thought that focused solely on Puritanism, and therefore offered an obvious and
Mintz and Price focus their concentration on the development of a distinct Afro-American culture in the New World. Their conclusion that the majority of Afro-American customs and cultures were consummated in the New World and did not directly stem from any particular pre-migration group culture seems sound, even if some of their methods of documentation are somewhat dubious. Their hypothesis can also help to understand the European migration to the Americas, as it seems that the development of mainstream American culture would undergo a similar pattern. With many different people arriving from Europe, it is logical to assume that their intermingling would cause a similar merging of cultural traits that they brought from their birthplaces. Greene would argue differently, and it is true that the fusion of a single American culture took a longer time to develop, but it is certainly likely that the European contingent in the New World underwent similar processes in becoming a! Jack Greene hypothesizes that the idea of mastery and the relationship between the new colonies and Great Britain were foremost in shaping America's colonial culture. Greene suggests that the idea of the English who migrated to the Americas was to achieve mastery over the rugged land of America as well as other groups, a mastery that was unavailable to them in their homeland. The problem with this mastery hypothesis is that it covers only the English
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 969
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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