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The Jamestown Project.

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The Jamestown Project

by Karen Ordahl Kupperman

Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007

I write this review in my office at Brown University, just across campus from the John Carter Brown Library where, some fifty-five years ago, Perry Miller delivered a talk, "Errand Into the Wilderness," that would set the terms for the study of the origins of American culture for the next few decades. Miller singled out the Massachusetts Bay Colony as the point of "coherence with which [he] could coherently begin" his story of "the movement of European culture into the vacant wilderness of America." His speech concluded with an image of those transplanted Protestants "left alone with America" with "no other place to search but within themselves." They were like so many little castaway Tom Hanks, but with Puritans instead of volleyballs for companionship.

One of the virtues of Karen Ordahl Kupperman's The Jamestown Project is that it indicates how much has changed in the origin stories we tell about the United States since Miller gave his talk. For one thing, far from being left alone on a vacant continent, her founding colonists seem more like social butterflies, involved with any and all groups of people,...

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