Becoming America : the revoluton before 1776

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"Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago - and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society - a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's view of the colonies in this epoch reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history."