Any history of English starts with the evidence its narrators select, the historical periods they focus on, and the guiding principles and frameworks they adopt. Even slightly different choices lead to significantly different narratives. English Begins at Jamestown investigates the factors behind these choices and the effects they have on our understanding of the English language and its history. Tim Machan explores how people tell and have told the story of English, from its Indo-European origins to its present-day status as a global language. He describes how narrative principles are constructed, what kinds of facts and analyses they allow or prevent, and what can be known outside of them. The book's historically and critically wide-ranging arguments center on the themes of social purpose, aesthetics, periodization, and grammatical structure, while the conclusion extends the discussion into the roles of speakers themselves, who have transformed the grammar and pragmatics of English since the colonial period embodied in the Jamestown settlement. English Begins at Jamestown shows that there are better, worse, and wrong ways to narrate the language's history, even if there cannot necessarily be one correct way.

Jamestown, America's first permanent English settlement, was established 400 years ago. Neither the Old World, not the New World (America!) was ever the same again! ... This book includes: Virginia company, Captain John Smith, Godspeed, Discovery and the Susan Constant, John Rolfe, James Fort, Christopher Newport, Lord De La Warr, Starving time, Pocahontas, Chief Powhatan, Historic Jametown today.

In 1606, one hundred and five men left England for the western shores of the Chesapeake Bay. They were looking for adventure, land, and treasure. Instead of gold and silver, the men found a dark and mysterious wilderness. A few, like John Smith, found friendship with the local natives. Others found new lives, hacked out of the Virginia wilderness. Most, however, found disease, starvation, and eventually death. Two-thirds of the original Jamestown settlers died within the first year. Still, the English kept coming. Land and opportunity were worth the risks. By 1621, Jamestown had grown to 1,200 settlers, and people from the first successful English colony began to branch out and settle other towns. The Building America series tells the story of the early years in which America struggled to become an independent nation. Jamestown: The First English Colony details the extraordinary circumstances and often harrowing experiences overcome by the persistent Englishmen who wanted to settle in Virginia.

Discusses the Jamestown settlement and its part in early United States history.

Lord Watson has written a short book of great fascination and importance. It is a story that begins with an English sea voyage, and culminates in the voyage of the English language, a voyage that is now in full flood. Four hundred years have passed since that first voyage. In itself it was historic, taking the language of a small island to the coast of a vast continent. The British and the Americans who used it, as both grew in territorial and spiritual strength, came to treasure it. Not only is the wealth and diversity of English expanding every day, but the language coveys the past of the English-speaking peoples and the values that they learned over time: the central ideas of law, governance and free enterprise.

Listen to a short interview with Karen Ordahl Kupperman Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane Captain John Smith's 1607 voyage to Jamestown was not his first trip abroad. He had traveled throughout Europe, been sold as a war captive in Turkey, escaped, and returned to England in time to join the Virginia Company's colonizing project. In Jamestown migrants, merchants, and soldiers who had also sailed to the distant shores of the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and Ireland in search of new beginnings encountered Indians who already possessed broad understanding of Europeans. Experience of foreign environments and cultures had sharpened survival instincts on all sides and aroused challenging questions about human nature and its potential for transformation. It is against this enlarged temporal and geographic background that Jamestown dramatically emerges in Karen Kupperman's breathtaking study. Reconfiguring the national myth of Jamestown's failure, she shows how the settlement's distinctly messy first decade actually represents a period of ferment in which individuals were learning how to make a colony work. Despite the settlers' dependence on the Chesapeake Algonquians and strained relations with their London backers, they forged a tenacious colony that survived where others had failed. Indeed, the structures and practices that evolved through trial and error in Virginia would become the model for all successful English colonies, including Plymouth. Capturing England's intoxication with a wider world through ballads, plays, and paintings, and the stark reality of Jamestown--for Indians and Europeans alike--through the words of its inhabitants as well as archeological and environmental evidence, Kupperman re-creates these formative years with astonishing detail.

A New York Times Notable Book and aSan Jose Mercury News Top 20 Nonfiction Book of 2003In 1606, approximately 105 British colonists sailed to America, seeking gold and a trade route to the Pacific. Instead, they found disease, hunger, and hostile natives. Ill prepared for such hardship, the men responded with incompetence and infighting; only the leadership of Captain John Smith averted doom for the first permanent English settlement in the New World.The Jamestown colony is one of the great survival stories of American history, and this book brings it fully to life for the first time. Drawing on extensive original documents, David A. Price paints intimate portraits of the major figures from the formidable monarch Chief Powhatan, to the resourceful but unpopular leader John Smith, to the spirited Pocahontas, who twice saved Smith’s life. He also gives a rare balanced view of relations between the settlers and the natives and debunks popular myths about the colony. This is a superb work of history, reminding us of the horrors and heroism that marked the dawning of our nation.